The Dot Eaters - Early Video Game History

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Player 1 Stage 1: Bits From the Primordial Ooze

In the beginning, there was nothing. Well, actually, there was pinball, Skee-Ball, some shooting gallery games, a few nickel peep-show machines and those mechanical genies that would guess your weight and give a glimpse of your future. But it was probably pretty hard trying to beat your buddies at who weighs less.

Tennis For Two - Higinbotham/BNL 1958

Willie Higinbotham and the Paleolithic "PONG"

History records that, technically speaking, the very first interactive game displaying graphics on a screen is Naughts and Crosses, aka OXO, written by PhD student A.S. Douglas at Cambridge University in 1952. The Tic-Tac-Toe game is displayed on the sparse 35x16 pixel CRT screen connected to the rather massive EDSAC mainframe computer unique to the university. However, one must advance another six years to find real-time, moving objects on a screen, a game that is even remotely recognizable as what we would refer to today as a video game. 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 a precursor videogame system in 1958. Working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US nuclear research lab located on the site of the old Camp Upton Army base in Upton, Long Island, William Alfred Higinbotham notices that people attending the annual autumn "visitors' day", held to show the public how safe the work going on there is, are bored with the displays of simple photographs and static equipment, displays that are purposefully obtuse to avoid revealing U.S. nuclear secrets. "Willie", as he is invariably known around the lab, is born in Bridgeport, Conn. in 1911, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Graduating from Williams College as a physics major, he continues with graduate studies at Cornell University. From there he joins the Radiation Laboratory staff at MIT as an electronics specialist. 1941 sees Higinbotham ensconced with a team of scientists on a top secret radar project, which results in U.S. warplanes equipped with the first airborne radar systems. In December of 1943, Higinbotham is assigned to the Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico, where he helps build timing circuits, essentially the trigger for the Manhattan Project, and is actually witness to the first detonation of the atomic bomb. This terrifying event would shape Higinbotham in later years, becoming a strident opponent of the use of nuclear weapons and their proliferation, as well as advocating strict civilian oversight of atomic power via the Atomic Energy Commission, which he helps to create. Joining BNL when it opens in 1947, by 1958 Higinbotham is a 47 year-old, bespectacled, chain-smoking, accordion virtuoso, fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player who wants to develop an dynamic open house exhibit that will entertain people as they learn.

Tennis, Anyone?

Reading a description in a manual, Higinbotham discovers that analog computer at the facility, the Donner Analog Computer Model 30, can be used to calculate ballistic missile trajectories. His idea is to modify the desktop-sized computer in the lab to display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope, the direction of which users can control, creating a game resembling tennis. As head of Brookhaven's Instrumentation Division, and being used to building such complicated electronic devices as radiation detectors, it's no problem for 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 visitor's day on October 18, 1958. In the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces off a long horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small vertical line in the centre to represent the net. Two boxes each with a dial and a button are the controllers...the dials affect the angle of the ball trajectory and the buttons "hit" the ball back to the other side of the screen. If the player doesn't curve the ball right it crashes into the net. A reset button is also available to make the ball reappear on either side of the screen ready to be sent into play again. No score is tabulated, and it is displayed in glorious phosphor monochrome on a puny 5" oscilloscope screen, but it is still a big hit with everyone who visits the display. Hundreds of people crowd around waiting in line for hours to play it, while the static exhibits of other scientists sit ignored.

No Patent Sought

The game reappears for the next year's open-house in 1959, and modifications include a larger 17" monitor to display the action, a button to increase the "force" of a serve, and changeable gravity effects to show what it would be like to play tennis on another planet. After this final appearance, the system is then dismantled and its components put to other uses. Higinbotham doesn't market or copyright his invention, thinking the idea so obvious as to be not worth pursuing. But his testimony is called upon years later during legal attempts to break the Magnavox videogame patent obtained through the development of their Odyssey home videogame system. While Higinbotham's set-up would seem to predict electronic ping-pong games such as those featured on the Odyssey and in Atari's PONG, the courts eventually rule against it as a viable videogame system and every company hoping to enter the videogame market ends up paying some sort of settlement to Magnavox.

