The reason why William Higinbotham created Tennis For Two is even more interesting than the game itself. He created it to provide bored visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory with something entertaining to do.
After realizing that Brookhaven’s computers could calculate ballistic missile trajectories, Higinbotham used this feature to form his game. Instead of calculating a missile trajectory, Higinbotham used the computers to display the path of a ball on a tennis court instead. By using an oscilloscope he was also able to display the moving ball with a realistic velocity.
When the ball hit the ground its path would be reversed. If the ball hit the net its velocity would slow down and bounce back. Players could control the ball using an analog aluminium controller. Clicking a button would hit the ball (which would produce a sound) and using the knob would control the ball’s angle.
Although the device was designed in about two hours, it took three weeks to assemble with the help of Robert V. Dvorak. The game’s circuitry took up about the space of a microwave oven.
It’s important not to confuse Tennis For Two with the game Pong that was created in 1972. Tennis For Two showed only the side of the tennis court, while Pong showed a top down view as well as the player paddles.
Tennis For Two was first shown on October the 18th, 1958 where hundreds of visitors lined up to play. An upgraded version of the game was created in the following year because the game had been such a hit.
Tennis For Two is arguably one of the most important games ever created. Unlike OXO, which was created for a thesis, Tennis For Two was created for pure entertainment. Tennis For Two showed the world that even a physicist could use a computer to create a fun game that served no educational purpose. This game would go on to inspire people all over the world to experiment with game development. A handful of these people would just happen to be graduate students at MIT…
1959-1961
During this time period a few more video games were created on a TX-0 machine at MIT. One of these games was called Mouse in the Maze. It allowed players to place walls and cheese in a virtual room by using a light pen. A light pen was an ancient peripheral that would allow users to interact with computer displays like you would with a pen on paper. Once the Maze was complete the mouse would be released and you could watch it find the cheese.
Two more games that were designed at MIT on the TX-0 were HAX and Tic-tac-toe. HAX allowed players to adjust two switches on the console to create different graphics and sounds.
Tic-tac-toe let players play Tic-tac-toe against the computer by using a light pen.
Although the games created at MIT from 1959-1961 weren’t that revolutionary, they inspired hobbyists to continue developing interesting games.
Spacewar! CC Image – Wikipedia - Joi Ito
Spacewar!
'Spacewar!' is a two-player game created by Steve Russell and Wayne Wiitanen from the fictitious 'Hingham Institute'. The game was programmed on the PDP-1 and allowed two players to fight against each other.
Each player controlled their own spacecraft capable of firing missiles. The point of the game was to destroy the other ship whist avoiding getting sucked into the centre star. Players could also enter hyperspace in an emergency to be teleported to a random location on the screen, but would explode if used too often.
'Spacewar!' took approximately 200 hours of work to complete. Other features were later added on by Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Graetz.
The game was later distributed with new DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) computers.
With an entire generation of MIT students and computer enthusiasts having had their appetite wetted by early attempts at game development and the popularity of 'Spacewar!', it was only so long before the gaming industry would explode. It was also time for the MIT students to take what they had learnt out of the campuses and into the real world.
1961
John Burgeson wrote the first computer baseball simulation game at the IBM facility in Akron, Ohio.
1966
Ralph Baer and co-worker Bill Harrison created the first video game 'Chase' to display on a standard television set. They also created the world’s first video gaming peripheral, the light gun. After months of prototyping, Bill Rusch, Baer and Harrison, presented table tennis and target shooting games to Sander’s R & D in 1967. Then, two years later, Sanders was marketing the world’s first home video game console to manufacturers.
1969
AT&T programmer Ken Thompson wrote Space Travel where a player could land a spacecraft on moving planets of the solar system. After AT&T stopped funding the Multics project which Space Travel ran on, Thompson ported the game to Fortran. The new game ran on the GECOS operating system of General Electric’s GE635 mainframe computer. But Thompson was met by another problem… running the game on the GE635 mainframe cost about $75 an hour. So he started looking for a better computer alternative. That alternative turned out to be a PDP-7.
Soon Thompson together with computer scientist Dennis Ritchie were porting Space Travel to PDP-7’s assembly language. While they were learning how to develop software for the PDP-7, the development of the Unix operating system took place as well. Thus Space Travel has been called the first Unix application.
Galaxy Game CC Image – Wikipedia – Tom Purves
Galaxy Game
Galaxy Game was the first coin-operated video game. It was based on 'Spacewar!' and was programmed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. Galaxy Game was installed at Stanford University in September, 1971. The hardware cost around $20,000 (or the equivalent of about $114,774.03 today). A game cost 10 cents but you could also play three games for 25 cents. Although the game was very popular on campus it was removed in May 1979 because of a failing display processor.
Computer Space
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney released a coin-operated arcade version of 'Spacewar!' two months after the release of Galaxy Game. Their version was called Computer Space and it was the world’s first commercially sold coin-operated video game. In fact, Computer Space came out 6 months before the Magnavox Odyssey, the very first 1st generation gaming console.
Computer Space got Nolan Bushnell and Ted Badney ready to create Atari, Inc. in 1972. Without them having had the experience of commercially marketing their first game, they wouldn’t have had the knowledge or capital to start their full-fledged gaming company. Atari released their first game, Pong, in 1972 which would forever change the gaming scene. Pong was initially a training exercise given to Allan Alcorn which was assigned to him by Nolan Bushnell. Atari were so surprised by the quality of his work that they decided to manufacture the game. The idea was based on a Magnavox Odyssey game of electronic ping-pong, which shortly after resulted in a lawsuit against Atari by Magnavox which was settled in court.
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney acted as a gateway in gaming history. They created the first commercially sold game, Computer Space, they created their own game company, Atari, and they created the hit game Pong, which then inspired the rest of the world to be just as revolutionary in game development as they had been.
Gateway To A New Era
This gateway finalised the first stages of gaming which were full of hobbyists, professors and students trying their hands at creating electronic gaming innovations. Then with the passing of the early stages of gaming we saw the emergence of the 1st generation gaming consoles, which