History Of Electronic Games
At the same time the arcade business was taking hold, important advances in electronics led to the creation of the first computers between 1937 and 1945 in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The early computers were giant mainframes that could take up whole rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and, as a result, were only found at top university research facilities and government institutions. As the transistor replaced the vacuum tube and the integrated circuit allowed for easier mass production, computers began to shrink in size and come down in price, spreading across universities and being adopted by businesses in the 1950s and 1960s. It was on these mainframe machines that university students in the 1960s and 1970s would design some of the first electronic games and establish most of the basic genres still popular today.
Tennis for Two The first known concept for an electronic game was a device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1948. The proposed device would have used eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at a target and would use knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. The earliest programs created to run a game on a computer appear to be a checkers program created by Christopher Strachey in 1951 on the Pilot ACE and Manchester Mark I and a tic-tac-toe program called OXO created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 on the EDSAC computer to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. Also in 1951, the NIMROD, a computer designed specifically to play the game Nim, was introduced at the Festival of Britain and displayed for several months. Perhaps the first true electronic game not a representation of a pen-and-paper or board game was created in 1958 on an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham and named Tennis for Two. Designed to entertain visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory at its annual visitors day, the game displayed a tennis court in side view and required controllers with a knob and a button. In this simple tennis game, the first player chooses an angle and serves the ball after which the second player must choose an angle and attempt to return the ball over the net. While popular at the visitor day, Higinbotham never attempted to patent or market the device, which was taken apart in 1959. Whether one of the concepts above, or another one entirely, counts as the first video game, none of them received wide distribution or had an impact on the industry.
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