Insert Coin to Continue, Part Four: Rising Overheads, 1979-1994

As computing power increased, the nature of football video games started to become more sophisticated.

The rate at which computing technology developed over its first couple of decades or so always meant that the development of video gaming technology was going to be similarly rapid. As the technology has developed and both the physical size and – arguably more importantly – cost of processors has reduced over the years, the possibilities for gaming have increased vastly, from the simplistic tennis of Pong in the early 1970s to the plethora of sophisticated sports games of this century, so new horizons opened for the programmers themselves. Furthermore, since sports tend to not change enormously over time in all but relatively cosmetic senses, sports games provide a handy barometer for the ways in which gaming sophistication has developed over time.

In order to tell this story, we need to head back to California in 1978. Atari may have been amongst the early leaders in the video games market, but such was the pace of change within the nascent industry that the need to be continually innovating in order to survive. Trackballs – a plastic ball built into the surface of a unit, as used to be found on the underside of a computer mouse – had been in existence for some considerable time, but Atari was keen to push this new technology.