Numero Uno

So in tramping around the Internet and the libraries looking for video game lore the "first video game ever" mantle steadily fell upon a quaint little game called Tennis for Two. The 2 games I wrote about in the posts were definitely out before this one, and they were real games, totally meant for distraction and amusement. So why is this one still called the first?

William Higinbotham, a scientist, developed the game to amuse visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory on, not surprisingly, visitors day. Higinbotham was a scientist of the highest order having first worked Los Alamos National Laboratory, where like at Brookhaven he headed the electronics division. He also had a conscience, being a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists, the seminal nuclear non proliferation group.

The game itself, according to Higinbotham was pretty simple. "Back then, analog computers were used to work out all kinds of mechanical problems. They didn't have the accuracy of digital computers, which were very crude at the time, but then you didn't need a great deal of precision to play TV games. " The tiny screen, actually an oscilloscope, was connected to an analog computer programmed to play the game. The "gamer" saw a tennis court from ground level on the side with the net a vertical line in the middle, inverted T style. A dot was the ball and users used a dial to change trajectory and a switch to hit it. The program was quite cool because it played like tennis in that the ball would drop on a long shot because of gravity and a hard shot bounced back farther than a weak one.

Barely ten years later, a very similar game broke onto the scene that was actually a hit, Pong.