[game_preservation] The Videogame Archivist

[Henry Lowood]

Devin,

another problem for linguistic analysis: Atari included the word 
"computer" in some of their advertising for Pong.  You can see this 
clearly in one of the illustrations for my article on Computer 
Space/Pong in the IEEE Annals for the History of Computing.  I recall 
(correctly, I hope) that the game sheets even used the term "computer 
brain" for Computer Space, implying there was a CPU, when of course 
there was not.

It might be worth a shot with the new google analytics, comparing "video 
game" v. "videogame."

Henry

On 1/10/2011 11:19 AM, Martin Goldberg wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Devin Monnens<dmonnens at gmail.com>  wrote:

>> Well, it might help if there was a little bit of taxonomical history. I

>> attempted this several times, and the best I was able to discover was that

>> the term "video games" became very widely used, though primarily in

>> reference to arcade machines, somewhere around 1974 or 1975 (don't quote me

>> on this, this is coming from rote memory!).

> I know we had discussed it when you were doing the research.  PONG was

> advertised as a "video skill game" which was the closest to the

> primordial sense of the word.  There are several games in 1973 that

> use the term:  Gotcha (1973) is one of the first ones I'm aware of to

> use the term (the full term in the flyer being "video game

> technology").  Micro Games' Champion Ping Pong (1973) were also using

> the term video game to describe their machine.  Ramtek also used it

> for their game Hockey (1973).

>

> Nolan of course claims credit for coining it, but when I talked to Al

> Alcorn he said they got the term from a member of the press who called

> PONG that while on display at the AMOA when they were there.

>

> By 1973, others in the game industry were calling these TV Games, TV

> Tennis, Space Age Game, video action game, electronic game, and

> television skill game.  But the context is obvious for these and the

> term "video game" itself arising to describe the TV technology encased

> in all of them - they all literally had television sets sitting inside

> of them.  For some reason, the industry and the press gradually

> gravitated to the term "video game" over all the others.

>

>

> Marty

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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator, History of Science&  Technology Collections;
    Film&  Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood