Because it all had to start somewhere...
Even though this may seem like an important point in the history of computer games, there seems to be a lot of confusion about which game really was the first of its kind. Ask this question to anyone, and many will point to Pong, the famous game of ball and paddle. Others may mention Spacewar!. There are, however, electronic games that predate both of these games.
While there are many According to [CTA] for example, in 1952, A.S. Douglas presented his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction, which included a tic-tac-toe game coded on an EDSAC computer.stories about early electronic games invented during the '50s, most haven't been documented very well. An exception to this is Tennis for Two.
Designed and built in 1958 by William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York, Tennis for Two was meant to give people something interesting to play with during the annual Higinbotham considered the normal tour (showcasing peaceful uses of atomic energy) rather boring...visitor day. The device was constructed using an oscilloscope, an analog computer, two A rotary knob whose position determines its electrical resistance.potentiometers and a set of push buttons. These controls were even placed on separate control boxes, which could be seen as the first joysticks.
The game itself was a simple two-player table-tennis game. The oscilloscope displayed a side-view of the court, net and ball. Players could change the angle by which the ball was hit using the potentiometers and could serve the ball by pressing a button. The ball would then either fly over the net or hit it and bounce back. If it went over the net the other player would need to return it, either hitting the ball directly, or waiting for it to bounce or even go beyond the end of the court.
There are multiple reasons why Tennis for Two is not as well known as for example Pong. One of these is that Higinbotham never patented or marketed the idea1:
For one thing, he later said that if he had patented the idea, it would have been assigned to the U.S. government and he would have made maybe ten dollars on it.
Additionally, computers were still huge, massively expensive things at the time. The idea of using them for entertainment was yet to be taken seriously by companies. Another reason why the game is often not considered as the first true computer game is that most of the game logic was hard-wired into the device, and computer games are often seen as software instead of hardware.
Most people consider this the real first computer game. Spacewar! was coded in 1961 by an MIT student named Steve Russell, on a Digital PDP-1 "mini" meaning "about the size of six refrigerators".minicomputer.
The game screen contained two spaceships, each controlled by a player. The controls were simple switches which were used to turn the ships left or right, accellerate, or fire at the opponent. At first, these switches were located on the PDP-1's terminal, but soon separate control boxes were constructed.
An interesting fact is that the game was continually improved by other students at the university; an early example of what's known today as 'modding'.
The original game, running on a PDP-1 emulator written in java, can be played online at http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar/
Nolan Bushnell, once a student at the University of Utah and working at an amusement arcade, saw Spacewar! during his studies. He got the idea of putting electronic games in arcades, where people would pay to play them. Bushnell created a single-player version of the game, and in 1971, 1500 Computer Space machines were built and installed in the United States. Unfortunately, while popular with college students, the general public found the game too hard to play.
After disagreements with Nutting, the company Bushnell sold the Computer Space idea to, Bushnell left and founded his own company, Atari, in 1972. The first Atari game was designed to be the complete opposite of Computer Space; Pong was as simple as possible. Two paddles at the sides of the screen could be moved up or down by the players, attempting to keep a single ball bouncing across the screen. If the ball went past one of the paddles, the other player gained a point.
There is some confusion over who invented the original Pong idea. At the same time Atari was formed, Ralph Baer introduced the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey was a TV-based game console that played a ping-pong game similar to Pong. When Atari released an arcade machine based on the game, Magnavox sued for copyright infringement, leading to a settlement of half a million dollars.