Welcome to the History of Learning Games podcast. Together, we’ll explore how digital games have shaped the ways we learn inside and outside of classrooms; have led to some of the game industry’s most fascinating successes and failures; and the lessons they have for us about teaching and learning. Let’s play.
Let me start with an introduction. My name is Brian Alspach. I’ve spent most of my career in what people sometimes call the ‘AltEd’ space, and most of my time there making learning games. I was a member of the founding team at E-Line Media, an indie game developer and publisher where I spent fifteen years making, marketing and distributing learning games. I’m also a lifelong gamer, and, conveniently, my lifespan as a gamer overlaps with the development of learning videogames as an industry and cultural force.
As a child of the 1980s, my education started just as computer labs were going mainstream in American public schools. My friends and I looked forward to the days when we’d line up in the hall and march down to a room with rows and rows of Apple IIs and early Macs. We sometimes did (quote – unquote) productive things with our time, like program in BASIC or later make presentations in Hypercard (this was before the Internet, so no using the web for research – or goofing around – for us). But usually we played games. Classic learning games like Odell Lake and Oregon Trail.
Later, when my family got our first real computer – a Packard Bell 286 with a forty megabyte hard drive that ran at a staggering twelve megahertz – I spent hours and hours as an international detective playing Carmen Sandiego or simulating everything from cities to ant colonies with Maxis’ classic titles. My mother – an excellent typist from the old-school typewriter days – tried to get me to learn typing along with Mavis Beacon (sorry, Mom, I’ve still never learned proper touch-typing technique, but I’d like to think Mavis’ approach influenced my glorified multi-finger hunt and peck).
As a teenager, I sat alongside my younger brother while he played some of the most commercially successful and influential “edutainment” titles of all time: games from the Mathblaster! And Reader Rabbit franchises.
Of course, all through this time I was playing non-educational games, too, starting in the 8-bit era with the NES, but also on my friend’s Apples, Macs and C64s; and, eventually, on my own PC. Some of these games were great, some not so much. And even though you wouldn’t necessarily call any of them “learning games,” there often was interesting, sometimes deep, learning going on. I learned more about how an economy works by playing an Electronic Bulletin Board game – sort of an early version of an MMO for those of you born in this millennium – called Tradewars 2000 than I ever did from a textbook or class.
I started working in the learning games industry in the late 2000’s. Not only had that industry – and the game industry more broadly – evolved significantly, but by this time, there had also been a couple decades worth of scholarship about games and learning. Inside academia, people were asking interesting questions. What makes for a good educational game? How can games be used most effectively in different learning environments and with different types of learning content? And maybe most interestingly (at least to me): what lessons do good learning games, and playful learning, have for us that apply to teaching and learning outside games? I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the amazing people exploring these questions. And to see the emergence of – and even work on – games that have put their ideas into practice.
Today, researchers, game makers, entrepreneurs and established companies continue to build on the legacy of this work. As the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. In particular, as AI becomes more of a fixture in education -- enabling learning to become more individualized, adaptive and self-directed -- I think there are important lessons for us in the history of learning games, going back to the days of Oregon Trail and beyond.
But for that to happen, you have to know the history. There’s been excellent work done on many aspects of this: work focusing on specific titles and genres; work analyzing the development and trends of the learning games industry; work discussing learning games in the context of educational theory and pedagogy; and so on. But what I don’t think there’s been is a soup-to-nuts historical overview of learning games: something that lays it all out in a way that captures the thru-line and, I hope, will be fun for a general audience of game enthusiasts.
My goal for the series is to keep it focused on the games themselves. My plan is to take a chronological approach, with most episodes focused on a single game or, sometimes, a genre of games, especially if that genre had its heyday over a relatively short period of time and can be covered in a way that doesn’t interrupt the historical flow. Where an important topic in the history of learning games doesn’t fit well into that structure, I’ll probably handle it in a special episode. I’m thinking especially here of abstract and recurring topics where it makes sense to take a broader perspective: concepts like “edutainment” or “gamification,” for example.
