When discussing the history of video games, one topic that inevitably comes up is that of the first video game. Most people, if asked, will likely cite 1972’s Pong as the first. However, while Pong can lay claim to being the game that popularized the medium, the origins of video games can actually be traced decades earlier to early computer experiments performed in the 1950s.
Gaming in this era was almost unrecognizable from what we have today. For one thing, games of the 50s were not intended to make money or be widely enjoyed by the public but were more so experiments intended to showcase the potential of the then-new technologies of the time. The primitive machines they were played on were often colossal in size and weighed several tons, with screens usually no larger than a foot or two across. Nonetheless, these early efforts would prove to be the precursors of what would eventually become the largest form of entertainment in the world, and so are worth appreciation and study.
We Have the Technology!
The early to mid-20th century would see major leaps forward in technology that would lead to the eventual emergence of video games in the 1950s. In 1897 German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the first video display technology in the form of the Cathode Ray Tube. The late 1800s and early 1900s would see the widespread usage of mechanical computers with the first digital computers coming about amid World War II. By the late 40s technology had advanced to the point where the first attempts at electronic entertainment began to emerge. The earliest example of which that is currently known is a 1947 patent (US2455992A) filed by inventor Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. for a device called a cathode ray amusement device, it appears that this machine was never built nor were any games that it would play ever described but it was a herald of things to come. By the early 1950s, there were several notated instances of electronic computer games being used to showcase the potential of emerging technology such as Burtie the Brain, an electronic Tic-Tac-Toe game shown off at the 1950 Canadian National Exposition, and Nimrod which was on display at the 1951 festival of Brittain and could utilize rows of lightbulbs to play the puzzle game Nim. While important stepping stones to the creation of video games all of these were lacking key elements that would allow for them to be cleanly classified as the first instances of video games. Nonetheless, with everything in place, it was only a matter of time before someone put all of the pieces together and for gaming as we know it to be born.
OXO
Due to a lack of accurate information concerning many of these ancient games, it is currently unknown what the first video game actually was, two possible candidates are presently known both of which began development in 1951 and were shown off in 1952. The first of these is OXO, a fairly simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe played on the University of Cambridge’s EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) Computer. EDSAC was created by Cambridge’s mathematical laboratory between 1946 and 1949 and was one of the very first stored program computers in operation. OXO was created by Alexander Douglas, a mathematics doctoral candidate at the University who developed the game as a part of his thesis on human-computer interaction. The primary form of input was a rotary telephone dial wherein the numbers 1 to 9 corresponded to each of the nine spaces on the board. Visuals were displayed on dot CRT with a resolution of 35×15.
Draughts
At around the same time mathematician and physicist Christopher Strachy became fascinated with computers after being shown the Pilot ACE computer at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. Inspired by an article in the June 1950 edition of Penguin Science News called “A Theory of Chess and Naughts and Crosses” Strachy decided to write a checkers program (draughts is what checkers is called in the UK). His first attempt was over 20 pages long, containing over a thousand instructions, and ultimately failed to work due to game-breaking bugs.
After several revisions and input from computer legend Alan Turning, he was able to finally complete and execute the program in August of 1952 on a Ferranti Mark 1 (the first commercially available general-purpose computer released in 1951). The game had players take turns inputting moves with the computer with players doing so by flipping switches and the computer doing so via a teletype (a type of computerized typewriter). While this was occurring, the current state of the game board was displayed on 3 CRTs. This multi-display setup even allowed for an option wherein players could preview their moves. What made Draughts revolutionary was being one of the first programs to utilize a form of artificial intelligence, unlike previous attempts at computerized board games which simply tried every possible combination of moves and chose the ones deemed most optimal leading to highly predictable gameplay. Strachy on the other hand programmed his Checkers AI to only look a certain number of moves ahead and weigh which moves it might make in a heuristic manner. This resulted in a much more unpredictable game, with an opponent that played like how a human might.
Michigan Pool
While the previous two efforts were groundbreaking for their time, they still lacked one important feature, motion. OXO and Draughts were purely turn-based affairs that only updated static screens in between player moves. To get the first video game with real-time graphics and gameplay, we must hop across the pond to the University of Michigan. After receiving a $500,000 grant from the US Air Force, staff at the University of Michigan created two computers: the MIDAC (Michigan Digital Automatic Computer) and MIDSAC (Michigan Digital Special Automatic Computer) in 1951 and 1953 respectively.
