As I mentioned a long time ago (and yesterday), this week the conferences on video games organized by the GameLab in Oviedo took place. 5 days, from 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in which very important people from the sector, including Charles Cecil (Creator of the Broken Sword saga and director of Revolution Studios), Gonzo Suárez (Creator of the Commandos saga), Enric Alvarez (Creator of Clive Bakers Jericho) and Richard Bartle (Inventor of the first virtual world).
The first conference was given by David Martinez, editor of Axel-Springer (A.k.A. Hobby Consolas). I remembered his face from reading that magazine in my “younger days”, in addition to having appeared in a documentary about “video game culture” a few years ago on Canal +.
The topic of the conference was “The history of video games”, which was analyzed based on David’s book: “From Super Mario to Lara Croft, the history of video games”, a book that, despite having a fairly commercial title, seems quite interesting in terms of content since it covers video games from their origins, telling some anecdotes and curiosities.
He began talking about “Tennis for Two”, which can be considered the first video game and was created from a modified oscilloscope in 1958.
“La flecha señala el osciloscopio que se utiliza por pantalla”
A few years later, in 1961, the video game “Space War” was developed, which caught my attention since there is a new version of the game in Ubuntu.
After recounting all the previous versions of Pong, it was the turn of the most critical moment in the history of video games, with the dreaded “E.T.” video game for Atari. According to “legend” (And as I had seen some time ago on a blog that I now don’t remember), the stock of unsold cartridges for this game was enormous, so they took them all in trucks to the Nevada desert and buried them there).
“Fact or fiction?”
There was also time to talk about Pac-Man, who was originally going to be called Puck-Man and was invented from a pizza that was missing a slice, but due to the ease of changing the “P” for an “F” they decided to give it the name that we all know.
Moving forward in the history of video games, it was Nintendo’s turn. Donkey Kong, which was originally designed to be a Popeye game, in which Olivia had to be rescued from the clutches of the evil Brutus while he was throwing barrels at Popeye. Due to licensing problems, Brutus ended up being changed to Donkey Kong, Popeye to Jumpman (who would later become Jumpman because it was the name of a member of Nintendo America) and Olivia to a stunning blonde (she was not yet Princess Peach).
Nintendo was the first company to censor a game, the culprit of this was Maniac Mansion, because some scantily clad statues appeared in the game and because a hamster had to be blown up in a microwave.
The last curious fact was about the origin of Sega, which began as a company that distributed pinball machines in American military bases in Japan.