Tristan Donovan, a U.K. writer who has contributed to Edge and The Guardian, has just released a new book called Replay: The History of Video Games.
Wired.com is pleased to share several excerpts from this exhaustive, wide-ranging book. Previously, we looked at the development of Nimrod, the first gaming computer. In this excerpt, Donovan tells of the earliest days of videogame design in France. (NB: Some of the links below are to French-language sites. Most of them have cool pictures, though.)
Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games
Paris was a war zone. Egged on by the Vietnam War and the rebellious rhetoric of the Situationist International, thousands marched on the city streets demanding revolution. They spray-painted slogans onto the city’s walls: “Demand the Impossible,” “Imagination Is Seizing Power,” “Make Love, Not War” and “Boredom Is Counter-Revolutionary.”
France’s trade unions sided with the protestors and encouraged wildcat strikes across the nation in a show of solidarity. The government had lost control and France teetered on the brink of revolution. For a few days in May 1968 it looked as if the motley coalition of students, trade unions, Trotskyites, anti-capitalists, situationists, anarchists and Maoists would win their fight for revolution. Ultimately they did not. In early June, the protests died out thanks to a combination of government capitulation and crackdowns on the protestors.
But the failed revolution inspired many. Among them was Jean-Louis Le Breton. “I was 16 in ’68 and part of the protests in Paris,” he said. “Our teachers were on strike and we had a lot of discussions. We thought we could change the world. It was both a period of political consciousness and of utopia.”
During the late 1970s and early 1980s Le Breton explored his desire to challenge the status quo via music. Then in 1982 he found a new outlet. “I exchanged my synthesizers for the first Apple computer delivered in France, the Apple II,” he said. “At that time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were presented as two guys working in their garage – such a pleasant image in opposition with IBM. I found that programming in BASIC was easy and fun and I could imagine a lot of amusements with this fascinating machine. It was possible to take power over computers and bring them into the mad galaxy of my young and open mind.”