Cricket
Cricket was one of the earliest sports simulation games, developed by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester in 1951. It was a simplified version of cricket, with only two players on each team and a fixed number of balls per over. The game was played on a 10×10 grid, and the players used the keyboard to control their batsmen. The game was very basic, but it was a significant milestone in the development of sports simulation games.
Here are some more details about Cricket:
- It was written in FORTRAN, a programming language that was popular at the time.
- It was played on a mainframe computer, which was a very expensive piece of equipment in the 1950s.
- It was only available to students and staff at the University of Manchester.
- It was not very popular, but it is considered to be a pioneering work in the field of sports simulation games.
Cricket was followed by a number of other early sports simulation games, including Tennis for Two (1958), Spacewar! (1962), and Grand Prix (1968). These games helped to lay the foundation for the modern sports simulation genre, which includes games like FIFA, Madden NFL, and NBA 2K.