History of GameDev Industry

Early decades of video games (1950s - 1980s)

The First Video Games

The most resounding impact William “Willy” Higinbotham had on the world had nothing to do with video games. Higinbotham worked on the team that developed the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos Laboratory. As a relative footnote to his role in such pivotal global events, Higinbotham is also known for having arguably developed the first electronic video game. While serving as a senior physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Higinbotham was aware that even though the innovations his facility was producing could be world-changing, they were not necessarily impressive on display to visitors. To entertain attendees at an annual public visitors’ day in 1958, he spent a few hours developing a rudimentary tennis simulation using analog computer technology designed to track missile trajectories and a pair of 5-inch oscilloscope screens. The result, Tennis for Two, was a popular feature for visitors but appeared only once more on the next annual visitors’ day. Higinbotham couldn’t even be bothered to pursue a patent for his patched together diversion, which was based on technology that was already on its way to obsolescence; digital computers had already begun to appear, and much larger cathode ray tube displays were in use in household televisions. Only more than a decade later, when the eerily similar Pong burst onto the commercial scene, did the significance of Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two as a milestone in video game history become apparent. As with the most remembered milestones in the history of communication technology, the actual story of the first video game is not so clear-cut as Higinbotham and Tennis for Two. There were other prototypes that could be called electronic games that were developed before Higinbotham’s 1958 demonstration. OXO, a simulation of the popular pencil and paper game called “Noughts and Crosses” or “Tic Tac Toe,” was developed in 1952 as part of Alexander “Sandy” Douglas’ doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. While the program ran on a digital computer (the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC) and used a cathode ray tube display, OXO often eludes credit as the first video game because it lacked a moving graphic display. A similar effort was a draughts (checkers) simulation made in 1951 by Christopher Strachey at England’s National Physical Laboratory in London, which was a pioneering artificial intelligence program. British engineering firm Ferranti exhibited a computer developed to play the game Nim using a series of lights as an interface at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and famed British mathematician Alan Turing worked with Dietrich Prinz on a rudimentary chess simulation that had no visual interface and was programmed by Prinz in 1951. Another argument for the earliest origin of the video game can be based on a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device” filed in 1947 and issued in 1948. That device, developed by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann at Dumont Laboratories in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, allowed users to control a dot on a screen to aim at paper overlay targets, with successful targeting tracked mechanically rather than by computer processing. While sharing some visual display traits with Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two game, Goldsmith and Mann’s device was completely mechanical and used no computer program or memory. There is therefore a good case for Tennis for Two as the first video game prototype because earlier putative “first” video games lacked either a graphical motion display (e.g., Nim, OXO) or computing technology (e.g., the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device). Bragging rights regarding which invention might truly be called the first video game notwithstanding, it is notable that all these early precursors and prototypes simulated a game or sport, and of these, the graphical motion display is frequently cited as a necessary criterion for an early prototype to be called a “video game.” Thus, even retrospective glances at video game history place a heavy emphasis on action and simulation as defining characteristics of video games.

First commercial games

Tennis for Two and its various predecessors were never widely played or released commercially; they were either produced only as working prototypes or exhibited to the public at isolated events. The first video game to find a large audience and be available beyond a single exhibition was Spacewar! Initially developed by three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stephen R. “Slug” Russell, J. Martin Graetz, and Wayne Witanen (with help from others at later stages), in 1962, Spacewar! allowed two players to control dueling spaceships and attempt to shoot each other with torpedoes while orbiting a black hole. Spacewar!, played using a cathode ray tube display and custom-built controllers on the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-1 computer, also featured a score display, a player-friendly feature not available on the oscilloscope display used by Tennis for Two. This and other competition-oriented features ensured Spacewar! was a hit. Within a year of its 1962 demonstration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Science Open House in May 1962, copies and variations of the Spacewar! the program began to emerge at research laboratories across the United States, and the game was being played not only on PDP-1 computers but on other computers that used a cathode ray tube display as well. A much more polished video game than Tennis for Two, Spacewar! might also be considered the first video game, especially Spacewar! used digital computing hardware rather than analog technology. More relevant to the video game industry boom to come, Spacewar! was certainly the first video game to be commercialized. While the actual Spacewar! game as originally programmed could not be commercialized because it was played on expensive research computers that were usually inaccessible to the public, the first coin-operated arcade games were both adaptations of Spacewar!: Galaxy Game, a one-of-a-kind arcade unit that debuted on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California in 1971 and was the first coin-operated video game, and Computer Space, a mass-produced coin-operated arcade game released later the same year throughout the United States. Therefore, whatever early device is credited as the first video game, there’s no debating that Spacewar! accomplished two milestones important to the scalability of the video game as a mass medium: it was the first video game to be played on more than one machine, and the first video game to be adapted for commercialization. While the technologies employed to create the first video game prototypes and their predecessors varied, some conceptual themes are apparent across all these early games. Each had a basis in simulating competition, either competitive action simulations or simulations of competitive strategy games. While some of the early precursors imitated competitive board games and parlor games (OXO, chess, draughts/checkers, Nim), the prototypes most often referred to as actual video games and the first video game to evidence the medium’s commercial potential featured competitive action simulations of sport or combat (Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, Tennis for Two, Spacewar!). Therefore, even in the earliest roots of video games, an emphasis is established on conceptual inspiration from simulation of competitive games and other competitive activities, sometimes based only on strategic competitions like board games or parlor games but more often based on action simulations of sport or combat.

Commercial Success in Arcades and the Home

Just as the first video game prototypes were conceptually rooted in simulating the themes of competitive enterprises from board games to sports to war, the biggest early commercial successes in video game history drew from the same sources of inspiration. While Spacewar! adaptation Computer Space was not commercially successful as the first mass-produced commercial arcade game, the release of Pong by Atari, Inc. the following year in 1972 met commercial success immediately beginning with its well-received introduction at a local watering hole called Andy Capp’s Tavern. Pong held to the same tennis theme as Tennis for Two, continuing the tradition of video games’ reliance on simulations of competitive activities. The year 1972 also saw the release of the first commercial home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which featured sports and shooting games among its game titles. The Odyssey console used light signals combined with overlays placed on the users’ television screens to simulate graphics and featured predominantly sports and action games, though some games featured other simulations such as roulette. Other successful arcade and home consoles would follow, once again with action sport and combat simulations predominant in their themes. In fact, the popular Atari Video Computer system (VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600 as later console versions were developed) was released with a game titled Combat that featured 27 combat games such as tank and biplane duels. Oddly enough, the first video game industry crash in 1977 was precipitated in part by a glut of Pong copycats on the arcade market. Action games also defined the video game industry’s recovery from its 1977 crash, most notably the iconic Pac-Man coin-operated arcade game released by Namco in 1980. Pac-Man’s simple action hunt-and-chase play made the game a commercial success and a cultural phenomenon. In fact, Pac-Man was so popular that after the arcade game sparked a resurgence from the 1977 industry crash, the let-down from a much-anticipated but poorly produced console version of Pac-Man contributed to a second video game industry crash in 1983.