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Trigger Happy
41
by planting grain and assessing tax rates each year—a
direct ancestor of Civilization. And later, the advent of
ADVENT (1972): short for Adventure, this was the
first of a lost genre of game that was hugely popular on
personal computers right up until the late 1980s. It was
the first computerized version of “interactive
narrative”: the computer described a location and the
user typed in commands—“north,” “look,” “kill snake,”
“use torch”—to move around the virtual world, use
objects and solve fiendish puzzles. But the world at
large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these
proto-videogames. It was a closed community, a
priesthood without a parish.
Most people assume that coin-operated arcade
games preceded home videogame technology. In fact,
in terms of conception rather than commercial
distribution, the reverse is the case, for by 1967 Ralph
Baer, the consumer-products manager of a military
electronics company, Sanders Associates, had invented
a TV-based home-tennis game and more complex
“hockey” simulations. Unfortunately it took him
several years to persuade other manufacturers of the
commercial possibilities. At last, at the turn of the
decade, Intel got their act together and invented the