Question about the history of video gaming and consoles

[Caviar]

Hello everyone, forgive me if this has been addressed before, but I would like to pose the following question:

As each video game console has its own video games, how did console gaming and video gaming companies come to existence? What I mean is, how did Sega or NES decide to release their consoles back when such a thing didn't exist, and when video games didn't really exist.

Was there an agreement between different companies before the product went on market that this is the system and this is what it could run, and then video-gaming companies decided to create games that would be compatible with those systems before they were open to the public?

Sorry if my wording is a little unclear. I would like some clarification as there doesn't seem to be any information online about this, and I know everyone here is quite knowledgeable in their field.

Thank you in advance.

[Nintex]

Hello everyone, forgive me if this has been addressed before, but I would like to pose the following question:

As each video game console has its own video games, how did console gaming and video gaming companies come to existence? What I mean is, how did Sega or NES decide to release their consoles back when such a thing didn't exist, and when video games didn't really exist.

Was there an agreement between different companies before the product went on market that this is the system and this is what it could run, and then video-gaming companies decided to create games that would be compatible with those systems before they were open to the public?

Sorry if my wording is a little unclear. I would like some clarification as there doesn't seem to be any information online about this, and I know everyone here is quite knowledgeable in their field.

Thank you in advance.

Before SEGA and NES there was already Atari but different methods were used to create video games.
First the platform holders would of course create their own games for their systems (after all they needed software).
In most case they were arcade conversions or close to arcade games. Your Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. and what have you.

Other companies could get licenses to publish on Nintendo systems. Like Namco and Squaresoft. If you had such a license you would be able to get the specifications and development information.
Although in those days Nintendo kept some secrets for themselves so their games would always be better than third party games. Games were partly made on sheets of paper.
Pixel drawings on sheets and written instructions would be converted by programmers into actual sprites, tile sets and code.

Enter the 'reverse engineers' like Rareware, who researched the hardware themselves to see what it could do and then built games for it. Often surpassing what Nintendo did.
They used this method because they were used to making games themselves for computer systems like the Commodore 64. You could program your own games as long as you knew how the damn thing worked.
Instructions would be printed in magazines and that way you could publish a commodore game. When the NES rolled in it took these wizards very little time to figure out what the little bugger could do.

In essence a video game is nothing more than a set of instructions carried out by a processing unit that you can see and interact with.

[Mr Gilhaney]

big corp put together big gay energy and made vidya

[bluemax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games

[benjipwns]

Follow bluemax's link, it'll help answer a lot of your questions. Also look into the book Game Over for how Nintendo came into power, it briefly touches on lots of these points as well.

Really the wikipages "history of" are quite good for a short reading on the history of videogames. You can get to them from bluemax's link.

The short version is basically that consoles came about at the same time as everything else. PONG was made into a home version very early on actually. The Atari 2600 isn't the first console but comes early on and helps establish what has been the model ever since of the console and then third parties making games alongside the manufacturer. Sega and Nintendo were doing arcade games, had ports to computers/consoles even if they didn't make them and then saw an opening when The Crash came to do their own. Sony similarly saw an opening during the switch to CD-ROM and 32-bit that nobody else was making a jump to focus a machine on 3D. Microsoft saw an opening regarding the internet.

PC gaming has always been right there even if it wasn't called "PC" and wasn't standardized into Windows yet. The console market was initially a more specialized derivative of the home computer market. Atari, for example, did lots of their computers and home consoles based around the same main technologies. It'd be like if Nintendo put out a computer that used the chips inside the NES or SNES but you could word process or do spreadsheets on them instead of just play games. Sega used a lot more "off the shelf" type components like the main CPU in the Genesis/Mega Drive for example was used in lots of computers, that's why the Genesis got so many ports and vice versa, especially of games you almost never saw on consoles before like strategy titles from EA, the power and familiarity with the Genesis CPU was such that it was fairly economical to do these ports. So while Sega themselves didn't make a PC, there were many PC builds that were considered and treated as quite similar.

That's basically where we are with PCs and consoles today. The consoles are less their own magic chips anymore than they are specific PC parts used (or prototypes) in specific ways versus the PC general use build.

I know you didn't ask about the PS1 specifically but this recent video with Andy Gavin regarding Crash Bandicoot touches on some of the stuff Nintex mentioned about how you sign up as a license and they send you specs and devkits to help you make the games, the process he describes was more or less the same for the NES and Genesis and so on. First they send you documentation that you use to build on a computer, then they'll give you hardware that's not final, then that hardware gets closer and closer to final, etc. (If you signed up after the console came out they'd just send you the final hardware obviously.)

[bluemax]

Pretty much what Benji said yeah. There's a bunch of initial hoops and stuff and lot of emailing and paperwork and what not. In the 360/PS3 days the fact that most PC games were DirectX 9.0c and the 360 SDK was based roughly on DirectX 9.0C made it so that many games were done on PC first, and then relatively easily brought to 360 with everything else being more effort.

These days its a bit different, but also fewer and fewer places have their own engines. I haven't really had to deal with hardware platform api differences in a long time.

[Nintex]

Benji help me out here.