In saying I’ll talk about the games themselves, I mean things like a game’s development; the play experience; the learning involved (the intended or claimed learning as well as the reality); the market context in which the game emerged and performed and its place in the history of games and learning. I’ll sometimes make reference to scholarly work or educational ideas outside of games, but the podcast isn’t about games and learning scholarship or educational theory: it’s about the games.
With that introduction out of the way, let’s move into today’s episode. I’ve got two items on the agenda for today. The main event is what I call a “nickle tour” of the history of games – not just learning games – up to the time of the first computer games. While this isn’t a general games history podcast, I do think a little orientation to how games develop and some of the ways they’ve played a role in learning, and across history and cultural, is an important backdrop for the story to come. But first, I want to talk a little about what the podcast is and isn’t: what’s in and out scope.
The podcast is called The History of Learning Games, but it would be more accurate to say it’s the history of digital learning games. By “digital” I mean games that are played exclusively (or more or less exclusively) using a computer, where “computer” includes PCs, consoles, smartphones, tablets: things like that.
Of course, people were making and playing non-digital learning games for a long time before there were computers. We know games were played for learning purposes going back to ancient times. I’m going to make reference to non-digital learning games – both historical and contemporary ones – throughout the podcast. As I said, I’m going to do that later in this episode, and again in the next one. But in terms of what I’m going to cover the history of during the series, it's digital games. That limits our timeline to the post-World War II era and, practically speaking, only back to the 1960s.
Within that time period, as I also mentioned, my focus really is on the history of learning games specifically, not of games or the game industry as a whole. There are lots of great books and podcasts on the history of videogames, so other than today’s nickle tour, I won’t be spending time going over territory that others have already covered.
That being said, you can’t talk about the history of learning games completely divorced from the history of games as a whole. The former is a part of the latter. Ideas, people and trends from non-learning games influence learning games, and vice versa. But maybe most fundamentally, the line between a learning game and a non-learning game isn’t always clear, as I’ll talk about in a moment. So even though game history broadly isn’t what this podcast is about, I’ll frequently make reference to events, trends and developments in the broader industry where that provides important context to what’s happening with learning games.
One more note about the historical approach. Even though the roughly six decades of history I’ll cover is a blink of the eye for humanity, it’s literally the entire history of digital games and the game industry, so a ton of evolution and change has taken place. The game industry, gaming hardware and even education itself looked very different when I was playing games in my elementary school computer lab in 1987 than any of those things do today. I also expect that some (maybe most?) of the listeners of this podcast weren’t alive in 1987, or at least if they were, weren’t old enough to experience sitting in front of a non-Internet connected beige box with a two-color display, swapping out floppy disks to load the next level.
In recognition of this, I’m going to devote more time setting the stage and providing that sort of historical context for older games than I do for more recent ones. I’m not going to assume, for example, that a listener knows what a mainframe is in the way I am going to assume that a listener knows what a smartphone is. If you are old enough to get the references, I hope you’ll indulge me in bringing the younger folks up to speed. Maybe you’ll even find it pleasantly nostalgic.
For these purposes, I’m going to pick a somewhat arbitrary cutoff of 2008 for a few reasons. First, that happens to be the year I got involved with learning games professionally, so I naturally start having a different perspective on games more as an industry insider than just as a player. But more importantly, I think it’s a good approximation of the point where the learning games industry – and the game industry more broadly – develop into more or less the forms we still have today. Without going into detail, I think there are six characteristics that make the industry essentially modern, all of which had either already emerged or were actively emerging by 2008:
1. We had the Internet, so games could be played and distributed online, including online multiplayer games;
2. By this point, most graphical games were made with 3D graphics in much the same way they still are (improvements in quality and performance notwithstanding), in contrast to earlier 2D, sprite-based games (or even earlier non-graphical, text-based games);
3. Commercial games, including learning games, were being sold and distributed through online marketplaces like Steam, the App Store, and game console storefronts, rather than just on physical media like cartridges and discs;
4. Smartphones were emerging as a gaming platform (with tablets coming just a little later);
5. With digital distribution and mobile devices, we saw the emergence of games-as-a-service business models for both learning and non-learning games: things like subscription-based games or freemium games with in-app purchases and DLC. This contrasts with the entire history of games before this point, when the overwhelming majority of games were games-as-a-product: something static that a publisher put in a box that the customer bought through a one-time purchase.
