ABOUT
HISTORY
The four games in BLIP ARCADE did not arrive from nowhere. Each one is the shadow of a game that changed the industry — designed under impossible constraints by engineers who were, in many cases, inventing the medium as they went.
This page traces where they came from: the studios that built them, the people who designed them, and the small decisions that became the foundations of an entire art form.
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari with $250 in capital and a single engineer, Allan Alcorn, whose training project — a table-tennis simulation — became Pong. In four years the company went from a rented cheese factory to the fastest-growing company in American history. Atari defined the arcade era and later the home console market with the Atari 2600. Two games in BLIP ARCADE trace their lineage directly to Atari: Rally (Pong, 1972) and Bouncer (Breakout, 1976).
Taito began as a vending machine and jukebox importer. By the late 1970s it was one of the dominant forces in Japanese arcade gaming. Tomohiro Nishikado, a staff engineer with no formal game design training, spent nearly a year hand-designing the hardware and software for Space Invaders (1978). The game caused a national coin shortage in Japan and exported the arcade boom to the rest of the world. Galactic Defender in BLIP ARCADE is inspired by that work.
The snake concept was born at Gremlin Industries as Blockade (1976), a two-player arcade game where each player's trail became an obstacle. The mechanic lay dormant for two decades until Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto wrote a solo version for the Nokia 6110 in 1997. Preinstalled on hundreds of millions of handsets, Snake became one of the most widely played games in history before smartphones existed. Serpent in BLIP ARCADE follows that thread.
If you want to understand the algorithms behind these games — the collision detection, the sprite rendering, the enemy AI — the best starting point is Code the Classics (Raspberry Pi Press, 2019), edited by Eben Upton and David Crookes.
The book rebuilds games like Boing! (Pong), Cavern (Manic Miner), and Infinite Bunner (Frogger) in Python, explaining every algorithmic decision along the way. It is not a nostalgic coffee-table book — it is a working technical guide with full source code for each title. A second volume followed in 2022 and is available at magazine.raspberrypi.com.
Nolan Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn in 1972 as his first engineer and gave him a simple brief: build a table-tennis game as a learning exercise. Alcorn added an AI opponent, a scoring system, and a ball that changed angle based on where it struck the paddle — none of which Bushnell had asked for. The result was Pong, installed in a Sunnyvale bar called Andy Capp's Tavern. It stopped working within two days. The coin box was overflowing.
Pong was not the first video game, but it was the first to reach mainstream audiences. The 1975 home version became Sears' best-selling product that Christmas. Its physics model — a ball whose angle and speed vary with paddle position — remains the template for every digital table-tennis game made since.
Breakout was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow in 1975. Bushnell offered Steve Jobs a bonus to minimise the number of chips on the board — the fewer the chips, the larger the bonus. Jobs hired his friend Steve Wozniak, who redesigned the entire circuit to use 46 chips (well below the typical 150–170) over four days of around-the-clock work. Jobs told Wozniak the bonus was $700 and paid him $350. The actual bonus was $5,000. Wozniak did not learn this until years later.
Wozniak's chip-reduction techniques proved too complex to manufacture at scale, and Atari quietly released a standard version instead. The game itself was a sensation: take Pong, add bricks, remove the second paddle. Its mechanic — clearing a field by angle and momentum — inspired Arkanoid (1986) and an entire genre of physics-based puzzle games.
Tomohiro Nishikado spent nearly a year designing the hardware and software for Space Invaders simultaneously — the existing microprocessors were not fast enough to move many objects, so he designed a custom CPU. The aliens moved faster as their numbers dwindled, an artefact of the hardware running fewer calculations per frame rather than a deliberate design decision. Players found the mechanic so compelling that Nishikado kept it.
Space Invaders reached Japan in 1978 and caused a nationwide shortage of 100-yen coins. Banks had to triple production. When Atari licensed it for the 2600 in 1980, it became the first killer app for a home console — quadrupling 2600 sales. The game introduced persistent high scores, the first attempt at in-game tension through music, and the concept of a wave of enemies as a pacing mechanism.
The snake mechanic began as Blockade, a two-player arcade game released by Gremlin Industries in 1976. Players steered trails that grew longer with each move; touching a trail meant death. The concept spread through numerous clones — Nibbler (Rock-Ola, 1982) made it a solo survival game and introduced the score-per-pellet structure that Nokia would later inherit.
In 1997, Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto was tasked with creating a game for the Nokia 6110. The phone had a monochrome display, no touchscreen, and a numpad. Armanto wrote Snake in a matter of weeks. Nokia preinstalled it on the 6110 and its successors; by the early 2000s an estimated 350 million handsets carried it, making Snake one of the most distributed games in history — entirely without an app store, a download, or a purchase.
ABOUT
HISTORY