Video games have a long and storied history. When you think of the dawn of gaming as we know it, it’s easy to recall the historic games that have come to be regarded as gaming’s Founding Fathers.
Icons such as Pong, Asteroids, or Mario may spring to mind for many of us, and while as an early entry into gaming lore, Pong would go on to revolutionize the idea of gaming, and help found the video game industry as we know it, pioneering developments in gaming’s history can be traced back further still. The story of what can be fully described as “video games” likely started two decades earlier, at Toronto’s 1950 Canadian National Exhibition.
The Fallout universe shows us a future in which the transistor was never invented, technology remains large and bulky and the games you find within the world and can be played on the PIP-Boy, are often 50s inspired parodies of the early video games of our timeline. But perhaps that universe wasn’t too far off how our world could have turned out.
In Toronto, at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibit, Josef Kates showcased Bertie the Brain, the first computer programmed to play games.
The 13 foot (four meter) tall metal computer would have fit right in amongst Fallout’s vacuum tube and nuclear powered atom-punk aesthetic as attendees were challenged to beat the machine’s artificial intelligence at a simple game of tic-tac-toe. Players would input their move on a panel at the front of the machine and Bertie would respond. Bertie the Brain pioneered features now common in the gaming scene, such as scalable difficulty and even timed exclusivity.
Yes, timed exclusivity. While Bertie the Brain was the first computer-based game to feature a visual display of any kind, using lighbulbs behind screens to display the current game state, it was primarily created as a tool to promote the additron tube, Kates’ ill-fated miniaturized version of the vacuum tube that would ultimately become forgotten to history — a fate that Bertie the Brain would share.
Many of the games and hardware of this era were created as tech demos or novelty pieces to wow the public and generate funds, and this was the case for Bertie the Brain, which was dismantled shortly after the exhibition ended. The early gaming feats it achieved, and its legacy as potentially the first-ever video game, were largely forgotten to the annals of time.
Let’s jump forward to the end of the decade to a public exhibition at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Here, in 1958, physicist William Higinbotham would display a game that many would now consider the true first video game.
Designed in three hours, after discovering the research institution’s analog computer could calculate ballistic missile trajectories, or a bouncing ball with wind resistance, Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two pits two players against each other in a side-on game of tennis.
Using a set-up reminiscent of early home consoles, Tennis for Two used an oscilloscope to display the simulation of a tennis ball that would bounce when hitting the ground, collide with the net if a player had not angled their “hit” correctly, or if the ball lacked velocity due to the simulated drag of wind resistance, and a custom controller that consisted of a knob to control the intended arc of the ball, and a button to simulate the hit.
Perhaps simulating the trajectory of gaming itself, Tennis for Two was wildly popular during the 1958 exhibit, with Higinbotham later claiming that “the high schoolers liked it best. You couldn’t pull them away.” A remastered version of the game was made available the following year. The upgraded version shown to the public at Brookhaven’s 1959 exhibition featured a larger screen and the ability to simulate different levels of gravity, giving players the ability to play with the simulated gravities of the Moon, and Jupiter.
Tennis for Two, like Bertie the Brain before it, was disassembled after the 1959 exhibition, its parts re-used in other projects, and the hugely popular game was another early video game forgotten to history.
But unlike Bertie the Brain, Tennis for Two found an unlikely resurgence in the late 70s and early 80s, where lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to use Tennis for Two as an example of prior art to invalidate the patents of Ralph H. Baer, the inventor of what would later become the first home video game console — the Magnavox Odyssey, and who has been dubbed “the father of video games.”
These court cases poured attention onto a video game and creator that had largely been forgotten for the better part of two decades, and in the early 80s Tennis for Two began to be recognized as a contender for the title of first video game. Some have since dubbed Higinbotham the “grandfather of video games.”
Higinbotham would deny that legacy, considering Tennis for Two as an obvious extension of the computer’s bouncing ball program, preferring his legacy be that of his nuclear non-proliferation work.
But legacy is important. In 1997, engineers at Brookhaven Laboratory would recreate Tennis for Two to celebrate the institute’s 50th anniversary, reconstructed using mostly original parts. It would be put on display again in 2008 for Tennis for Two’s 50th anniversary.
These moments in gaming history have been forgotten, novelties of technology with no inclination of the important stepping stones they would be in the growth of a multi-billion dollar industry. How many more disassembled and forgotten machines did their part to shape what we know today as gaming?
Whether or not you consider Tennis for Two the first video game, or Bertie the Brain, or the succinctly titled 1947 cathode-ray tube amusement device, their contribution to gaming history is clear and those contributions, no matter how big or small, are important steps in the tapestry of gaming.
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