A video game is a software program that, in combination with the hardware input and output devices, serves as entertainment by artificially generating simultaneous software-simulated response to the controlled actions of the player, the result of which is displayed on a visual output device such as the computer or TV screen.
Difficult questions. But with enough research one can come to a surprising conclusion: at different times many different people created the first ever video game. Even to this day various sources state different games claiming the title of the first every video game. But it is really one of those impossible questions to ask, and many sources have provided many misleading answers. In this series of "History of Video Games", Authentic Society will give you the facts, and let you draw your own conclusion.
The answer to what the first video game ever created may depend on one's understanding of what constitutes a video game. It is with this subjectivity in mind we must approach the question of when the first ever computer game was made.
A close relative to the computer game industry is the movie industry, and it has the same problem. It is difficult to tell what the first movie in history is, because as emerging technologies started to come out of the closet into the world of entertainment, there were many experiments, doubts and uncertainties.
Let's consider a specific case, and take as an example the Eadweard Muybridge's high-speed photographs of a galloping horse that he created in 1878. Can something like this claim the title of being the first movie ever made? While these photos can be considered the first moving pictures, which seems reasonable to believe that it is what a movie is, was it truly the first movie ever made? Or was it the first slideshow ever made?
The process of making a movie involves various types of techniques and levels of inventiveness, use of reason and logic and perhaps a creative mind. Still, the belief that somewhere in the past someone created the first ever video game, is the question that logically seems to make sense. But the answers can be a little surprising.
It can be argued that the foundation of the first video games lies in the CRT, or the Cathode Ray Tube. The CRT is a vacuum tube that contains an electron gun and a fluorescent screen. When the beam strikes the surface of the screen, it can create a number of various types of images.
The Cathode Ray Tube is also known as the Braun tube because it was developed by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun, in 1897. Later the CRT became an important contributor to the TV industry as well as video games. It's primary function is to display images.
The Cathode Ray Tube was not created for the purpose of entertainment and was initially developed for military use. However, inventive use of the CRT device has become an important event in aiding not only the development of video games but for what is now known as television.
In 1907, when a Russian scientist Boris Rosing used it to display basic geometric forms on a CRT device, it became obvious that it could be used for more sophisticated uses and rendering more advanced types of images, other than missiles such as the ones that could be displayed on a military radar display based on CRTs.
Commercial non-color television devices were available as early as 1920s and by late 20's to mid 30's started to slowly take over the previously popular form of information transmittal – the radio. However the very first TV sets were cumbersome because of their dimensions and weight, had small screens that were usually round due to the shape of the neon lamps on which they were based and were mostly enclosed in a wooden case. The period of time between 1920 and 1935 is referred to as the Mechanical Era of Television.
The Cathode Ray Tube was used by the United States military as a device that helped to track and intercept enemy missiles during the World War II, which is where, inadvertently, the first interactive computer game has had its origin. In 1947, two years after the end of the war, the first known interactive game was invented by Settle Ray Mann and Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. based on the electronic devices based on the CRT's. Together they have invented the first missile simulation game and titled it "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device". It can probably be considered the first electronic device ever created in the United States at that time. In 1947 computer game was a term that did not yet exist, but it can be theorized that the two inventors have laid the foundation to what later, after more complex transformations, emerged into the computer game as we know it today.
1952 Professor Alexander "Sandy" Shafto Douglas, popularly known as A.S. Douglas created what is believed the first graphical computer game called OXO at the Cambridge University, using an EDSAC computer. OXO was a computer-based tic-tac-toe game, also known as Noughts and Crosses.
The OXO game is believed to be one of the first, however some historians agree that it may not have been influential, because it was limited to be played in the confines of the university.
Another early contribution to the theories that eventually led to the creation of computer games can be tracked back to the cybernetic model of "Mouse in the maze" device, created in the Soviet Union in 1955. This rather sized black box apparatus demonstrated the ability of the proverbial mouse to search for and find cheese by traveling the shortest distance possible, once it "discovered" and memorized such a path. The path of the "mouse" is represented by lit connections located on the front of the box that demonstrate the device's function.
The model was developed and manufactured in 1955-1957 at the Institute of Automation in the USSR in the laboratory of Professor M. Gavrilova.
The importance of the "mouse in the maze" device is the usage of a basic memory model to store data or "remember" the shortest distance to the cheese. The significance of this example is the creation of some of the first primitive artificial intelligence logic. Even modern computer games could use an improvement of artificial intelligence algorithms to make gameplay better. Improved artificial intelligence in video games can make the difference between an extremely fun experience and a not-so-exciting one.
