Stanford Magazine - May/June 2012

VIDEO GAMES LEVEL-UP:

VIDEO GAMES LEVEL-UP: 50 YEARSOF STANFORD INGENUITY

Click to view infographic as a single image or get the PDF.

STEVE RUSSELL and fellow Tech
Model Railroad Club members create
Spacewar! at MI T. Within weeks, the
game spreads to other computer
research centers, including
Stanford’s AI lab (SAIL). Russell
follows AI pioneer JOHN
MCCAR TH Y to the Farm soon after.

BILL PITTS, ’ 68, and Hugh Tuck build a coin-operated computer game based on Spacewar! A prototype of the Galaxy Game is installed at Tresidder student union in June 1972. An eight-player version installed six months later remains there until 1979.

A teenage EUGENE JARVIS, MBA ’86, plays Pong at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park and watches students play the Galaxy Game at Tresidder.

NOLAN BUSHNELL plays Spacewar! as an undergrad at the University of Utah and at Stanford while working nearby at Ampex.

ED LOGG, MS ’72, plays
Spacewar! on a SAIL computer.

Rolling Stone reporter STEWART BRAND, ’ 60, and SAIL executive o;cer LES EARNEST organize the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics,” the first competitive video gaming event. BRUCE BAUMGAR T, PhD ’74, wins the five-man free-for-all.

In June, Bushnell founds Atari
with Ted Dabney. In November, a
coin-op prototype of Pong is
installed at a pub in Sunnyvale.

By GRETA LORGE Illustrated by SECTION DESIGN

KEY

FUNDAMENTAL TECHNOLOGY
PLATFORM / HARDWARE
GAMEPLAY / GENRE
BUSINESS / INDUSTRY

Stanford Center for Computer Music founding director JOHN CHOWNING, MA ’ 64, DMA ’ 66, pioneers digital implementation of frequency modulation (FM) to achieve realistic synthesized sound.

Intel employee No. 12 TED HOFF, MS
’ 59, PhD ’ 62, invents the microprocessor,
which comes on the market in 1971 as the
4-bit 4004 processor.

The first message transmitted between two nodes of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) network is sent from UCLA to Stanford.

ANDY MOORER, PhD ’75, translates Chowning’s FM synthesis algorithm into hardware design. It is patented through Stanford and subsequently licensed to Yamaha, which commercializes it.