At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. 1970 marked a crucial year in the transition of electronic games from academic to mainstream, with developments in chess artificial intelligence and in the concept of commercialized video games.
While the technology that later became the Odyssey by Magnavox was stalled in development, the game which would become Computer Space began development in this period. In computer games, BASIC games written by high school and college students circulated among different time-sharing computer networks via user’s societies. Some of these programs would later be distributed as type-in listings via books and magazines. The first national competition of chess programs was held, drawing attention to advances in artificial intelligence across various fields.
The special events for ACM 1970 included the first computer chess championship.
April – Georgy Adelson-Velsky, Arlazov, Bitman, Zhivotovskii and Uskov publish their paper Programming a computer to play chess in Russian Mathematical Surveys. In addition to discussion of the mathematical problems involved, the paper includes examples of humans playing against the computer, presented using chess notation.[1]
Summer – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney begin work on an adaptation of the Spacewar! mainframe game. Originally the game is intended to run off a Data GeneralNova 1200 computer with support hardware. This would eventually lead to the development of Computer Space (1971).[2]
The newsletter EDU is first published by Digital Equipment Corporation. Edited by David Ahl, the newsletter became one of the first commercial outlets of type-in listings for games. Ahl later published 101 BASIC Computer Games based on listings he collected for publication in EDU.[8]
September 12 – Christopher Gaylo, a student at Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, completes a finalized version of the BASIC game Highnoon. It was distributed on the Huntington Project time-sharing network. The code was later posted by Gaylo online.[9]
^Adel'son-Vel'skii; Aralazarov; Bitman; Uskov (1970). "Programming a computer to play chess". Russian Mathematical Surveys. 25 (2): 221–262.
^Smith, Alexander (November 27, 2019). They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry. Vol. 1: 1971 – 1982. CRC Press. pp. 68–73. ISBN978-1-138-38990-8.
^"Computer Chess Is 'Like Playing Tennis Without a Ball'". The Journal News. 1970-09-03. p. 8.
^Kozdrowicki, Edward; Cooper, Dennis (July 1973). "COKO III: The Cooper-Koz Chess Program". Communications of the ACM. 16 (7): 411–427.
