You Lose: The History of Video Games

Few can deny that video games have had a profound effect on our lives. Millions of hours that the youths of the past spent in idle whimsy, impregnating teenage girls, curing cancer or just farting around are now devoted to virtual carjacking, rape and mayhem. Except of course for the poor, who are still investigating the plumbing problems of an LSD nightmare world in their gaming hours. But whether we're slamming a trunk lid on the neck of a witness or just trying to get our virtual selves laid, few and elderly are the lives that have not been touched by the video game revolution. So how did this all come about?

The very first "video game" was a decidedly low-tech affair called Kill 'Em, a homemade game which involved shooting a toy suction cup gun at the television set whenever someone you didn't like was on-screen. Though the game's lineage is unclear, it does date back to at least the early 1950's, when the world's original first-person shooter was passed on to my father from his older brother Drake during a particularly exciting episode of The Lone Ranger. The game skyrocketed in popularity until 1955, when a tragically excited Dirk Dreck got carried away and shot Harriet Nelson in the snatch with a bb rifle, destroying the Dreck family television set and inspiring the first of many parental backlashes against the video game industry.

The first game that actually acknowledged player input in some way other than complete destruction, however, was the legendary Pong. Never again would such a crappy game change lives of so many. Except for checkers.

What few people realize is that Pong was actually the world's first supercomputer, the product of fifty million dollars worth of research by IBM scientists in 1954. All those scientists were promptly fired when the IBM higher-ups discovered they'd spent $50 million to fund electric ping-pong, which made the scientists glad they'd never told their superiors about the progress they'd made on the world's second supercomputer, the $100 million Color Pong.

By 1972, advances in technology had made an arcade-sized Pong possible, which sucked just as much as it sounds like. Thousands of disappointed teens going Kill 'Em on the Pong consoles nationwide necessitated the rush release of 1978's Space Invaders, which placated angry arcade rats with its mesmerizing waves of colorful squid, marching happily to their inevitable doom at the hands of a user-controlled shooting sombrero. Wildly popular though utterly unprofitable, manufacturer Taito saved Space Invaders in 1979 through a vast public information campaign informing the swarms of teens flocked around the consoles that by inserting quarters into the big black box, they could actually control the killer sombrero-thing themselves. Minds were blown, and America's youth never went outside again.

Unfortunately for Taito, just when they had started to recoup the losses from twelve months of people standing around and watching their games play themselves, the Hiroshima of video games dropped in 1980 in the form of Pac-Man. Originally designed by inventor Toru Iwatani as a terrifying horror game, Pac-Man was conceived as an exploration of the emotional and psychological torment of a disturbed young man trying to escape the demons and ghosts of his own troubled psyche, only to find himself trapped within the labyrinth of his own mind while his neurosis closed in to destroy his very soul. Parent company Namco, however, though the designer's original title of Pretty Angry Crazy Man was too long to fit on the arcade console, and had it shortened to P.A.C.-Man before the game's release.

Gamers mistook the periods in the game title as an artist's rendition of the lithium pill "power pellets" the protagonist so greedily gobbled up within the game, and so the game became popularly known as Pac-Man, with millions of gamers worldwide mistaking the experience for a fun, lighthearted adventure. Iwatani was furious at the unintentional bastardization of his vision, and channeled that rage into his next game, a magnum opus about the desperate last minutes of a suicidal, manic-depressive misfit named Q-Bert.

Eventually, Pac-Man's berserk popularity led to a backlash, which some blamed on the gay community adopting Pac-Man as a gay icon, forcing millions of innocent gamers to reconsider just exactly what kind of packing this little yellow guy was doing. Then in 1981, Pac-Man's chokehold on the pocket change of America's teens and irresponsible adults was jostled loose by the release of an exciting new game called Donkey Kong. Named after an extremely bad translation of the Japanese phrase for "That monkey is fucking my girlfriend!" Donkey Kong introduced video game audiences to the character of Mario, who would go on to star in 5,711 video games, four breakfast cereals, two feature films and one mostly-regrettable porno. Though the corpulent plumber is only identified as "jumping fatso" in the original Donkey Kong game, he's clearly the same meatball that children of the 80's would spend hours piloting through countless bad acid trips in his later adventures.

In 1981, however, Mario was limited to serving as target practice for an oddly construction site-obsessed gorilla, his only defense to wildly swing a sledgehammer in all directions in a desperate ploy to drum up audience sympathy, before he was inevitably rolled the fuck over by a flaming monkey barrel. Surprisingly the ploy worked, at least until Gallagher stole his act two years later. But by then Mario had been reincarnated in some kind of weird, rubberized sewer, and he was too busy keeping an eye on his pocket-change-stealing, housepet-abusing brother Luigi to waste much time thinking about his own phallic issues.

Anyone who didn't die in 1985 (sorry, deadies) knows that this was only the beginning, since in 1986, games would, depending on your perspective, either stop sucking or start sucking forever. But that's a suck story for another day. Stay tuned.

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