CS: Storytelling in Games: 2013

The first video game to be created was the Cathode Ray Amusement Device in the year 1947, constructed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr and Estele Ray Man. Despite being the first video game created, it was never sold to the public. The gameplay itself is basic with the player being a dot, having a limited amount of time to overlap an aeroplane and then fire at it, causing it to explode.
This game had no storyline or plot to it and since graphics could not be drawn at the time screen overlays were used as targets.
Through the '50s the world saw the arrival of Tic-Tac-Toe, Tennis for Two and Mouse in the Maze. All had no back story to the game as with the technology available games were playable with light pens, didn't use a memory feature and were generally very short anyway.

Spacewar!

Spacewar! (1961) was the first shooter game to be created. The game was to shoot the other player and not collide with the star in the center of the screen. Again, no story was in the game but this began to create basic objectives in video games. Spacewar! also influenced other programmers to start writing their own games.

The Magnavox Odyssey

The first video game console was released to the public, it's prototype name of "The Brown box" being changed to Odyssey for it's release in May of '72. In the previous year, the first coin operated game Galaxy Game was released and Computer Space, the first coin operated game to be sold commercially. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (The creators of Computer Space) released Pong in '72 which then became a huge success, selling 19,000 units, and became the founders of Atari Inc. No storyline of any sort was present in video games at this time.

Space Invaders

Towards '77 a larrge event took place due to games - The Video Game Crash of 1977! Older games such as Pong were sold at a loss to the creators to clear the remaining stock. The only game consoles which survived this ordeal were the Atari and Odyssey, even though they suffered huge losses. This crash was caused by Pong, due to it swarming arcades and home consoles. The crash ended due to the success of Space Invaders in 1978.
This had one objective - destroy the Invaders. No storyline was given as to why the Invaders were in fact Invading but despite this it created a legacy outside the screen. Atari held the first ever Video Game Competition in 1980 with Space Invaders, bringing together more than ten thousand players and causing video gaming to be recognized as a mainstream hobby. Within this same year, The Arcade Awards Ceremony was created to pay homage to the best video games with Space Invaders taking the Game of the Year award. Space Invaders also paved the way for First Person Shooters (FPS), making it a huge influence in the Video Game History, much compared to the Beetles in the music industry.
However, it wasn't all love for the game - one year after it's release to the world, the Japan Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) attempted to ban Space Invaders for causing students to skip school lessons and commit Trauncy. This eventually failed and Space Invaders was free to game on in the world from behind the screen.
With the release of the Atari 2600, The Intellivision and the ColecoVision, second generation of video game consoles began to dawn. However, with so many consoles on the shelves with a surplus of video games in low quality, this prepped the beginning of a disaster greater than 1977 - The North American Video Game Crash of 1983!
The main causes were a surplus of consoles and bad games rushed to completion for the Christmas period. It brought the end of the second generation and almost destroyed the gaming industry with many companies going bankrupt, including Atari.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

One notable game of this event was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, based on the story from the movie, which was labeled as the worst video game ever made. Due to Atari overestimating the game, a surplus of 3.5 million cartridges were rumored to have been buried in a landfill within New Mexico. This became an urban legend which would influence music video "When I wake Up" by Wintergreen and the internet star James Rolf (Angry Video Game Nerd) to base a movie around the burial, titled Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie.
The long term effect of this crash meant that the shift in dominating the home console market went from the United States to Japan, Nintendo dominated the majority of the gaming market, when two years later in 1985 the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) brought back the video game industry and became incredibly popular by '87. Atari could not recover from the Crash or earn as much as the sales of the Atari 2600, resulting in them pulling out of creating consoles in 1996 after the Atari Jaguar failed to sell like it's competitors.
Through 1978 to '86 was refereed to as The Golden Age of Arcade Video Games, thanks to Space Invaders, with arcades popping up in shopping stores, restaurants and convenience stores all over mainstream locations. Due to the low cost of publishing video games, more bold and original games began to appear and with them, a unique storyline.

Zork

In 1980, the first game with a largely notable storyline was Zork, an adventure type game which was largely revolved around the use of typing in the players actions, such as "open mailbox" and "hit the troll with the Elvish Sword". Originally planned to be called Dungeon, it was faced with lawsuits from the creators of Dungeons & Dragons which had been released in '74. Zork was split into three games: Zork I ('80), Zork II ('81) and Zork III ('82), due to the discs not having enough memory to store the entire game on. Despite lack of visuals, which were difficult for the home computers the game was played on, it was highly praised for it's quality of storytelling.
Battlezone, also released in 1980, used a "viewing goggle" in order to play. This combined with it's first person shooter styled game play made it the first virtual reality arcade game. Little story was implemented but rumors of reaching the volcano in the background spurred other gamers on a wild goose chase.