6. Schools – particularly American schools – were in the process of transitioning from earlier computer lab and classroom computer technology models to one-to-one computing models where each student has their own device.
In 2025 when this podcast is being recorded, all of this is still basically true. So, again, before my admittedly arbitrary 2008 cutoff, I’ll spend more time on context and table setting for the games I’ll talk about. After the cutoff, I’ll assume the listener has that context already.
That bring us to an issue I’ve been dancing around so far, which is what exactly I mean by “learning game.” I thought a lot about what term to use here when I was conceiving of the podcast, and I think it’s about more than semantics. For me, it’s about drawing the right circle around what we should properly consider if our goal is to understand the history of the intersection of digital games and learning. OK, that was pretty abstract, so let me try to explain by going over some of the terminology I rejected before deciding on “learning games”:
First, there are a number of terms that I just think are ill-defined, understood differently by different people and often have unhelpful connotations. The most glaring example is “edutainment.” For some people, this is a broad term they use to describe any game that is trying first and foremost to entertain but is also trying to educate. For others, it refers to a specific set of games like that, all released around the same time and featuring certain common design elements (and maybe some later games that are very similar to those games). For some people, “edutainment” is a neutral, descriptive term. For others, it carries connotations, usually negative ones. At any rate, it’s too ambiguous and loaded to be useful here.
Then we have a term like “educational games.” But at least as I understand the term, I think it’s too limiting. When I use the term “educational game,” among the things that I’m trying to capture is that the game was designed with education as a goal. There are many great educational games in this sense. We’ll talk about lots of them on the episodes to come.
But I think it would be doing both games and education a disservice to restrict the history to only games where education was an explicit goal. The reality is there are tons of games that are great for learning where the idea of the game supporting learning never crossed the minds of the people who made them. I’d argue that Minecraft is one of the best and most significant learning games of all time; and that by almost any standard the learning that Minecraft has enabled is far greater than even the most impactful “educational games.” And while Minecraft, from an early point in its history, was and is routinely and widely used and monetized in classrooms for explicitly educational purposes, the people who designed and built Minecraft didn’t do so with education in mind. They were just trying to make a fun game.
Both “learning game” and “educational game” are useful concepts to have if you want to understand the history, but “learning games” is a broader category than “educational games.” What I’m interested in, and what I’d argue is worth considering is you want to draw lessons from the history, is all the ways in which games facilitate learning, whether the people who made the game set out to facilitate learning or not. Games where education was a goal are an important part of this picture, but so are other types of games that facilitate learning: for example what folks refer to as “classroom games,” “serious games” and “games for impact;” but also games where education wasn’t part of the vision but that support meaningful learning nonetheless. Our understanding of the history of learning games – and the lessons we can draw from it – would be woefully incomplete if we didn’t consider Minecraft.
If you want a definition of “learning game” as I’m using it – and will throughout the podcast – it would be something like any game that is used by someone (including the player themselves) to educate a player about something outside the game.
I say “outside the game” to highlight one more important element that sets learning games apart from games generally. Most digital games teach the player at least something: namely how to play the game. This is obviously true when a game includes a tutorial, but even without a tutorial, most well-designed games are designed in a way that teaches the player how to play through the gameplay itself.
I, along with countless others, have written about how the opening level of Super Mario Bros. is a masterclass in game design, in part because of the ingenious way it introduces and teaches almost all the skills a player will need to succeed at Super Mario Bros., and does so through play alone. In fact, the techniques that Super Mario Bros. uses to accomplish this have strong parallels in educational theory, bearing a striking resemblance to something that the educational innovator Maria Montessori called “isolation of difficulty.” We’ll see parallels and even influences like this from outside learning games along the way, but our story is focused on games that educate about something beyond the game itself.
