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Games of the 1970s

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Unlike the incredibly rapid adoption of television sets that occurred during the 1950s, game consoles were considerably slower to find their way into American homes. Until the advent of cartridge games, early consoles were strictly limited in the number and variety of games they could support; the economic instability of the industry made investing in a home console an expensive and uncertain proposition. Throughout the 1970s, arcade games continued to dominate Hollywood's vision of video games. While the spaces where these games were played - shopping malls, convenience stores, storefront arcades - were sometimes framed in terms of their potential for contributing to juvenile delinquency, the first generation of arcade games on screen were more likely to be linked to narratives of teenage independence and achievement. Unlike TV, the earliest depictions of games on film did not immediately provoke cultural anxieties related to violence, addiction and sexuality, but instead occupied a space of cultural and technological fascination.

Unlike television, which was immediately recognizable as an extension of the existing radio broadcasting industry, video games were primarily viewed as an extension of the computer and high-technology industries of Japan and California's' Silicon Valley. The computerization of American business practices took place over several decades beginning in the 1940s and active public relations campaigns by industry leaders such as IBM and Burroughs created a foundation for public acceptance of technology based on promises of speed, ease, efficiency and an ideology of American technological supremacy that culminated in the Moon landing of 1969. More negative associations with the computers used to enforce government bureaucratic activities such as tax collection and military service during the Vietnam War were associated not with computation as such, but with large-scale mainframe computing and the dehumanizing conversion of people into numbers stored on punch cards and databases. When the first microprocessor-based home consoles were introduced in the early 1970s, nothing could have seemed further removed from the bureaucratic logic of the previous generation's mainframe computers and punch cards. In addition to early games' association with the beginnings of personal computing, development of consoles by toy manufacturers such as Coleco and Mattel contributed to the perception of games as more or less benign objects of diversion.

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  1. Out of context