Article by Jamie Carr
The history of online car games is inter weaved with the history of the computer, video games, the World Wide Web and all the associated technologies that make online gaming possible.The First Computer Game
A.S. Douglas, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, created the first graphic computer game in 1952. Douglas programmed a version of naughts and crosses on an EDSAC computer. The EDSAC in Cambridge was the 2nd computer in the world, the first being located in the University of Manchester.
“Tennis for Two” was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham on an oscilloscope in Brookhaven National Laboratory. “SpaceWar!” was the first game programmed for computer use by Steve Russell in MIT using a PDP-1 mainframe computer.
Computer and video game technology progressed throughout the 60′s with new inventions such as the mouse and windows. Progress culminated in 1968 with a the first public demonstration of a networked computer system in the Augmentation Research Center. The demonstration was the first public appearance of the mouse, windows, hypermedia with linking and addressing, and video conferencing.
1974 saw the first racing game by Atari named Gran Track 10. It had low-resolution graphics and it was a race against the clock rather than racing against other cars.The First Car Game
It wasn’t until 1982 when Namco released the first true car game that things really took off. Pole Position was the first game that allowed players to have cars to race against and was based on a real racing circuit.
1983 saw the birth of the Internet evolving from ARPANET that had started deployment in 1969. The Internet allowed for network games that could be run on peer-to-peer or client-server architectures.The First Online Car Games
The Internet continued to develop and web browsers became more and more sophisticated. People started creating games that used web browsers as a client. HTML, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, MySQL and FLASH technologies have now progressed to such a point that many of the games developed in the 80′s and 90′s are now available to play for free online.
So the next time you have a few minutes to kill why not Google “car games” and enjoy the race.
Roary McQueen is a car games andracing nut from London, England who is particularly fond of all thingsracing and car games related andwrites about them here.
One of four lectures on aspects of legal anthropology given by Alan Macfarlane to second and third year students in Cambridge university department of social anthropology doing a special paper on Legal Anthropology in February 2008.