Perhaps it's difficult to tell which one of the invented interactions with the CRT could be considered to be the first video game ever created. However, based on the definitions we have outlined in the beginning of this page, it is important to notice a crucial element of what defines a video game: the fact that the software must respond to player's action, or in other words it must be interactive for it to be considered a game. Taking this in consideration, we can draw a much concrete conclusion and say that perhaps the first video game ever created was "Tennis for Two".
Tennis for Two was created by William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist who was one of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. In anticipation, hundreds of visitors have stood in lines awaiting to play this electronic game for the first time in their life (in anyone's life).
Oscilloscope is an electronic test instrument whose function is to provide a visual display of voltage variations. An oscilloscope which was used as the display screen for the "Tennis for Two" game. First oscilloscopes used CRTs as their display, the same Cathode Ray Tube that Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr and Settle Ray Mann have used to create their missile simulation game.
Tennis for Two was a game in which two players controlled the visual output of the game on the screen of an oscilloscope. An interactive dot, when in motion, was followed by a trail representing the tennis ball and its trajectory. The two players bounced the tennis ball back and forth between each other pressing buttons on the two controllers that connected to an analog computer. In addition to the button, the controllers also had a dial the player could spin in order to change the trajectory angle of the ball. Unlike the popular game Pong that came out in 1972 and released by Atari, there was no representation of the actual tennis racquet on the screen of Tennis for Two, and the player had to react "just in time" the ball was close enough to the ground represented by a wide horizontal line.
How did William Higinbotham come up with the idea?
Tennis for Two was made possible by an analog computer. The instruction booklet that came with the computer explained how to create different types of curves on the oscilloscope's CRT display. For example it was possible to reproduce the gravitational effects on objects traveling in space such as rockets, bullets and bouncing balls, each of which would be affected by trajectories with respect to the behavior of each object. Internal relays, capacitors and resistors were used to make these computations.
When Higinbotham saw the trajectories of a bouncing ball it reminded him of the game of tennis, and the idea was born.
1958 is the year that is not only known for the first truly interactive computer game in video game history, but also for the invention of the first integrated circuit. Integrated circuits are used in almost all electronic devices today and are largely responsible for revolutionizing the world of electronics. It all started when Jack Kilby, a new employee at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, not yet having the right for a summer vacation, has spent the summer working on trying to solve the problem known as the "tyranny of numbers". This was a common problem faced by computer engineers in late 50s and early 60s. It was physically impossible to increase performance of electronic devices because of the large number of components required for those devices to provide their basic functionality. At that time, computer scientists built electronics that were made up of series of "modules", or separate parts. Each module could only provide one function.
Jack Kilby had an idea that production of electronic circuit components placed on a single piece of semiconductor material could solve the problem. As part of his preliminary experiments he has constructed a practical physical device to confirm his theory. The device consisted of a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached to it. When a switch was turned on the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, which was the proof that his idea of integrated circuit could solve the problem.
In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the integrated circuit. Today, integrated circuits come in all kinds of sizes shapes and performance types and are used in almost all electronic devices including the personal computer and video game consoles.
In 1951 Ralph Baer first conceived of an idea for a computer game "Chase" that he finally created 16 years later. Chase was a simple game where one player attempted to catch the other one, while both players are represented by a dot. Baer came up with the idea while working for a television company called Loral. Chase was the first video game for playing on a tv / television set and was materialized in the year 1967.
But that wasn't what had given him fame in the computer game history. Ralph Baer was an important person in the history of video games. In fact he is sometimes regarded as the father of video games (according to Gamasutra's interview with Ralp Baer article), in large part for the development of the first ever prototype game console called The Brown Box. Later in the article you will learn of Magnavox, the company that licensed the brown box's technology and re-branded it as Odyssey. In 2006 Baer received the National Medal of Technology in-part for pioneering alternating circuit boards via game cartriges.
In the aforementioned Gamasutra's article, Ralph Baer is asked what was the first video game he created, to which he responds:
The very first thing was first to put one spot up. Once we had one spot up and we knew how to move that around, we said, "Oh, let's put two up and chase each other, and wipe one out when you catch up with him." The "chase game" was the first.
In order to draw the line between the electronics used for scientific and military purposes and electronics used for entertainment (games) we must first identify the definition of the video game. Below are some of the common definitions of the video game, as explained by a number of various sources on the Internet. Respectively, according to these sources a video game is
Wikipedia: "an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device" (link)
Wiktionary.org: A type of game existing as and controlled by software, usually run by a video game console or a computer, and played on a video terminal or television screen. Controlled by a paddle, joystick, joypad, mouse, keyboard, or a combination of any of these input devices (link)
Princenton University's WordNet Search database: "a game played against a computer" (link)
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