The Birth of Video Games : 1950's - 1960's
William A. Higinbotham, a physics graduate of Cornell University, who
also worked at
Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, and who also had
a love for
pinball machines, wanted to develop an interesting exhibit for
a
open house that
entertains and engages people, instead of boring them,
at his new place of work, Brookhaven National Labs, based
in
Long Island,
NY, where is he the head of BNL's Instrumentation
Division.
His id
ea
was for a "tennis game" using a small
analog computer to display the
trajectory of
a moving
ball, and which users can then control using a primitive "game
controller". The development of this new type of game would
require skills
very similar
to those of missile trajectory plotting, which coincidentally is
also
the major
specialty of the mainframe computers in use at the time, and also
of Brookhaven Labs, with the "Cold War" in full swing
at the time.
Game Controller
Higinbotham, along with Robert Dvorak, develop a game they call "Tennis
for
Two" in just a couple of weeks after William has his initial idea, and they
debut the
game at Brookhaven's open house in October, 1958. In this first
historic video game,
a "tennis ball", or blip of light, bounces off a horizontal line at
the bottom of a small
5" oscilloscope screen, with a vertical line in the center of the
screen representing
a tennis net. Player controls consisted of two boxes, one for
each player, with a dial
and a button to control the gameplay (the first video game
controllers) During the
the open house, the game attracts a enthusiastic audience, who wait for hours
in line
to play his new invention. After the open house, Higinbotham doesn't bother to
consider
copyrighting his very unique creation, because he thinks nothing
will ever come of it....
The Early Years : 1970s - 1980s
The 90's to
2000
Video Games Today : The Next Century
Surprising Facts:
Video Arcade Game History Timeline
1958 - The first documented video game in history is created by William
A. Higinbotham and
Robert
Dvorak of Brookhaven National Labs, and is called "Tennis For Two".
1962 - "Spacewar !", the world's first fully
interactive video game, is created by Steve Russell,
a 25
year-old Artificial Intelligence (AI) specialist at MIT, on a
Digital PDP-1 Mainframe
1971 - "Computer Space", the world's first
coin-operated video game, is developed by Nolan
Bushnell, and released by Nutting Associates.
1972 - "Pong", the first commercially successful
coin-operated video game, is released by Atari.
1974 - "Tank" is introduced
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