In 1958, as Head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven, he created a computer game called Tennis for Two for the laboratory's annual exposition.

[5] He recalled in 1983, The instruction book that came with the computer described how to plot trajectories and bouncing shapes, for research.

[Working with colleague Dave Potter], it took me four hours to design one and a technician[11] a couple of weeks to put it together.

[12]In the 1980s, critics and historians began to recognize the significance of Tennis for Two in the development of video games.

[12] In 2011, Stony Brook University founded the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection, managed by Head of Special Collections and University Archives Kristen Nyitray and Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Studies Raiford Guins.

[14] The Collection is explicitly dedicated to "documenting the material culture of screen-based game media", and in specific relation to Higinbotham: "collecting and preserving the texts, ephemera, and artifacts that document the history and work of early game innovator and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist William A. Higinbotham, who in 1958 invented the first interactive analog computer game, Tennis for Two.

[16] Higinbotham remained little interested in video games, preferring to be remembered for his work in nuclear nonproliferation.