Do you remember the old weird ass post about the Donkey Kong / Nintendo / WB conspiracy from the early 80's?
There was this post, I think from an old message board type thing that in detail described how Atari was fucked over by I think Warner Bros.

I recently thought about it again when I read an article that Atari indeed was supposed to be releasing the Nintendo products in the US market.

[Caviar]

This was very insightful. Thank you all again for the thorough responses.

[benjipwns]

It's not really a conspiracy, Nintendo got into licensing crap with Coleco over the port rights to Donkey Kong, Universal then sued everybody involved saying Donkey Kong was a infringement of King Kong and then Nintendo's Ninja Lawyers found out that King Kong had effectively entered the public domain and Universal had already argued this exact position in court in another case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v._Nintendo_Co.,_Ltd.

Separately, Nintendo went to Atari to offer them the NES to sell in the U.S., Atari turned it down, so Nintendo released it themselves.

I'm sure an insane person could connect them into a larger conspiracy against Atari. Maybe even Atari themselves, this was the company that threatened to sue Sony for "dumping" the Playstation by not charging $500+ for it then instead went bankrupt.

[benjipwns]

here, some Sam Tramiel delusion from the weeks before his company went bankrupt:

[chronovore]

I've enjoyed reading this thread. I'd entirely forgotten about Magnavox Odyssey.

[tiesto]

If you want a really thorough book (700+ pages!) covering everything back from Tennis For Two (a simple game created on an oscilloscope right here in the Brookhaven National Lab in the 50's!) and Ralph Baer's "Brown Box" (the prototype for the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console system) all the way up to the Switch, including obscure Japanese systems like the PC-FX and FM-TOWNS MARTY , with a hardcover full-color version even, I absolutely recommend Leonard Herman's "Phoenix":
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-IV-History-Videogame-Industry/dp/0964384809

Got to meet Leonard at our local retro expo and he signed the book for me when I bought it!

[ToxicAdam]

In a lot of ways, consoles were just an extension of the fad of people wanting to create "game rooms" in their home.

In the early 70's, owning pool tables, dart boards, ping pong tables, pinball machines were highly sought after by the emerging middle class to show off to their friends. As people moved out to the suburbs and had more space (and less access to public places to engage in these recreational activities) it made sense to devote a part of your house to it.

So as arcades exploded in 1979-1982 it just became a logical desire to want them in your home. But the prices for individual machines were prices way higher than the middle class could possibly afford. Which is where consoles stepped in and offered a similar experience for a fraction of the price. But the quality disparity between those early machines and what you could play in arcades was still too much. People quickly soured on those early consoles. Arcades still thrived and PC gaming took off in the infamous "video game bust" of 1983. Console makers tried to promise "arcade quality" graphics for their next generation of games, but they were still too far off.

Nintendo was able to take advantage of this by giving the consumers near arcade perfect ports of their already popular games. Then Sega took it to another level a few years later.

[chronovore]

I had never thought about it that way! That's fascinating!

[bluemax]

BTW, if you're interested in a lot of game history stuff from the perspective of developers I can't recommend Fabien Sanglard's website and books enough. He's been running a series recently on the classic game Another World, talking about all the various ports and how they worked. While these articles are generally aimed at programmers, he prefaces pretty much every one of them with a ton of history and backstory that even non technically minded people can enjoy. The most recent post is about the Atari Jaguar version:

http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_Jaguar/index.html

His books on the engines for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom cover a ton of history on development of games for IBM PCs back in the late 80s early 90s.

[benjipwns]

Though I'm obviously a weirdo I found that easy enough to follow, well written for non-programmers or even technical types once you know what the hardware names are basically for.

I have read elsewhere that the Jaguar hardware was quite buggy and did not necessarily reproduce across all machines. This shouldn't be a surprise if you understand the history, the Jaguar was designed by the same guys who were doing the Panther, who were the same team at the core of doing the Lynx and the Lynx was notoriously so. That's because it was a project by just a few guys, it wasn't hardware designed by a big ol computer company. Atari just bought the technologies and then tried to mass produce them. Both had issues of manufacturing enough even to meet the small (in comparison to say Sega) demand. Lynx doubly so because of the original screens.

I believe the 3DO is similar in having a bunch of these types of issues. That one programmer for 3DO who did a series of videos looking at games including a long play of the one he programmed by himself mentioned a few times that the 3DO had some constraints in which it basically would have these very powerful chips but the paths to and from could never support the full production/bandwidth of them. PO'ed is a great example because they "did things wrong" and it's pretty fast and at times impressive even today, whereas the infamous Doom port is a disaster because it was "done by the book" but has to be in a postage stamp window to run at an acceptable (FOR THE TIME!) framerate. And Wolf3D is another problem port that led to other problems on other consoles until somebody else finally did a replacement port.

Speaking of Wolf3D and the Jaguar and Carmack who's quoted in that link, it runs too well so the player speed is all fucked up. IIRC, Carmack thought it was great and nobody at id cared enough about the port (they were into the start of Quake development I think) to check and realize it needed to be slowed down to compensate for what Carmack had done with the framerate.

[bluemax]

The Doom book covers all the ports as well. I'll have to dig out my copy tomorrow and see if there's any good quotes for you. They're good books even if you skip all the really programmery bits,