Alright, that’s the setup. Now let’s start the nickel tour.
As far as we know, play and playful learning have been part of what it means to be human from the very beginning. In fact, learning playfully isn’t an exclusively human thing. It’s one of the main ways in which many non-human animals learn: think about a kitten playfully stalking and pouncing on one of his littermates. Not only is that behavior adorable, it’s also deeply ingrained. And – here’s the first point I want to make about games and learning from the history – play has an important and unique role in preparing the kitten to hunt as an adult cat.
One of the most valuable things that games do for human learners is that they allow us to try, fail and learn in a safe environment. You can get absolutely owned in a Call of Duty multiplayer match an unlimited number of times and the only things that are going to get hurt are your ego and maybe your reputation. But you can only get fragged on a real battlefield one time. Play lets the kitten hone his hunting skills without any real consequences if he messes up. But the adult cat who fails to hunt successfully for too long starves.
At this point, we should distinguish play and playful learning in humans from games and gameplay. Not all play is gameplay: the imaginary play of child is a good example of this. Merely being playful isn’t enough to make a game. In addition to being playful, we generally only recognize something as a game if it has two other characteristics.
First, there has to be some structure, and that comes in the form of rules. The player or players have to be operating within some framework that says what is OK and not OK for them to do. If there’s more than one player, it also helps if they agree about what those rules are. Again, think about how this differs from children’s unstructured imaginary play, or other playful things we do as adults like good naturedly teasing a friend.
Second, there usually has to be a way for the player or players to win or lose the game. Another way to express this – and this is a very game-designery way to put it – is to say that the game has win and loss conditions or states; that is to say that the rules define certain conditions in which a player or players can be said to have won or lost the game. Yet a third way to express this is to say that for the players, games have goals. The players are trying to achieve a win condition, or at least avoid the loss conditions. Again, this contrasts with the imaginary play of children, which tends to lack goals, or have goals that change and shift. It’s also very different from the play of animals: we don’t really think of the kitten as having “won” when he successfully stalks his littermate. Often, the littermate doesn’t even know she’s being stalked and so doesn’t have a goal of her own like avoiding it.
So when did games with rules and goals first develop? We get some disputed evidence from around 5-7000 BCE of things that might be parts of board games. But the earliest undisputed archeological evidence we have of games is from around 3000 BCE where we have bone objects from multiple parts of the world that we believe were used as dice.
This is apropos of nothing, I just think it’s cool: many of these early dice were made from one specific bone, and this is one of those happy accidents that benefited early game designers. Humans and most other land vertebrates have a bone called the talus, which forms part of the ankle joint. In mammals, the bone is roughly tetrahedral in shape: sort of like a three-sided pyramid, so having four faces. Apparently if you toss the talus bone of a hoofed animal, it has roughly the same chance of falling with any of the four faces up. If you put a distinct mark on each face, you’ve got yourself a primitive four-sided die.
As I said, the evidence for these early dice games dates from around 3000 BCE, which is an interesting point in human history because it’s around the time the first societies were transitioning from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. It’s also around the time we get the first writing systems, and the first schools. For some more historical context, by this point you had agriculture; you had domestic animals like the cat, dog, horses and cattle (the last being fortuitous for early gamblers, as we’ve seen); people were starting to live in cities; and you had societies building early megastructures like Stonehenge.
You also had the beginnings of mathematics, with math used for things like dividing up land, trade and astronomy. I bring up math because math is pretty important to the development of games, and learning games, and you can see that in the dice example.
In order for it to occur to you to make dice, or to design a game involving dice, you have to have some understanding of chance and probability. If you’re going to invent a game that involves more than one die (which we see evidence for a little later in Ancient Greece), you have to have a more advanced understanding involving compound probability. People don’t start to develop formal, mathematical understanding of probability until much later -- the 16th Century CE -- but it’s interesting that at basically the same time as we first see evidence of formal mathematics, we see evidence of people using a rudimentary knowledge of probability to create games.
