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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