A History of Computer Games - Pt 1

It’s difficult to think back to when the idea of video games, or using computing systems for fun, came to be. The idea originally started by the two Americans Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947, with the ‘cathode ray tube amusement device’ – the earliest known interactive electronic game of which was never released to the public. The device itself is nothing remnant of video games today – it recorded and controlled the quality of an electronic signal and had no memory, computer or programming, and was described as a game of skill with the display resembling a WWII radar display. The player would sit in front of a ‘cathode ray tube’ (CRT) - a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images – and uses a knob to control the CRT beam to interact with the display.

Tick-Tack-Toe - 1952

From here the majority of early computer games were created as hobbies using university mainframe computers. In 1952 we come across A.S. Douglas, whom created the first graphical computer game – quite an achievement. What did he create, I hear you cry? The original Call of Duty? Maybe he looked into Goldsmith and Mann’s ideas and developed on a war simulator or some form of action adventure… Don’t be silly, Tic-Tac-Toe is the obvious creation. Using his universities EDSAC vacuum-tube computer he created the game to illustrate his thesis on Human-Computer interaction, using a 35x16 pixel display, and was played against the computer which was programmed to use specific algorithms to win.

However, it was William Higinbotham who gained the title of the person to first create a video game. In 1958 he created “Tennis for two” using an oscilloscope in Brookhaven National Labority, which was played by two individuals using hand controls.

Space War! - 1961

In 1961 three students who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Martin Graetz, Stephen Russel and Wayne Wiitanen, created ‘Space War!’ on a PDP-1 computer using vector graphics to design it. Unfortunately as the game did not use a video display it technically couldn’t be considered a video game, however acted as an excellent precursor for the 1970s version. The debugger programme was found to generate random pixels, of which looked like stars – even more so once they simulated real constellations and variable luminance. It’s somewhat incredible that such realism was considered for something that nowadays would be seen as simple or perhaps overlooked so easily.

And now enters the apparently credited inventor of the video game! It was in 1966 that Ralph Baer designed an amazing television set which had the capacity to display video games, revisited his concept from 1951 that was turned down. He began to build the first prototypes – 7 in total- of which played several video games, the first of which being the game ‘Chase’ with the last prototype build in 1968 playing ball and paddle & target shooting games. From here, Magnavox signed an agreement in 1971 leading to the first video game system to be released in 1972 - The Magnavox Odyssey.

The Magnavox Odyssey - 1972