First video game

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are numerous debates over who created the first video game, with the answer depending largely on how video games are defined.

1 History
2 Notes and references
3 External links
4 See also

[edit] History

The Magnavox Odyssey released in 1972.

The earliest known interactive electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube^[1] in 1947. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analogue circuitry, not digital, to drive the CRT, and used an overlay for the targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.^[2]

On the 5th of May, 1951, the NIMROD computer 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.^[3] NIM is a simple game, where you start with a number of piles of tokens — traditionally matches. Each player in turn takes one or more tokens from any one pile, and the game continues until the last token is taken from the last remaining pile. The simplest way of playing the game is when the winner is the one who takes the last item. There is also a 'Reverse' game, where the loser in the one forced to take the last token. NIMROD could play either version of the game.

In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first computer game to use a graphical display, OXO (Noughts and Crosses), for the EDSAC computer.

In 1958, William Higinbotham made an interactive game named Tennis for Two for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual visitor's day. This display was meant to promote atomic power, and used an analog computer and the vector display system of an oscilliscope.^[4]^[5]

In 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar on a DEC PDP-1 computer which also used a vector display system.^[2]^[5]

In 1966, Ralph Baer resumed work on an intial idea he had in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. The Brown Box, the last prototype of seven, was released in May 1972 by Magnavox under the name Odyssey. It was the first home video game console.^[2]

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 raster 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.^[2]

Baer's position was further substantiated on February 13th, 2006 when he was given a National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush, in honor of his "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games". ^[6]

In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed the first coin-operated video game, Galaxy Game, 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). Two months after its installation, Computer Space 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 1961 Spacewar.

PONG, often thought of as the first video game, was not released until 1972 (a year after Computer Space), and the home version did not come out until 1975 (three years after the Odyssey). PONG was considered more popular in the public eye and actually helped improve sales of the Odyssey.