First video game
Encyclopedia
There are numerous debates over who created the first video game, with the answer depending largely on how video games are defined. The evolution of video games represents a tangled web of several different industries, including scientific
, computer
, arcade
, and consumer electronics
.
The "video" in "video game" traditionally refers to a raster
display device. However, with the popular catch phrase
use of the term "video game", the term now implies all display types, formats, and platforms.
Historians have also sought to bypass the issue by instead using the more inclusive "digital games" descriptive. However, this term still leaves out the earlier analog-based computer
games.
and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube
. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.
, a British mathematician, developed a theoretical computer chess program as an example of machine intelligence. In 1947, Turing wrote the theory for a program to play chess. His colleague Dietrich Prinz wrote it as the first limited program of chess for Manchester University's Ferranti Mark I
. The program, however, was only capable of computing "mate-in-two" problems and was not powerful enough to play a full game.
computer, created by Ferranti, was presented at the Festival of Britain
. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of Nim; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.
made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display. OXO
, also known as Noughts and Crosses, is a version of tic-tac-toe
for the EDSAC
computer at the University of Cambridge
. It was designed for the world's first stored-program computer, and used a rotary telephone controller for game control.
In 1958, William Higinbotham
made an interactive computer game named Tennis for Two
for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's
annual visitor's day. This display, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to promote atomic
power, and used an analog computer
and the vector display
system of an oscilloscope
.
experimental computer at MIT. These included Mouse in the Maze and Tic-Tac-Toe. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini. A virtual mouse represented by a dot was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. Tic-Tac-Toe used the light pen as well to play a simple game of naughts and crosses against the computer.
, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on a DEC
PDP-1
mini-computer which also used a vector display system. The game, generally considered the first Shooter game
, spread to several of the early mini-computer installations, and reportedly was used as a smoke test
by DEC technicians on new PDP-1 systems before shipping, since it was the only available program that exercised every aspect of the hardware. Russell has been quoted as saying that the aspect of the game that he was most pleased with was the number of other programmers it inspired to write their own games.
under the name Odyssey
. It was the first home video game console
.
, at Stanford University
using a DEC PDP-11/20 computer; only one unit was ever built (although it was later adapted to run up to eight games at once).
by Nolan Bushnell
and Ted Dabney
was released, which was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind, predating the Odyssey by six months). Both games were variations on the vector display 1961 Spacewar!; however, Bushnell and Dabney's used an actual video display by having an actual television set in the cabinet.
, also by Bushnell and Dabney, used the same television set design as Computer Space, and was not released until 1972 – a year after Computer Space.
equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. The previous computer games did not use a video display, so did not qualify as such in the courts.
Game emulation
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
, computer
Computer industry
Computer industry is a collective term used to describe the whole range of businesses involved in developing computer software, designing computer hardware and computer networking infrastructures, the manufacture of computer components and the provision of information technology services.-See...
, arcade
Arcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...
, and consumer electronics
Consumer electronics
Consumer electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, most often in entertainment, communications and office productivity. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver...
.
The "video" in "video game" traditionally refers to a raster
Raster graphics
In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium...
display device. However, with the popular catch phrase
Catch phrase
A catchphrase is a phrase or expression recognized by its repeated utterance. Such phrases often originate in popular culture and in the arts, and typically spread through a variety of mass media , as well as word of mouth...
use of the term "video game", the term now implies all display types, formats, and platforms.
Historians have also sought to bypass the issue by instead using the more inclusive "digital games" descriptive. However, this term still leaves out the earlier analog-based computer
Analog computer
An analog computer is a form of computer that uses the continuously-changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved...
games.
History
The history of video games is filled with events and earlier technology that paved the way for the advent of video games. It also includes games that represent direct steps in the evolution of computerized gaming, and lastly the development and release of video games themselves.1947: Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device
The earliest known interactive electronic game was by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.
Thomas Toliver Goldsmith, Jr. was an American television pioneer, the co-inventor of the first arcade game to use a cathode ray tube, and a professor of physics at Furman University.-Biography:...
and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube
Cathode ray tube
The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...
. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.
1947–1958: Chess
Alan TuringAlan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
, a British mathematician, developed a theoretical computer chess program as an example of machine intelligence. In 1947, Turing wrote the theory for a program to play chess. His colleague Dietrich Prinz wrote it as the first limited program of chess for Manchester University's Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer...
. The program, however, was only capable of computing "mate-in-two" problems and was not powerful enough to play a full game.
1951: Nim
On May 5, 1951, the NIMRODNimrod (computing)
The Nimrod was a special purpose computer that played the game of Nim, designed and built by Ferranti and displayed at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. Later, when the Festival ended, the computer was shown in Berlin...
computer, created by Ferranti, was presented at the Festival of Britain
Festival of Britain
The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition in Britain in the summer of 1951. It was organised by the government to give Britons a feeling of recovery in the aftermath of war and to promote good quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities. The Festival's centrepiece was in...
. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of Nim; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.
1952: OXO / Noughts and Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe)
In 1952, Alexander S. DouglasA.S. Douglas
Professor Alexander "Sandy" Shafto Douglas CBE was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical Computer game OXO a tic-tac-toe computer game in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.Douglas died in sleep on April 29, 2010, from...
made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display. OXO
OXO
OXO was a computer game written for the EDSAC computer in 1952, an implementation of the game known as Noughts and Crosses in the UK, or tic-tac-toe in the United States. It was written by Alexander S. Douglas as an illustration for his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction for the University...
, also known as Noughts and Crosses, is a version of tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe
Tic-tac-toe, also called wick wack woe and noughts and crosses , is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The X player usually goes first...
for the EDSAC
EDSAC
Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator was an early British computer. The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England...
computer at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
. It was designed for the world's first stored-program computer, and used a rotary telephone controller for game control.