There are a couple other things I find interesting about dice being used in the first games. First, it means that the first games were what we call games of chance: games in which the success of the player is based exclusively or primarily on luck. The opposite of a game of chance, as you probably know, is a game of skill where success involves the player being good at something. Of course, many games involve both chance and skill elements, but outside of some childhood games and I guess some gambling games, we tend to find games that involve mostly chance and very little or no skill unrewarding. This is true of learning games, too, maybe even more so, and I don’t think it’s hard to see why. On a fundamental level, learning involves or is for the purpose of doing something well or better: getting knowledge, acquiring skill, cultivating virtue, and so on. Even though learning games can and do incorporate chance elements, it would be weird if a game was trying to help someone get better in a way that didn’t require the player to have or develop skill. So in part, I’m bookmarking this issue of skill and chance because we’ll come back to it throughout the series as we break down learning games.
Another interesting thing here is that just as designing dice games involves an understanding of probability, the games themselves are often great ways to show probability in action. Playing even a simple game of chance like Candyland makes certain fundamental concepts in probability very real in a way that an abstract discussion can’t, and certainly can’t for young children who aren’t ready to wrestle with those concepts in the abstract. So, even though we don’t have any evidence of this, I like to think that even the first dice games were effective probability learning games.
Back to the story. We first see evidence of board games – all of which were also dice games – from Egypt and the Near East from 2000 – 3000 BCE. Unlike the very earliest dice games, we even know how some of these games were played, sometimes because we can reconstruct the rules from artifacts, sometimes because we can infer them from games descended from them that we still play or know the rules of from later texts. For example, in China around 2500 BCE, we see the origin of the game Go, which is the oldest game we know of that has been continuously played up to the present day.
Many of the early boardgames we know of like Go, Senet, Hounds and Jackals and The Game of Ur would fall under the genre we call strategy games. Even though these games involve chance elements, the rulesets are complex and usually math-based. Like their modern descendants, these games are sophisticated enough that they require strategic thinking to play well, and different players can use different strategies to win and counteract their opponents’ strategies. So while we think these games originally developed for entertainment, we start to see evidence in surviving texts of people discussing strategy in much the same way modern chess theorists discuss openings. And, more importantly for our discussion, we see evidence of these games being used as learning games to train strategic thinking.
By around 2000 BCE, we have evidence of competitive sports like running, wrestling and archery. From around 1400 BCE, there’s evidence of sports involving a ball being played in the New World, giving rise to the genre of games my non-sportsfan friends refer to as “sportsball.” Now, there’s evidence of people engaging in some of these activities much earlier: we have cave paintings from 15,000 years ago that show people running, swimming and wrestling. But we think these activities served either ritualistic functions or as what we would call athletic or military training. But from around 2000 BCE, we see athletic activities happening competitively (often in addition to ceremonially) and I think that’s significant in the development of learning games.
Once you have competitive sports, you have the minimum set of characteristics I mentioned before that make something an educational game. You’ve got rules, like “everybody has to stand this far from the archery target” or “everybody in the race starts at the same time and runs the same distance.” And since you’re competitive, you’ve got win conditions like “closest to the bullseye wins” or “first across the finish line wins.” And to the extent these games were designed to serve an educational or training purpose – like preparing archers for actual combat – well, you’ve got the first thing I would say qualifies as an educational game: a game that’s explicitly for learning or training, rather than a game that developed for entertainment and later was repurposed for educational use.
Moving on, starting in the first millennium BCE, the Greeks and Romans played games that we would recognize today like Tic-Tac-Toe, and in Greece in the 700s BCE we have the earliest Olympic Games. The earliest forms of chess originate in India around 600 CE. Early tile-based games develop in China around the same time. Modern checkers develops in France in the 1100s and the first paper playing cards, which develop from the earlier game tiles, appear in China in the late 1200s. They make it to Europe later, and by the 1500s we have more or less the modern suits. Backgammon emerges from earlier games in England and Scotland in the 1600s. Miniature war gaming develops in the late 1700s, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we get many card games we still play, or play the direct descendants of.
