Melissa Brinks - Little Book of Video Games: 70 Classics That Everyone Should Know and Play

Pinpointing the very first video game is difficultnumerous tic-tac-toe and chess emulators existed prior to Tennis for Twos creation in 1958, but William Higanbothams invention is often regarded as the first video game by modern standards.

Higanbotham started his career in radar technology before working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project. His team developed ignition and measuring instruments for the first nuclear bomb, but Higanbotham later left the project and dedicated his life to nuclear nonproliferation as a founder of the Federation of American Scientists in 1945. He joined Brookhaven National Laboratorys instrumentation division two years later, where he developed Tennis for Two, a tennis simulator, to showcase at one of the labs annual exhibitions.

Higanbotham hoped that it might liven up the place to have a game which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society. He, along with other members of the instrumentation division, created the game in just three weeks, using existing circuits and instructions. They chose not to patent it because Higanbotham didnt think the game was sufficiently innovative. And having been developed with Brookhavens technology, it would have belonged to the US government rather than to him.

Despite creating one of the earliest known video games, Higanbotham preferred to be known for his work in nuclear nonproliferation.

Tennis for Two was largely forgotten until the 1980s, when David H. Ahl, founder of Creative Computing magazine, recalled playing the game as a teen. In a cover story for the magazine, he called Higanbotham the grandfather of video games. Around six months later, an interview by Frank Lovece that ran in Video Review renewed interest in Higanbothams contributions to the field.

Spacewar! is another contender for the title of first video game. Though it was never commercially available, the game introduced many conceptsunique weapons, a virtual world, physicsthat later became synonymous with the medium. Developed by Steve Slug Russell, a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, which many early hackers participated in, Spacewar! was one of the first games created for entertainment. Two players control spaceships in orbit around a star with a gravitational pull. Both ships have weapons, and the ultimate goal is to destroy your opponents ship first.

Russell developed the game with the intent of impressing his friends, and that it did. Because the computer he used to create the game was enormous (roughly the size of three refrigerators) and prohibitively expensive, Russell and others deemed it unnecessary to copyright protect the game. It was also developed under hacker ethic, a philosophy of early computer programming that held that computers and the knowledge possibilities they contained should be free to operate and access. Spacewar!, as part of that new technology, was available to be played, taken apart, remixed, and studied by others.

As the game grew in popularity, hackers added new modes, such as a realistic starfield, and tweaked Russells weapon deployment (which included frustrating random explosions) to be more predictable. Others invented variations on the game, spreading its popularity among computer enthusiasts for free. The game was even used to test whether PDP-1 units were functional: programmers would turn on the machines and activate the game to verify that the computers were in working order.