The pre-history of computer games

I ran a computer games company for 12 years and before that, when I was at school, I loved reading about and playing computer games. This was back in the ‘old days’ when video games took one or two people a few months to make – not hundreds of person-years.

Being a geek historian, back in the day, I used to give lectures at the Game Developers Conference about the history of computer games. You can see an online version on my personal site. I also wrote an article (which ended up as a cool diagram) for Wired about the subject (see previous post).

However, I came across this slideshow today which goes into the pre-history of computer games in way more detail than I did. It’s great. I don’t know if there’s a word for the kind of nostalgia you have for a time that you didn’t live through; but if I had my time again, I’d want to write games on Plato.

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