How could they draw and animate the 8bit characters at the time?
In: Technology
Computer games weren’t really a thing until the 70s.
There were some computer programs that people created for large expensive early computers as demonstrations or theoretical ideas or one offs or similar that may loosely fit the definition of game. But video games as we know them today weren’t really a thing until the 70s.
Those early computer games didn’t have much in the way of graphics and even less in the way of animation.
Even once graphics became more complex it was still cheaper and easier to draw the arrangement of pixels you wanted to created on paper and then program that in rather than using some computer drawing program.
I remember that the Commodore 64 for example came with a manual that showed you how to create sprites by drawing them out on graph paper and then doing some sums of powers of two to know what numbers to poke into the computer to create them.
And that was not just for home users.
There are some pictures of the sheets of graph paper that Shigeru Miyamoto and the other creators of Super Mario Bros used to design the levels of that game.
Making computer graphics on computers wasn’t really a thing for most people until the advent of computers like the Amiga and it successors.
Which games are you talking about? Space Invaders came out in arcades in the late 70s and Donkey Kong for the home market in the early 80s. There was nothing like 8-bit animated games before then.
1950’s and 60’s was really before there were computer games, not until the 80’s did computers for the home start to appear. There was an early game of noughts and crosses or tic tack toe but that required a massive computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OXO
Everyone here saying video games didn’t exist before the 70s is wrong. They did but weren’t common.
They didn’t have 8 bit characters though. They were more primitive than that, such as a light that lit up.
Games like Tennis For Two (which pong ripped off) was made back in 1958. A physicist made it using an oscillator and an analog computer which existed back then to solve problems such as missile trajectory.
He attached the computer and the oscillator, and had the oscillator display a ball, and had the computer detect the trajectory like it would with missiles.
So it wasn’t a personal computer, but it was still a computer which you can program (albeit through switches, patch cords, etc instead of code). The reason it wasn’t common yet was because it was so expensive and this type of equipment was limited to universities.
As others have said, there wasn’t such a thing as “computer games” in the 1950s and 1960s, although your question does have some validity because the PC as we know it didn’t exist until the early 1980s but some well-known games such as Space Invaders were released into arcades in 1978. In order to develop the games they basically built their own computers to create the game on.
The Wikipedia page on the [Space Invaders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Hardware) game has a description of what hardware they used to create the game.
There were no computer games in the 1950s. The earliest graphical (or “video”) computer game was Spacewar!, created by ha handful of MIT programmers for the PDP-1 in 1962. The PDP-1 used a 6-bit byte, so “8-bit characters” (or sprites) were not a thing, nor would they need to be since the PDP-1 used a monochrome display.
How did the creators of early games like Spacewar! create compelling, fun, interactive, multiplayer games using such limited, general-purpose hardware and no special libraries? By being badass computer scientists.
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