- In a courtroom in the mid-1970s, a handful of companies fought tooth and nail to define what was the first video game.
Magnavox put out a machine a few short years prior which could connect to an everyday television set and play rudimentary games on it, like tennis.
Now, all these other companies were putting out their own machines, like Pong, that seemed to work exactly the same way and play nearly the same game. From their perspective, these copycats were stealing a technology that Magnavox patented and owned.
If they had their way, Magnavox wouldn’t just have copyright over this particular game. They would have ownership of video games as a whole. Anyone who wanted to put out a video game, of any kind, ever, would have to go through them.
To Atari, Bally, and all the other companies being sued, this was ridiculous. First of all, the Magnavox Odyssey went out to wide release after the first units of Pong had been fully completed and sent out to market. So the idea that they had copied Magnavox’s game didn’t seem to add up.
But more importantly, did Magnavox really have the first video game?
The defense managed to dig up a whole host of examples of what could be video games created decades before, citing them as prior art. If just one of these could be recognized as the first video game, rather than the Magnavox Odyssey, it could turn the tide of the entire case.
- The first contender they managed to find traced back all the way to 1947.
The Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device played a simple accuracy-based war game.
The targets were disconnected from the underlying electronics completely, represented using decals on top of the device itself. The player adjusted the dials and buttons on the side to line up the "blast" with wherever the decals are placed, under a 30-second time limit.
Play a recreation of the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device in your browser
Was this the first video game?
The courts said no.
The device ran entirely on analog electronics, functionally similar to a radar display. The win-lose condition of the game came from the connection between the dot and the decals on top. Without the decals, there would be no game at all.
Perhaps more importantly, the device was never mass produced. In fact, its only lasting impact at all was its patent, discussed in this court case. - A necessary part of the agreed-upon definition was that a video game had to be computerized to some extent.
Under this definition, the history of video games began with the earliest computers.
Computers were forged in war, built to break enemy codes with Alan Turing’s Enigma Machine. It wasn’t long after the war’s end that British engineers began to tinker with running games on machines drawing from Turing’s designs.
These early computerized games weren’t meant for entertainment. They were typically tests of artificial intelligence, experiments to see if a computer could be taught to beat a human in traditional games. - The game of Nim, played by Nimatron, a rudimentary machine shown at the 1939–40 World's Fair.
- Tic-tac-toe, with Bertie the Brain, built by Josef Kates in Toronto, used lightbulbs shaped like X’s and O’s for its visual display.
- Nim again, this time represented with an array of light bulbs, on the Nimrod Digital Computer shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Read a reproduction of Nimrod's pamphlet, given out by Ferranti at the festival.
- Checkers, programmed by Christopher Strachey, was originally built for the Pilot ACE- although the rudimentary machine was never actually able to run it.
- It took the Ferranti Mark I at the University of Manchester, from the same electronics company behind Nimrod, for Strachey’s program to run.
Titled A Game of Draughts, Strachey gave us what is perhaps the first video game screenshot.
As well as the first recorded electronic music, around the same time.
- As Strachey worked on Draughts, Dietrich Prinz and Alan Turing also got a version of chess to run on the same machine, although Mate-In-Two was played entirely through text, with no visual component.
- The University of Cambridge’s EDSAC computer had at least two games running on it.
Tic-tac-toe, in the form of Sandy Douglas’s Game of Naughts and Crosses, or later simply OXO, ran on the machine’s electronic screen.
Stanley Gill made Sheep and Gates, which could be the first video game not to be based on a pre-existing board game. Its description is somewhat unclear, but it displayed a dot, representing a sheep, going through one of two holes in a line, representing gates. - There were early computers over in the United States as well.
Developed by a laboratory at MIT for the US Navy, Project Whirlwind was completed only months after the Ferranti Mark I. The machine was built for physics simulations to help train Navy officers.
One such physics simulation came from Charles Adams and a group of his students at MIT, a recreation of a bouncing ball.
In its original form, the Whirlwind Bouncing Ball was nothing more than a simulation, showing a side view of a ball bouncing several times across the screen.
There was no game involved until years later, when one of the students made a modification.
A line shot across the screen, representing the floor, with a small gap representing a hole. This gave the player an objective, to set up the variables in the physics simulation so that the ball falls into the hole.
The game didn’t take very long to win, and wasn’t the most fun game in the world, but it was the first computer game with visuals to update in real time.
It’s not clear what year the game modification was added. If it was before Stanley Gill’s Sheep and Gates, then it would also be the first original video game.Play a recreation of the Whirlwind Bouncing Ball in your browser
- A few years later, the University of Michigan came up with a game with more advanced physics, with William George Brown and Ted Lewis’s simulation of pool.
The MIDSAC computer version of pool was probably the first game to drop frames, slowing down noticeably when enough of the balls were moving at once, although reports from the time were less annoyed at the slowdown and more interested that the speed of gameplay could be manipulated.
- The next important game came out of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Every fall, the laboratory held visitor days where the public could come in and tour the laboratory.
William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist who worked at the laboratory, wanted to make something “with action,” that would convince the public that what they were doing at the laboratory had relevance for society.
His idea came from an instruction booklet for the lab’s analog computer, which had examples of various physics simulations the computer could run; specifically, one of a bouncing ball. It’s unlikely this had any direct connection to the Whirlwind Bouncing Ball, but it might have been similar.
To Higinbotham, the ball suggested a ball game, which gave him the idea to make a version of tennis. Robert Dvorak put the game together, and Tennis For Two was set up for three days for visitors at the lab to play.
Even though there wasn’t much going on in the way of mechanics, the visitors loved it, lining up for a turn to play.Play a recreation of Tennis For Two in your browser
The fact that it was For Two made it notable; older conversions of two-player games like tic-tac-toe and checkers were typically played against a computer rather than another human.
The tennis gameplay was eerily similar to the video games that would dominate arcades years later, but at the end of the exhibition, it was dismantled and completely forgotten about. - That is, until almost 20 years later, when it was dug up by lawyers to prove Magnavox wrong.
Here was a game that played nearly the same as Pong or Magnavox’s Tennis, on similar hardware, created and put to use nearly a decade before.
Surely, this was the first video game?
But Tennis For Two wasn’t taken seriously, by its creators or by anyone else, originally, as anything other than a fun experiment.
Really, depending on your definition, any of these games could be considered the first video game.
But they were not influential. Most of them were unrelated to each other and to any future video games. As such, these examples are best thought of as a part of video game pre-history than its actual history.
The history of video games really begins with Spacewar!