History
While it is as far from the eventual commercial videogame systems that come later as a walk in the park
is to a walk on the moon, a physicist trying to make the public tour of his lab a little more exciting
to bored visitors designs what some consider as a precursor videogame system in 1958. Working at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, a US nuclear research lab in Upton, New York, William A. Higinbotham notices that
people attending the annual autumn open houses, which are held to show the public how safe the work going
on there is, are bored with the displays of simple photographs and static equipment.
His idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball
on an oscilloscope, with which users can interact. Higinbotham, along with Technical Specialist Robert V.
Dvorak who actually assembles the device, to create in three weeks the game system they name Tennis for Two,
and it debuts with other exhibits in the Brookhaven gymnasium at the next open house in October 1958.
At MIT circa 1961 there's a group of hard core computer nerds calling themselves the Tech Model Railroad Club, Wayne Witanen and J. Martin Graetz, along with 25 year-old Steve Russell.
They develop the idea to pit two spaceships with limited fuel supplies against each other in a missle duel. The program becomes Spacewar!, the world's first fully interactive videogame, with Russell as main programmer. Two spaceships called the wedge and the needle, according to their shapes, are rendered in rough outlined graphics.
By spring of 1962, the game is completed, weighing in at a grand total of 9K. It causes a sensation at MIT's
annual Science Open House, and a scoring system must be introduced to limit people's time at the control
switches used to play. It is such a huge hit with the computer community that copies are quickly spread around
to other educational facilities in the U.S. across the then burgeoning Internet precursor ARPAnet.