Russ Frushtick
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Russ Frushtick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So there's a little bit of debate, but the general consensus is that the very first video game was called Tennis for Two. It came out in 1958, and if you wanted to run it in your home, you couldn't because it basically needed... nuclear-powered computers to run it.
A guy who created it was named William Higginbottom, and he actually used the computers in his nuclear power plant to engineer and create this piece of software just for fun. They would have an annual event where they would basically invite people from the public to come into the plant and see what they were working on.
And just as a demonstration of their computers, he created this game called Tennis for Two.
It's kind of great, surprisingly, for being the very first video game. It's a very complicated physics-based recreation of tennis. You actually see the ball bouncing realistically from left to right. It's much more involved than Pong, which I'm sure everyone is more familiar with. But yeah, it was pretty amazing and is still very playable today if you manage to find a machine that can run it.
I believe the last time that I played it was at the Museum of the Moving Image, which is in Queens, New York. They had a version of Tennis for Two that you could actually play.
Well, I mean, the big milestones that people think of are probably the jump from 2D to 3D. So in the mid 90s, you know, you had the original Super Mario Brothers and then Super Mario 64 comes out. And that's the first time you see that game in three dimensions. So that was a pretty big leap.
And then obviously these days, you know, you mentioned the difference between Tennis for Two and Fortnite, for example, is night and day. It's amazing the level of fidelity and realism that you could find in video games today. But you're right. A lot of it is just small incremental improvements year after year after year.
Is it purposeful to make a game addicting? Yes. My general attitude is that I think games are made to be fun and as fun as possible. And frequently, to create something that is as fun as possible, you want to make something that someone does not want to put down, does not want to stop playing.
And obviously, people with impulse control issues might play way too much, spend all their days playing the same game over and over and over again. That's not ideal. But certainly in a capitalist society where people are trying to make money selling video games, that is somewhat of the end goal, right? Is to just get people playing the game a lot, a lot, a lot.
Well, you have gravity, which is a key component to amusement parks back then. Some of the earliest amusement parks were just cars that were placed on tracks and just kind of shoved down a hill at a very fast speed. I've early examples of some roller coasters that were looping roller coasters without electricity, which is about as dangerous and horrifying as you can imagine.
And yet people were just pushing the boundaries of that. So there's always been a desire, I think, to kind of cheat death in a somewhat safe way. But looking at these photos, not that safe.
Absolutely. Yeah. Disneyland, when it opened, was a major shift in terms of how people kind of approach theme parks, amusement parks. Ironically, even though it ended up being an enormous success, the first day of Disneyland was a total disaster. They handed out tickets for people to come.
They sold tickets and all of the tickets that they sold ended up getting counterfeited and scalped such that they were about four or five times more tickets than could actually be allowed in the park. which resulted in giant traffic lineups for miles on end.
And then when people came to the park, it was an extraordinarily hot day that first day at Disneyland, and people's shoes were actually melting into the asphalt because it hadn't fully set yet. And there was a plumbing strike. And the plumbing was not functioning. So people looking to get water to kind of cool down were totally out of luck. So it was a very unlucky day.
But obviously, we know Disney came out OK in the long run.
I mean, there were pretty spectacular amusement parks before Disneyland. You know, we look to Luna Park and Coney Island obviously had their heyday in the early 1900s. And they were astonishing. I mean, just enormous light shows and everything. various rides of complexity. People would really come from all around to experience that.
I think later on, as the interest in amusement parks kind of waned, places like Coney Island did develop a seedier reputation. But when they first started, they were really just the height of entertainment for people.
Yes. So there's a place called Wonderland Kalkar in Germany. This is an amusement park you can go to today. It's open. And it is set in a nuclear power plant
not an active one it is off but it was actually built as a nuclear power plant but never functioned because germany pulled the plug literally right after it was built so you have the giant cooling towers you have everything you would need for a nuclear power plant but inside of it is this wild amusement park there's actually a giant swing within the cooling towers so if you've ever wanted to experience that uh there's really only one place in the world you can do that
It seems kind of weird, strange, odd. So there's a small town in Spain that actually hosts an annual baby jumping festival. It is as weird as it sounds, but it is a traditional festival. And the idea is that in order to ensure the health and luck of newborn babies, The parents of the town will place their children on the street in the middle of the street. They clear it out.
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