1958: Tennis for Two
William Higinbotham
William A. Higginbotham , an American physicist, is credited with creating one of the first computer games, Tennis for Two. Like Pong, it is a portrait of a game of tennis or ping-pong, but featured very different game mechanics that have no resemblance to the later game...
made an interactive computer game named Tennis for Two
Tennis for Two
Tennis for Two was a game developed in 1958 on an analog computer, which simulates a game of tennis or ping pong on an oscilloscope. Created by American physicist William Higinbotham, it is important in the history of video games as one of the first electronic games to use a graphical...
for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base...
annual visitor's day. This display, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to promote atomic
Nuclear power
Nuclear power is the use of sustained nuclear fission to generate heat and electricity. Nuclear power plants provide about 6% of the world's energy and 13–14% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for about 50% of nuclear generated electricity...
power, and used an analog computer
Analog computer
An analog computer is a form of computer that uses the continuously-changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved...
and the vector display
Vector graphics
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
system of an oscilloscope
Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope is a type of electronic test instrument that allows observation of constantly varying signal voltages, usually as a two-dimensional graph of one or more electrical potential differences using the vertical or 'Y' axis, plotted as a function of time,...
.
1959: Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe
In 1959–1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0TX-0
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo , was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was built in 1955 and went online in 1956 and was used continually through the...
experimental computer at MIT. These included Mouse in the Maze and Tic-Tac-Toe. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini. A virtual mouse represented by a dot was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. Tic-Tac-Toe used the light pen as well to play a simple game of naughts and crosses against the computer.
1961: Spacewar!
In 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve RussellSteve Russell
Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1...
, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on a DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
PDP-1
PDP-1
The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
mini-computer which also used a vector display system. The game, generally considered the first Shooter game
Shooter game
Shooter games are a sub-genre of action game, which often test the player's speed and reaction time. It includes many subgenres that have the commonality of focusing "on the actions of the avatar using some sort of weapon. Usually this weapon is a gun, or some other long-range weapon". A common...
, spread to several of the early mini-computer installations, and reportedly was used as a smoke test
Smoke test
Smoke testing refers to physical tests made to closed systems of pipes to test for leaks. By metaphorical extension, the term is also used for the first test made after assembly or repairs to a system, to provide some assurance that the system under test will not catastrophically fail...
by DEC technicians on new PDP-1 systems before shipping, since it was the only available program that exercised every aspect of the hardware. Russell has been quoted as saying that the aspect of the game that he was most pleased with was the number of other programmers it inspired to write their own games.
1966: Odyssey
In 1966, Ralph Baer resumed work on an initial idea he had in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. In May 1967, Baer and an associate created the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal – i.e. a "video" game. The "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was released in May 1972 by MagnavoxMagnavox
Magnavox is a US electronics company founded by Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen, who invented the moving-coil loudspeaker in 1915 at their lab in Napa, California. They formed Magnavox in 1917 in order to market their inventions....
under the name Odyssey
Magnavox Odyssey
The Magnavox Odyssey is the world's first home video game console. It was first demonstrated on May 24, 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years....
. It was the first home video game console
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
.
1971: Galaxy Game
In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed the first coin-operated computer game, Galaxy GameGalaxy Game
Galaxy Game is the earliest known coin-operated computer or video game. It was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game...
, at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
using a DEC PDP-11/20 computer; only one unit was ever built (although it was later adapted to run up to eight games at once).
1971: Computer Space
Two months after Galaxy Game's installation, Computer SpaceComputer Space
Computer Space is a video arcade game released in November 1971 by Nutting Associates. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would both later found Atari, Inc., it is generally accepted that it was the world's first commercially sold coin-operated video game — and indeed, the first...
by Nolan Bushnell
Nolan Bushnell
Nolan K. Bushnell is an American engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari, Inc and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain...
and Ted Dabney
Ted Dabney
Ted Dabney is the often uncredited co-founder of Syzygy and Atari. While working at Ampex Ted met Nolan Bushnell and the two jointly created Syzygy with their first product being Computer Space which was manufactured and sold by Nutting Associates...
was released, which was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind, predating the Odyssey by six months). Both games were variations on the vector display 1961 Spacewar!; however, Bushnell and Dabney's used an actual video display by having an actual television set in the cabinet.
1972: Pong
PongPong
Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games, and is a tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. While other arcade video games such as Computer Space came before it, Pong was one of the first video games to reach mainstream popularity...
, also by Bushnell and Dabney, used the same television set design as Computer Space, and was not released until 1972 – a year after Computer Space.
Controversy and lawsuits
Baer was involved in court battles over patents that spanned the 1970s and 1980s. These trials defined a video game as an apparatus that displays games by manipulating the video display signal of the rasterRaster graphics
In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium...
equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. The previous computer games did not use a video display, so did not qualify as such in the courts.
See also
- History of video gamesHistory of video gamesThe history of video games goes as far back as the 1940s, when in 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a "cathode ray tube amusement device." Video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and...
- History of video game consoles (first generation)History of video game consoles (first generation)The first generation of video game consoles lasted from 1972, with the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, until 1977, when "pong"-style console manufacturers left the market en masse due to the introduction and success of microprocessor-based consoles....
- History of video game companies
External links
Research- Ralph H. Baer Papers, 1943–1953, 1966–1972, 2006 – Ralph Baer's prototypes and documentation housed at the Smithsonian Lemelson Center.
- pong-story.com
- Classic Gaming Expo 2000: Baer Describes the Birth of Videogames
- Videogames Turn 40 at 1UP.com.
Game emulation