The two machines were placed in the Willow Research Center where they were primarily utilized for defense research. However, in 1954, it was decided to hold a semi-public exhibition showcasing these two devices. For MIDSAC, programmers William George Brown and Ted Luis created a pool program inspired by their real-life enthusiasm for the sport. Using dials and a joystick on the computer it was possible for players to manipulate a 2-inch pool cue which was then used to try and knock a set of 18 balls into pockets at the edge of the screen. Rather than render the table itself the edge and pockets were represented by an overlay placed on top of the screen. By redrawing the image at a rate of 40 frames per second it was possible to create the illusion of motion. This game is also notable for being the first (at least that we know of) to utilize physics calculations as it was necessary to plot the movements of multiple moving objects simultaneously, something that we largely take for granted in games today.
Tennis for Two
Perhaps the most famous video game of the 1950s is Tennis for Two from 1958. The game was the creation of Engineer Bob Dvorak and nuclear physicist William Higinbotham while working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. Higinbotham had previously worked at Los Alimos and had taken part in the creation of the atomic bomb. Wanting to distance himself from the military after the war, he went to work at Brookhaven in 1947 with the goal of finding peaceful uses for atomic power.
Having nuclear research occur in their backyard was somewhat disconcerting for locals living near the laboratory and with most people of the time having a general lack of understanding of how such things might work, many became paranoid that the work being done at Brookhaven might lead to armageddon. In an effort to alleviate fears and improve public relations, it was decided to host an annual visitor’s day. Due to the top-secret nature of the research being done very little could actually be shown to the public and as a result, visitor’s days tended to be extremely boring. This is why Higinbotham decided to spice things up with a demonstration of some of the technology he worked with on a daily basis. What he and Bob Dvorak created was a simple tennis game played on an oscilloscope screen using a pair of controllers which each featured a dial and a button.
Unlike Pong, which utilizes an overhead view of a tennis court, Tennis for Two viewed things from the side utilizing a physics model used to plot the trajectory of Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles to send the ball arching back and forth across the court. The game would prove to be fairly popular, enough that it was brought back the following year, with additional enhancements that allowed players to alter the gravity on the court and simulate what it would be like to play tennis on other planets (something I wish modern tennis games would allow).
Mouse in the Maze
One name that often comes up when discussing the early history of video games is MIT, with the university seeing several early breakthroughs in interactive entertainment throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The first of these was an early maze game released in 1959. The year prior, Lincoln Laboratories agreed to loan MIT its TX-0, one of the first solid-state computers to utilize transistors instead of vacuum tubes, which enabled it to utilize an impressive (for the time) 64k of memory. Soon after, a pair of instructors coded an assembler and debugger for the machine which made programming for it far easier by allowing for the use of assembly language instead of machine language.
It wasn’t long before a number of students became enamored with the machine, with some going so far as skipping daytime classes so that they could use the TX-0 when it was unoccupied at night. Over the next year, these students would familiarize themselves with the TX-0, learning how to push its limits and developing demos that could showcase its capabilities. At least two of these demos were video games.
The first was a simple Tic-Tac-Toe Program, but the second created by Doug Ross and John Ward was far more ambitious. Mouse, or Mouse in the Maze, had players create a maze by utilizing a light pen to delete walls from an 8×8 grid and placing a piece of cheese at the end. A computer-controlled mouse would then wander the maze in search of it. The mouse possessed limited stamina and so had to find the cheese within a limited time. The mouse utilized a very rudimentary AI that allowed it to remember the areas it had explored within the maze. Even if the mouse could not find the cheese on its first attempt with each subsequent one it would learn the layout of the maze and try to find the most efficient way to the end. A later variation replaced the cheese with martini glasses that would cause the mouse to move drunkenly.
Mouse in the Maze was notable for a number of reasons, it was the first game to be controlled using a light pen, the first to utilize what we might today call a level creator, and the mouse was the first video game character (mouse for Smash!). The game was also a progenitor to the later maze game genre which would rise to prominence in the early 80s.
Conclusion
This concludes the first decade of video game development. The games released throughout the 1950s were extremely simple by today’s standards but represented major leaps forward for both technology and software at the time. At the time, the idea of commercializing these games would have seemed absurd to these pioneers of interactive entertainment as the hardware they were played on where both massive and cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money. It all had to start somewhere, though, and these programming experiments would help set the stage for the massive industry that would develop in later decades. That being said, most of these games existed in something of a vacuum and had little direct influence on what would come later. This is often the case with new mediums, people experiment with new ideas largely independent of one another until one proves successful enough to serve as a foundation. For example, the idea of moving pictures had been toyed around for over a century before the first movies as we know them came to be. To gain a complete view of the history of the gaming medium it is necessary to give consideration and study to even these earliest days.
