How Videogames Changed the World

Video games, for years the domain of outsiders and geeks

and people who look a bit like owls.

Somewhere down the line, gaming went mainstream

and now everyone plays them 18 hours a day, even George Alagiah.

And while that is a lie, games have infiltrated popular culture

and fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world.

Yes, really.

Now, tonight, I'll share my personal,

possibly bull-headed selection of the 25 most significant games that

ever there were, and we'll be hearing from videogame insiders,

videogame likers, and some reassuring, friendly, familiar faces

so easily spooked viewers don't shit their own kidneys out

with terrified indignation.

We'll show you games that broke out of the pixelated ghetto

and romped across mainstream culture.

We'll see games that will make you feel guilty, or make you cry,

or even introduced you to your soulmate.

In fact, we'll show you nothing less than how videogames

changed the world...

because that is the title, so we have to.

This programme contains strong language, scenes of violence

And scenes some viewers may find upsetting.

Today, in 2013, games are almost as commonplace as shoes.

Practically everyone plays them in some form.

Even bacon replicant David Cameron was reportedly addicted to the

jolly food slash 'em up Fruit Ninja on the iPad.

But games weren't always as graphically staggering,

painstakingly realistic,

or conceptually sophisticated as they tend to be today.

No, they had to start somewhere.

Gaming's Big Bang happened in 1972 with the release of a simple

looking tennis simulator, a game called Pong.

Pong, of course, was very simple.

You know, it begins with a black screen, as all great moments do.

It's meant to be kind of table tennis

but it was like a moving white bar that would go up and down,

and you could bounce a ball from side to side.

But it was so limited, so kind of basic in its function,

and yet, curiously, satisfying.

Pong wasn't the first videogame

but it was the first truly successful one, and it contains

much of the same basic DNA as almost every game that followed.

It was co-created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell

and programmer Allan Alcorn.

Without these two legendary figures,

there would be no videogames industry at all.

I had completed the design and we said, "Well, it plays pretty good,

"let's put it in a box and see if anybody plays it."

And all it had was the name Pong on it. There's no instructions,

there's just a coinmach.

And Nolan and I carried it over to Andy Capp's Tavern,

put it on a barrel, and within a short time, within a week or

so, the thing stopped working, and so I went over to fix it...

That became full of quarters.

Yeah, I opened it up and the quarters just gushed out,

filled my pockets with quarters and came in the next day and said,

"Nolan, I think we've got... Something is going on here."

And you go, "Hmm."

Pong was incredibly simple. Everybody knows how to play

ping-pong. It was a very stylised version of ping-pong on a TV.

The controls were simple, just a knob each to move the paddle.

There was also hidden depth.

The power allowed the ball to come off the bats in different angles,

depending on where you hit it, so it introduced this whole

idea of skill and strategy, which is really, really important.

Yes, it's hard to remember now, but in 1972 this was cutting edge.

You know, I found the graphics on Pong,

the little players, the little lines, they moved quite smoothly,

it was quite impressive, and the ball moved smoothly.

By ball, I mean square!

We didn't make the ball square

because we thought that a square ball was cool.

It's the only way we could do it,

and so, you know, in some ways,

I'd say the first 10 years of the video game business,

we were always bumping right

up against the edge of the technology that was allowed to us.

'You are watching the most exciting game

'you'll ever see on your TV set.'

Technology may have held the graphics, back but soon,

the rise of cheap microchips created a wave of Pong-like imitators

you could plug in and enjoy in your living room,

revolutionising home entertainment at a stroke.

'Oops, a goal.'

Until Pong came along, you would have to sit there and withstand

whatever the TV threw at you, which in the '70s

was only a handful of channels.

It often meant a choice between a documentary about bricks

or Jimmy Savile.

Now, suddenly, there was

a box you could plug directly into your TV and take control.

At the time, the very idea of that was mind-manglingly exciting.

That was the revelation,

the fact that you didn't feel passive for the first time.

Not that you don't mind being passive with TV,

but for the first time you were doing something here that

translated into something over there and that was kind of mind-blowing.

So I think it was just the miracle of being in the TV and operating

something from your couch which was the game changer for me.

I can remember gathering around it with my whole family,

it was like the piano in the 1940s or the Victorian era.

