Modern Day Graphics - Video Games

            Now that I have discussed the evolution of graphic design from the beginning of the human race with cave paintings in France, to typography, up through eh Bauhaus, War propaganda and American design in New York we finally reach the main event for my studies in this class. My main focus at the University of Redlands has been to study the creation of video games in the hopes that I would one day be able to create my own gaming company. Video Games have had a very impactful presence in my life. It’s how I’ve connected with friends and connected with friends who have moved away from me. It is here and now that I am doing research on the history of videogame graphics and how they have evolved from the beginning until now.

            Contrary to popular belief the first video game was created back in the 1940s when Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann created a rocket simulator on a Cathode ray tube. Back in the 1940’s however computers were very expensive and hard to come by and therefore computer graphics could not be developed for video games. Of course as soon as Apple’s Mac and Microsoft Pc came out people took immediately to creating video games with graphic displays. As the original operating system was the Disc Operating System or DoS for short the only graphical displays that could be produced were text boxes on a black screen. These games called Text based games are arguable considered the world’s first real video games however it depends on personal opinion on the definition of games themselves.

            By 1960 at MIT a group of hackers hacked into the schools revolutionary TX-0 computers and established a vector based game in which two player controlled ships were used to fight against each other on the screen. The game was called Spacewars! And it revolutionized the concept for video games. It was during this time that Ralph Baer would come in to create the world’s first every home console where games could be played in homes on peoples TV sets. TVs were not computers and so it was difficult to get a TV to generate graphics for people to be able to play in their living rooms. The result that Baer came to was to create logic circuits to send visual signals to the television and use the pixels of the screen to create images. These pixels were created in an 8-bit format and this 8-bit graphics were born. This format took hold to further develop into arcade games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, where the ever popular character Mario made his debut. From here the company Nintendo is developed and they take Mario to new heights with the establishment of the Super Mario Bros. This game created what would be called side scrollers where the game was made in a 2D format and the screen would scroll sideways as you moved your character to the edges of the screen. This would go on for years until Nintendo’s invention of the Nintendo 64 brining 3D graphics into play. 3D would play as the main graphic style for video games until just recently in 2012 when eighteen year old Palmer Luckey invented the virtual reality headset called the Occulus rift which brings in the future style of 4d virtual graphics.

            The Occulus rift is still not available for public release however youtubers like Markaplier and Tobuscus have been able to Beta test them with horror and adventure games. While this brings in a new style of graphics that are thus far unknown the future looks promising.