In the mid-19th Century, we see the launch of the modern commercial game industry through board games like Parchisi and Snakes and Ladders, which are Westernized versions of earlier games from the Indian subcontinent. The Nintendo company we know today famously starts as a manufacturer of traditional Japanese playing cards in the late 19th Century. The 19th Century is also when we see many Western sports – for example the many forms of football – take on their modern forms, usually as a result of people developing and agreeing on a standard, official set of rules for what were originally folk games. What we call roleplaying games – like Dungeons and Dragons -- are a mid-20th Century development coming out of miniature wargaming.
I’ll say more about the early days of computer games starting in Episode 3 when I talk about the first digital learning games, but to round out the general games history timeline, I want to mention a few early milestones in the evolution of digital games, just so we’ve got some markers on the timeline as a reference point when we come to those early digital learning games.
Though there are examples of videogames going back to the early 1950s, these are essentially tech demos for early human-computer interaction, not something anyone would play for fun. The first computer game developed purely for entertainment purpose is generally thought to be 1958’s Tennis for Two. Tennis for Two might not be the catchiest title, but its admirably descriptive: Tennis for Two is a two-player tennis simulation. It was developed by a physicist named William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York, and you played it on an oscilloscope, so not only was Tennis for Two the first video game, it also established several long-running trends in the game industry, like the sports genre and nerds acting as amateur game developers in their spare time.
Since an oscilloscope is a kind of analog computer, Tennis for Two doesn’t technically qualify as the first digital game, even if it is the first videogame. You have to wait a few more years until 1962 and a game called Spacewar! – that’s “spacewar” followed by an exclamation mark -- for that. Spacewar! is pretty remarkable for something so early in the history of videogames. It’s a two-player spaceship combat game that takes place in the gravity well of a star and it includes an early version of what we would now call a physics engine, so you can do things like use the star’s gravity to slingshot your ship around the screen at high speed. And since it’s not just a rehash of a real-world game in digital form, it’s also the first original videogame.
Spacewar! was developed by students at MIT for the PDP-1 microcomputer, an early general-purpose computer that was “micro” in the sense that it was only about the size of a bookshelf, rather than an entire room. The PDP-1 wasn’t widely available outside universities and only a few dozen were ever made. But this was a huge advancement over earlier computers, which were mostly one-off designs. Because the PDP-1 was a standard design, and was used in multiple places, it became possible to create software that could be shared. This makes Spacewar! the first videogame to gain wide distribution, and eventually the first videogame to be ported to multiple platforms. In fact, you can play implementations of Spacewar! online today.
Both Tennis for Two and Spacewar! are what we would today call amateur games or hobbyist games: games made by people for the fun of it and shared informally with other enthusiasts. These and other early titles weren’t commercial games, or games that someone pays to play. You have to wait almost ten more years for that and a game called Galaxy Game. Galaxy Game came onto the scene in 1971 and, gameplay-wise, it’s a lightly modified version of Spacewar! running on a newer version of the PDP computer. What made Galaxy Game unique was that its creators hooked the PDP up to a monitor and controller, put them in a wooden cabinet, added seats, put in a coin slot and charged people ten cents per game. This makes Galaxy Game the first coin-operated game and the game that, along with a 1971 singleplayer Spacewar!-derived game called Computer Space, launched the commercial videogame industry. Computer Space, by the way, was developed by two guys named Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney who would go on to found a little game company called Atari. And I can’t resist noting that this early parade of Spacewar! clones and derivatives lends some support to the criticism that there aren’t a lot of new ideas in the videogame industry.
After this, you don’t have to wait too long for another milestone: the first in-home video games. Remember, this is a time before having a general-purpose computer in your office, let alone your home, was commonplace, or even really possible. So the earliest in-home video gaming devices were consoles, beginning with 1972’s Magnavox Odyssey.