Pacman's cutscene

The well known game Pac-Man was released back in 1980 as the first maze game and has been argued to have had the first cut scene in video games. It was simply Pac-Man being chased by a Ghost from the right of the screen to the left. The Ghost would then return blue and afraid, traveling from left to right, and Pac-Man would appear double his size coming after them.

The Split Screen

Pac-Man was released at a time where Space Shooter games were widely popular and brought the new genre of maze chase games with it, the first to introduce Power ups in the form of power pellets, brought the stealth game play by avoiding enemies rather than fighting them and appealing to both genders. Because of this, it became one of the highest earning games, earning more than $2.5 billion in quarters by the 1990s alone. Pac-Man was the first official game mascot and is one of the most recognizable game characters of the world to this day.
Pac-Man is also responsible for another legacy involving it's Split Screen, which was cause when the game tried to count 256 pieces of fruit, causing the counter to roll over. Players had claimed to get past the kill screen but none could prove it, so in 1999 Billy Mitchell, the first player to get the highest score in Pac-Man, offered $100,000 to the player who could prove to pass the split screen before January 1st 2000. None could complete this challenge and so the money was left unclaimed.
Only emulators could show what could happen beyond the Split Screen. The game would revert to level one conditions but the Ghosts would keep their speed and invulnerability to power pellets from higher stages.

Donkey Kong

The first true platform game was called Donkey-Kong in 1981, featuring JumpMan (who would be known as Mario from '83 onwards and become the mascot for Nintendo). The story was that Donkey Kong the gorilla had been abused by JumpMan for many years and upon breaking free, kidnapped JumpMan's girlfriend Pauline. The Player would then play as JumpMan in order to rescue her. This basic storyline would soon evolve into something greater in the future games.
The Atari 400 version (1979) also contained the longest undiscovered Easter eggs in a game, remaining hidden for 26 years until the creator, Landon Dyer, revealed it on his blog. The method to reveal it was discovered by Don Hodges who searched through the game's code to find it was the creator's initials after dying in a certain way. It was noted as the first true platform due to the player being able to jump over incoming objects.
Donkey-Kong would be the first in a large line of spin off games and the birth of the Mario Bros series.


The Legend of Zelda's Gold Game Cartridge

The Legend of Zelda in 1986 helped categorize the Action-Adventure genre of video gaming by combining puzzles, action components and a very basic Role Play style. It also introduced open world, nonlinear game play. It was the first game to include saved data by the use of an internal battery and it's game cartridge was colored a unique gold.
The game was based in a land called Hyrule where Ganon, the Prince of Darkness, had taken the Triforce of Power (an artifact of great power). Princess Zelda takes the triforce of wisdom, splitting it into eight pieces to stop Ganon from aquiring it. She then tells her maid to find one courageous enough to defeat Ganon and save Hyrule. The maid is attacked but saved by Link, a young boy, who is informed of Zelda's plea and ventures off to gather the pieces and become powerful enough to defeat Ganon.
Nintendo wanted to keep the fans on board with Zelda and stated that anyone who sent in a warranty card with the purchase of the game would become a member of the fun club, receiving issues containing puzzles, jokes and the valued game secrets, such as passageways and hidden rooms. Once 1 million subscribers had been reached in 1988, Minoru Arakawa started the Nintendo Power magazine. The third generation of game consoles ended with the NES being discontinued in '95.
With the third generation closing the storyline of games began to evolve in potential and the graphics with it too. The graphics would help to immerse the player further into the game and, soon, into the series of the game itself.

Various Zelda games

Over the years, Zelda has received a series of video games including:
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
Over these many years from 1987 to 2011, not including the spin offs, The world of Zelda has greatly expanded due to the various stories that each game has to offer, most often being defeating Ganon, The Prince of Darkness. This series has attracted millions of fans and gamers and with more games being released, will continue to draw in new fans and keep entertaining the old.
Thanks to the evolution of graphics and the technology of today, games can have vast stories and missions that past games could not handle (such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim). Storytelling over these years has evolved from nothing to elaborate backgrounds on both areas and characters, and sees great potential for new ways to portray the story through the further evolution of technology.

Bibliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube_amusement_device
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_%281980_video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_%28video_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Legend_of_Zelda_media

Images
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacewar!-PDP-1-20070512.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magnavox-Odyssey-Console-Set.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/20/SpaceInvaders-Gameplay.gif
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/wp-content/gallery/duke_nukem_forever_et/et2.png
http://levgrossman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/zork.jpg
Screenshots of Pacman Loading Screen from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glYGt7mFCaQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pac-Man_split-screen_kill_screen.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3f/Donkey_Kong_NES_Screenshot.png/200px-Donkey_Kong_NES_Screenshot.png
http://insidermedia.ign.com/insider/image/zelda_nes_cart_480.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zelda-media.jpg

Final Word Count: 1,996

CS: Storytelling in Games

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Drafting

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Researching