We all gathered around and were amazed at this

idea of interacting with the television screen.

Even though the graphics were profoundly simple, there was

that sense that this was a whole new thing that was happening.

Trad TV was clearly

so rattled by the obvious threat posed by the technological

upstart, it made desperate attempts to incorporate the new

enemy into its flagship entertainment shows.

When Pong came out they tried to use it as part of a live TV thing,

and I know I am not imagining this, with Bruce Forsyth.

Nice to see you to see you... Nice!

Well, what else could I say?

Bruce Forsyth had jumped ship from BBC to ITV for a huge pay packet,

there was a huge story about that,

and ITV gave him the whole of Saturday night.

LAUGHTER

And the competition they had,

they had people using a voice-operated form of Pong.

I know I've seen this.

You're looking at me like I'm hallucinating, but I have seen this.

Ladies and gentlemen, tele-tennis.

AUDIENCE CHEERS

CHEERING

And even as a kid I was thinking, "Wow, this really doesn't work."

In the years following Pong,

amusement arcades filled with coin guzzling monoliths became

a common sight, but in 1978, the success of one title

catapulted gaming out of the dark and further into the mainstream.

This stark, bleak, humans vs aliens fight-to-the-death quickly

hoovered up coins worldwide.

What Space Invaders did was it took arcade machines out of those

arcades, out of bars and suddenly, they were in restaurants

and cafes, places where families could go.

I think it was the first game that really did that.

It took games into the mainstream.

I can remember the first time I saw Space Invaders.

It was at the Silver Blades ice rink in Birmingham.

We were on a school trip, on Thursday night,

and I remember seeing this game

and putting 10p in the slot and it was like a revelation to me,

it was the most amazing experience.

And from then on in, Space Invaders was my life.

You would get 40p dinner money each day

and you could go down to the cafe down the hill

and get beans on toast for 20p and have two games of Space Invaders.

The pace of Space Invaders was beautiful.

As a newb, who had never played, you know, an arcade game before,

you could walk up, put 10p in, and you could play for, like,

five or ten minutes without being annihilated.

And that pace meant that it drew people in.

It also satisfied something which gamers seem to enjoy - attrition,

cleaning something up.

You have this block of stuff which had to be cleared away.

It's odd, because it is something you can never win. You clear them

up, there's a little pause and they all come back again.

But somehow, you want to keep on doing it.

Mastering Space Invaders became an overriding obsession for many.

This is one of the first published books by revered author Martin Amis.

It's Invasion Of The Space Invaders.

A surprisingly in-depth collection of his arcade tips with

a foreword by Steven Spielberg.

Martin Amis has since disavowed his involvement

in the Space Invaders tips scene.

And the game's appeal wasn't simply restricted to the

nature of its challenge. The sheer experience was equally important.

This was the first game to evoke a distinct mood and tone.

The music sped up as soon as aliens got closer to you, and it was like

that excitement and that,

"Oh, this is really responding to what I am doing."

It's like a heartbeat when the Space Invaders are coming down the screen.

It's, "Dum, dum, dum, dum."

It accentuates your own tension, it was perfect.

It was very stylistic.

You know, the shape of the alien, as soon as you saw it,

you kind of understood it and it burnt it into your mind.

# Space Invaders

# Space Invaders. #

As a result, Space Invaders wasn't just an arcade hit,

but a bona fide, mainstream, cultural phenomenon.

Yes, tonight, we will be discovering just who the Space Invader

champion of the Midlands is!

Space Invaders tournaments were considered entertaining enough

to be televised, for God's sake!

'And how Tim Coxon of Stoke must be feeling now.'

And the world of cheerful children's animation also couldn't

resist the pull of the global fad of the moment.

Left a bit, steady.

Right. Right a bit, fire.

Every element of the Invaders template had such an instant

iconic purity, it still resonates today, with references to it

popping up everywhere.

Slick TV commercials nod in its direction and it

appears on walls around the world, courtesy of street artist Invader.

And Space Invaders still survives as a game,

albeit in a remixed, re-imagined, modern form.

I was very honoured to be asked to do it.

Working on Space Invaders is like being asked to go on stage

and play with Dave Gilmour out of Pink Floyd or something like that.

Space Invaders was the catalyst for an explosion of similarly themed