The Odyssey is a fascinating device. Like the consoles of today, it connected to a TV. But it had an incredibly limited set of capabilities, even relative to the early videogames we’ve already heard about that ran on microcomputers. This is a little hard to describe verbally, but I’ll try to paint a picture:
The Odyssey could display only four monochromatic graphical objects. To be clear, that’s four specific objects, not four different types of objects: three squares (two controlled by the players, one by the system) and one line. That was the entire universe of graphical building blocks you could make a game from. So what could you do? Well, you could, for example, have two dots represent the players, one dot represent the ball, the line represent the net and have yourself a game of tennis. And, in fact, one of the Odyssey’s bundled titles was Table Tennis. [Sigh] We’re recycling the same ideas already yet again.
As you can imagine, this doesn’t make for an especially compelling graphical experience. Magnavox knew this, so they came up with an innovative solution. Many games came bundled with a transparent plastic overlay that you literally attached to your TV screen. The overlays were illustrated with static images that provided a backdrop – or I guess technically a foredrop -- for the dots and line to be moving on, so in a football game the overlay might have an image of the field, or in a geography quiz – hey, that’s a learning game!, of which the Odyssey had several – it might have a map.
Another limitation was that other than the ability to respond to user input and move the one system-controlled rectangle around, the console could do absolutely nothing else computationally, including, notably, implement game logic. So, for instance, there was no way for a game to have a timer, or to keep sco re, or to give the user information, or to implement win and loss conditions, for that matter. All of that was handled by the players outside of the game. So in Odyssey Table Tennis, it was up to the players to keep track of points and determine when one of them got enough to win, which isn’t any different from real-world table tennis if you think about it. To get around these limitation, most games came with bundled physical objects like dice and cards. For any instructional designers listening, that means the Odyssey play experience blended the use of digital and physical manipulatives.
In spite of all the weirdness, the Odyssey had a surprising number of things in common with later consoles, including things we still see today. There were controllers, albeit really funky ones by later standards where you controlled the x- and y-axis movement of the players with dials. Games came on cartridges, though they worked differently than the ROM cartridges of later consoles. There was even a light gun accessory, a la the later Nintendo Zapper. If I squint, the design even gives me some vaguely PS3-in-horizontal-orientation vibes.
The Odyssey ultimately had a 28-game library, with a ton of those titles bundled with the console, and sold for a hundred bucks, which doesn’t seem too bad until you adjust for inflation, making the cost about $750 in 2025 dollars, or $187.50 per graphical object. Perhaps because of this not-so-great price-to-value ratio, the Odyssey isn’t considered a commercial success. Still, it sold about 350,000 units and got a couple of sequels (the Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 2) before being discontinued in 1974. And it’s worth noting that some of the Odyssey’s innovations – especially the removable cartridges and games you could buy separately from the console – weren’t shared by other devices that came out around the same time or even years later: Atari’s first home console, which didn’t come out for three more years, played only the one built-in game that gave it its name: Home Pong. It’s not until the second generation of home consoles at the end of the 70s that those features become mainstream. The second generation is when we see the first commercially successful home consoles, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, pour one out for the Odyssey, launcher of the home videogame industry.
So, to quickly review the whole timeline: people have been playing as long as there have been people. We’ve been playing games for at least 5,000 years and have been playing games to learn for probably just as long. The first educational games – in the sense of games developed explicitly for educational purposes -- were probably sports that derived from earlier athletic rituals and served a military training function, and we have evidence of those from about 4,000 years ago. What we would think of as commercial games debut in the mid-19th Century in the form of board games. Videogames come around in the late 1950s and the first commercial video games, in the form of arcade games, appear in the early 1970s, followed very shortly thereafter by the first generation of home video games.
That’s it for our nickle tour, and for the first episode. Next time, we’ll talk about two non-digital learning games, both because they’re interesting in their own right, but also because I think discussing non-digital games is a great way to introduce the concepts we’ll be using to deconstruct and analyze digital learning games throughout the series. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.