Early history of video games
Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the Bertie the Brain and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951, video games also became the purview of academic research.
The term "video game" has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment.
[4] Today the term "video game" has completely shed its purely hardware-dependent definition and encompasses a wider range of technology.
[6] The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope, with a set of knobs and switches.
The large metal computer, which was four meters tall, could only play tic-tac-toe on a lightbulb-backed display, and was installed in the Engineering Building at the Canadian National Exhibition from August 25 to September 9, 1950.
[14] Nearly a year later on May 5, 1951, the Nimrod computer—created by engineering firm and nascent computer developer Ferranti—was presented at the Festival of Britain, and then showcased for three weeks in October at the Berlin Industrial Show before being dismantled.
[10] It was based on an earlier Nim-playing machine, "Nimatron", designed by Edward Condon and built by Westinghouse Electric in 1940 for display at the New York World's Fair.
[16] The Nimrod was primarily intended to showcase Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than entertain, and was not followed up by any future games.
[10][20] As a part of a thesis on human–computer interaction, Douglas used one of these screens to portray other information to the user; he chose to do so via displaying the current state of a game.
[22] The game was not available to the general public, and was only available to be played in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory, by special permission, as the EDSAC could not be moved.
[5] The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time, rather than only when the player made a move, was a simulation of a bouncing ball created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Oliver Aberth for the Whirlwind I computer.
It allowed users to adjust the frequency of the bounces with a knob, and sometime between late 1951 and 1953 he made it into a game by adding a hole in the floor for players to aim for.
The game, developed over six months by the pair, featured a pool stick controlled by a joystick and a knob, and a full rack of 15 balls on a table seen in an overhead view.
[5] The computer calculated the movements of the balls as they collided and moved around the table, disappearing when they reached a pocket, and updated the graphics continuously, forty times a second, so as to show real-time motion.
Created by American physicist William Higinbotham for visitors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory to be more entertaining for visitors on their public day than the usual static exhibits about nuclear power, the game ran on a Donner Model 30 analog computer and displayed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope.
[30] Due to the game's popularity, an upgraded version was shown the following year, with enhancements including a larger screen and different levels of simulated gravity.
[32] These interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, and Bob Saunders.
The system's comparatively small size and processing speed meant that, like with the TX-0, the university allowed its undergraduate students and employees to write programs for the computer which were not directly academically related whenever it was not in use.
In 1961–62, Harvard and MIT employees Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar!
[40] The two-player game has the players engaged in a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a randomly generated background starfield.
As the computer was uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time, Kotok and Saunders created a detached control device, essentially an early gamepad.
[43] Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 (equivalent to $1,200,000 in 2023) and only 55 were ever sold, many without a monitor, which prohibited Spacewar!
[55] At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies.
[56] The first commercial arcade video game was Computer Space (1971), which was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and was based on Spacewar!.
While investigating the concept of replacing some of the computer with purpose-built hardware, however, the pair discovered that making a system explicitly for running such a game, rather than general programs, would be much less expensive: as low as $100.
[58][59] A prototype version had been successfully displayed for a short time in August 1971 in a local bar, the design was nearly finished, and the pair had founded a company around it called Syzygy.
[58][60] Bushnell and Dabney immediately started work on another game, using the same television set design as Computer Space, as well as founding a new company, Atari, to back their projects.
[58][63] That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set.
Unable to do so with the technological constraints at the time, he began work on a device that would attach to a television set and display games in 1966, and the "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was licensed to Magnavox to adapt and produce.
[58] The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of Pong.
