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By
Mary
Bellis
 Spacewar
Screenshot
In 1952,
A.S. Douglas wrote his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge on Human-Computer
interraction. Douglas created the first graphical computer game - a version
of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game was programmed on a EDSAC vaccuum-tube computer,
which had a cathode ray tube display.
William Higinbotham
created the first video game ever in 1958. His game, called "Tennis for
Two," was created and played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope.
In 1962, Steve Russell invented SpaceWar!.
Spacewar! was the first game intended for computer use. Russell used a
MIT PDP-1 mainframe computer to design his game.
In 1967, Ralph
Baer wrote the first video game played on a television set, a game called
Chase. Ralph Baer was then part of Sanders Associates, a military electronics
firm. Ralph Baer first conceived of his idea in 1951 while working for
Loral, a television company.
In
1971, Nolan Bushnell
together with Ted Dabney, created the first arcade game. It was called Computer
Space, based on Steve Russell's earlier game of Spacewar!. The arcade game
Pong was created by Nolan Bushnell (with help from Al Alcorn)
a year later in 1972. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney started
Atari
Computers that same year. In 1975, Atari re-released Pong as a home
video game.
Larry Kerecman was one of the first first
operators of video arcade games, including Computer Space. He writes that,
"The brilliance of these machines was that Nolan Bushnell
and company took what was computer programming (in Space War) and
translated it into a simpler version of the game (no gravity) using
hard-wired logic circuits. The printed circuit boards that comprise
electronics of these games use integrated circuits called small-scale
integrated circuits. They consist of discrete logic chips and gates or
gates, 4-line to 16-line decoders, etc. straight out of the Texas
Instruments catalog. The shape of the rocket ship and flying saucer even are
visible in a pattern of diodes on the PC board."
In 1972, the
first commercial video game console that could be played in the home, the
Odyssey was released by Magnavox and designed by Ralph Baer. The game machine
was originally designed while Ralph Baer was still at Sanders Associates
in 1966, Baer managed to gain his legal rights to the machine after Sanders
Associates rejected it. The Odyssey came programmed with twelve games.
In 1976, Fairchild
released the first programmable home game console called the Fairchild
Video Entertainment System, and later renamed Channel F. Channel F was
one of the first electronic systems to use the newly invented microchip
invented by Robert Noyce for the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation that
allowed video games to not be limited by the number of TTL switches.
On June 17, 1980, Atari's "Asteroids"
and "Lunar Lander" were the first two video games to ever be
registered in the Copyright Office.
Nintendo
- Game Boy
The history of Nintendo (1889 -
1997) - Gumpei Yokoi invented Game Boy, Virtual Boy, Famicom (and NES),
as well as the Metroid series.
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War and the Beginning of Computer Games
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