The Fun Begins 50 Years Ago: Behind The (Arguably) First Video Game

October 25, 2008 by Chapree

In general, most of us usually able to relate video games history back to Pong - released in 1972, as the first ever video game we ever heard. Although there were already couple of video games before Pong, it is still the first popular video game and pretty much brought us where we are now. But, do you know video games may have been invented like 14 years before Pong?

$Brookhaven National Labotary\'s Tennis for Two$
Tennis for Two (circled) as it was in 1958.
Photo credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory via MSNBC

Behold the “Tennis for Two“, created by William Higinbotham, a nuclear physict at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, USA. Developed in 1958 as part of the display for the lab’s visitor day, the game ran on an analog computer. Unfortunately, the original game were only showed to public twice and was then disassembled.

The game was then recreated by a team of Brookhaven’s researchers - Scott Coburn, Gene Von Achen and Peter Takacs, once again for the lab’s 50th anniversary in 1997. Today, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the game, the team booted up the game once again and displayed it to the public for couple of hours at the lab. Meanwhile, you can download the game simulator HERE to play at the comfort of your (modern) PCs.

You can even recreate the legendary game back home, provided you know your way around circuits and have access to an oscilloscope. Instructions available HERE.

According to the history, Higinbotham didn’t patented the game since he didn’t see any financial gain as the patents would be owned by federal government themselves. Secondly, he said that all the circuitry was based on instructions contained inside the analog computer’s own manual book. So, he believe there are nothing new about his creation. Little did he know what happened after five decades has passed… .

Of course, as I pointed out in the post title above, Tennis for Two wasn’t exactly the first video game. Technically, the output are ran through an oscilloscaope which is not a video output. Second, there is a tic-tac-toe like game called OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) developed by Alexander S. Douglas for University of Cambrigde’s EDSAC in 1952, six years before Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two.

OXO on EDSAC Emulator
OXO - Another contender for the first video game ever. Shown here running on EDSAC emulator in a Mac OS X machine.
Photo taken from Wikipedia

OXO has it’s own dispute as well. The game was developed on a computer belongs to Cambridge exclusively, so the machine is the only one in this world. With that, only the privilege few has access to it. As per Tennis for Two, nowadays you can play OXO on an EDSAC emulator HERE.

A lot of things have changed after 50 years. We now got complex and interactive video games with the help of never ending graphic capability of PCs, motion sensor capabilities on Wii, huge online connectivity on Xbox 360 and complex processing power of PlayStation 3. One must knew the past to appreciate the present and look up to the future.