THE MAINFRAME IN THE ROOM
Awarding the title for “first videogame” is also tricky, and generally depends on who you believe—but here’s a rough guide…
ALTHOUGH THERE ARE PLENTY of contenders, generally the entry that gets awarded without controversy is 1958’s TennisforTwo.
An astonishing technical achievement, the title suggests something like Pong, but the reality is far grander. Designed by American physicist William Higinbotham, it was built over three weeks using a modified oscilloscope. Whereas Pong has a simple top-down viewpoint, TennisforTwo is viewed side-on, and has real-time physics, with gravity and inertia shaping the game’s dynamics. There is a simulation you can run on your PC, but don’t bother with that. Just search for it on YouTube, and watch it being played on an oscilloscope—it’s an exquisite piece of engineering that makes the likes of Atari look positively vulgar.
However, these were one-off machines. The first known game to be copied and installed on multiple machines is Spacewar! from 1962. Written at MIT for the DEC PDP-1 computer, it has two spaceships engaged in a torpedo dogfight while avoiding the gravity well of a star. In order to get around the physical awkwardness of two players on a keyboard, it had an early form of gamepad. Other features include random starfields, the wraparound effect when you cross an edge of the screen (later famous in Asteroids), and even a warp feature for random teleportation.
Note that Spacewar! is often confused with 1969’s SpaceTravel, particularly by Unix fans. SpaceTravel was an early space-flight videogame developed for the PDP-7 that had the player flying around a scale model of the solar system. The development process of the game and the technical constraints imposed upon Ken Thompson led to the push to create a better system, which resulted in Unics, or Unix*, as it’s known today
Spacewar! became so influential that it spawned two arcade machines in 1971: GalaxyGame and ComputerSpace. These were two of the very first arcade machines, the latter being the first commercially available videogame. A second videogame market was developing in the form of home gaming consoles, with the first to market being the Magnavox Odyssey.
Released in 1972, it had no CPU—just a collection of individual boards covered in diodes attached to a main circuit board. The packaging wowed with lots of accessories, but the reality was less impressive when it turned out you just moved a couple of squares behind a plastic overlay. That said, it did play a mean game of Tennis.ComputerSpace creators Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney started their own venture in 1972: Atari. At this time, Bushnell had seen a Magnavox Odyssey demo machine, which was running Tennis on a TV. History gets contentious here, but it’s generally agreed that Atari decided to make a clone of Tennis for the arcades, dubbed Pong.
Tennis clones (now known as Pong clones) started popping up all over the place. However, it would only be so long before the public lost interest. It was clear that the home console needed a rethink, and Atari decided the single-game format needed to be discarded in favor of swappable games—so a microprocessor CPU would be needed.
Atari’s bullish business tactics and financial backing would eventually see 1977’s Atari Video Computer System—with its cheap MOS 6507 CPU—dominate the competition. It was later renamed the Atari 2600.