09 January 2006

Video Games and the Evolution of Microprocessors

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I’ve just returned from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES is a veritable festival of microprocessors. There were 28 football fields worth of microprocessor-driven gadgets. As exciting as it was to see thousands upon thousands of high definition televisions, the biggest crowds formed around Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

I suspect there’s no better way to appreciate the incredible advancement in microprocessors over the last 25 or so years than to compare the video game consoles of yesterday and today.

In 1977, the Atari 2600 was the state-of-the-art video game machine. It had such exciting games as Asteroids (which you can play on this blog by clicking on the Asteroids image above), Pong, Centipede, Missile Command, etc. This holiday season, I bought my kids an Atari Flashback 2 — for $30 I was able to buy the complete console and the 40 best games from the Atari 2600, all built into a single machine.

As nostalgic as it was for me to play Missile Command, I was absolutely astonished at how primitive the graphics, game play and sound were. In stark contrast, the sound, graphics and game play demonstrated at CES on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were mind blowing. Video game consoles are now able to produce images on the fly that only a few years ago took animation render farms hours to create.

Video game pundit and game developer extraordinaire David Perry will be speaking at TED2006. He’s been developing games for the last two decades and has taken full advantage of the increasing power of video game consoles. A quick look at screen shots from games from the Atari 2600 (Combat) and Perry’s latest game for the PlayStation 2 (The Matrix: Path of Neo) and you can more fully appreciate the incredible evolution of the microprocessor over the last quarter century. I look forward to hearing where Perry thinks it’s all heading next.

Atari2600