Strachey's List (1952 - 1970)
The Most Consequential Games of All-Time
Strachey’s List
Welcome to Strachey’s List. These lists will examine what I believe to be the most consequential video games of all time. These are games that are either critically acclaimed, essential to the industry, or revolutionary to their genre. These lists will be limited to a maximum of 20.
The list is named after Christopher Strachey, the first true video game developer. Strachey is an integral part of the industry and I felt it made sense to call a list of important games to the industry after him. Being on this list is the highest honor the vault will give a game. I do not plan to make “Game of the Year” lists, as I prefer to shine a spotlight on all the great games.
Vault Manager Note - Some of you who have followed me earlier may remember these. I decided to relaunch the list as I wasn’t completely happy with the formatting of previous entries. So this will be copied and paste from that first article I wrote a while ago.
Draughts
Draughts is the first video game to be developed. Created by Christopher Strachey as a thesis at university, it’s a simple Checkers game. It’s instrumental as the first true playable video game, considering the Cathode Ray-tube Amusement Device was just a concept. Strachey’s contribution to the industry was cemented when making this, and the main reason this list is named after him. Strachey being gay and British should also be considered when looking at video game history, as it makes video games a theoretical British invention and adds the medium in a big way to LGBTQ+ history.
OXO
Around the same time as Christopher Strachey’s Draughts, OXO was created by the University of Cambridge’s Alexander Douglas. It’s a simple game of tic-tac-toe. Some have argued that it’s OXO, not Draughts, that is the first video game. However, there’s evidence that shows Strachey’s thesis was published before Douglas’. OXO is like other games such as Bertie the Brain, but that game uses lightbulbs rather than any visual screen.
Tennis for Two
Tennis for Two, the first multiplayer sports video game, was a hit at a three-day college exhibition. Higinbotham was a member of the team that made the first atomic bomb. Looking to create excitement about what technology could do, he made Tennis for Two to have fun at the exhibition. This game introduced multiplayer gaming and is extremely influential in the history of video games. A sequel titled Computer Tennis was released the following year at the exhibition with new features.
Spacewar!
The first Science Fiction video game, and a very important one at that. Spacewar! became a staple in colleges across the country as the people who helped Russel make the game would go to new jobs at universities and clone the game. As a result, this is the first video game that was played beyond concepts and experiments, though still limited. The game is a space combat title that revolves around a gravity star and two monochrome spaceships that shoot missiles at each other to score a point. The game would go on to have a major influence on many early game designers. In 2007 the game was called one of the most important video games of all time. It is similar to how Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey influenced so many would-be movie directors.
BASIC Computer Games
In the 1960s, mainframe computers were used to make simple video games by employees of large corporations or students in colleges. The problem is that these games were specially coded for the device they were made for and came around before the commercialization of video games. Unfortunately, some have been lost to time, but many were ported to computers using the BASIC computer language. Most of these were text-based small games.
In 1971, David H. Ahl began to port a few of these games to the BASIC language. His first two games were Hamurabi and Lunar Lander. They became a hit after he published the language in the educational newsletter EDU. He asked for submissions and got a bunch from high school students. He went on to publish the book 101 BASIC Computer Games, which contained the games he gathered. Hobbyists with the first microcomputers began to use the book to get the games. It would go on to become the first million copies selling computer book.
Major games included Hamurabi, Lunar Lander, Chomp, Hexawar, and Civil War. There will be some titles you will see on these lists that are part of the book. BASIC computer games influenced many future developers and those games are essentially the start of PC gaming.
Have you figured out how to play Strachey Draughts?