In the Courts

The exact nature of "Tennis for Two" has been called into question by some; Brookhaven National Labs and David Ahl both uphold Higinbotham's accomplishments. Ahl recalls playing the game during his tour of Brookhaven in his teens as a Grumman scholarship winner, during one of the open houses at Brookhaven. He goes on to found Creative Computing, an early, influential magazine on the industry. On the other side is Ralph Baer, filer of the first home videogame patent for what would become the Odyssey. During many years of litigation defending his patent, Baer learns of Higinbotham's creation, and he describes it as a simple, oscilloscope-based ballistics demonstration. It has also been stated by David Potter, a colleague of Higinbotham involved in the initial development of Tennis for Two, that a high school student attending the demonstration of the game seemed particularly interested in its design. So much so that he later requested the schematics, schematics that Higinbotham then provided. Later it is learned by the pair that this young man grew up to become president of one of the first companies producing TV games in the PONG era. The name of this precocious entrepreneur, and how his involvement might have been overlooked during the Magnavox litigation, is lost to history. Unfortunately, the man at the centre of the "PONG" controversy cannot speak for himself: William Higinbotham, first chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and owner of 20 patents concerning electronic circuits, passes away from emphysema on November 10, 1994, at the age of 84.

Multimedia:

Images

Videos

Tennis for Two - BNL 1958

External Links:

Brookhaven National Laboratory - www.bnl.gov

Acknowledgements - Some images and information came from the following sources, in no particular order:

(Inert links are kept for historical purposes)
Low Bit Games - William Linn - muzak.timesup.org/Obsolete/lectureBolt.html
Pong: The official site devoted to the PONG story - www.pong-story.com/
Video Games: "One More Patent Couldn't Hurt" - library.thinkquest.org/21798/data/tqmainsite/videogame/info_page1.htm
Brookhaven National Laboratory - www.bnl.gov
Computer History Museum - www.computerhistory.org
Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions, by Mary Palevsky - www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8743/8743.intro.html
Video games turn 50 - CBC News - www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2008/10/15/tech-games.html
Tribute to William Higinbotham, Inventor of PONG - fas.org/cp/pong_fas.htm
The Origins of Video Games - eci2.ucsb.edu/~geoff/origins.html
The Real PONG FAQ - gamma.nic.fi/~mikkohoo/peijoonit/pongfaq.htm
DOE Research and Development Accomplishments - kratos.osti.gov:85/
North Adams Transcript, "Secretary McNamara, Gen. Norstad, 6 Others Honored by Williams", pg. eight, June 10, 1963
Independent Press Telegram, "Wonderful Willie from Brookhaven" by Robert P. Goldman, pgs. 17 - 18, May 18, 1958
Altoona Mirror, Obituaries, "Video Game Pioneer", pg. B3, November 16, 1994

Supercade, by Van Burnham, MIT Press 2003, pg. 28

High Score! 2nd edition, by Rusel Demaria & Johnny L. Wilson, McGraw-Hill/Osborne 2004, pg. 10

Plus interviews with:
Ralph Baer
William B. Higinbotham

Spacewar! - Higham Institute/MIT 1962

Wedge vs. Needle

Alan Kotok, Steve Russell and J. M. Graetz play a game of Spacewar! at Boston's Computer Museum in 1984

At MIT circa 1961 there's a group of hardcore computer nerds calling themselves the Tech Model Railroad Club, and for an offchute group known jokingly as the Higham Institute (an apartment building located on Highham St. in Cambridge, Mass.), activities include obsessively discussing the novels of E.E. "Doc" Smith, considered the grandfather of the literary SF genre. They dream up wild fantasies of special-effects-ridden movie sequences based around the writer's Skylark and Lensman novels, containing descriptions of vast interstellar spaceship battles. Then comes word that MIT's aging transistorized TX-0 mainframe computer, located in Building 26 on the second floor Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), is getting a slick new companion: the relatively svelte Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1. Not only is this new computer sexily compact, it also revolutionizes the computer industry by allowing a single programmer in front of its control panel to have complete access to the processor, as opposed to the prevalent idea of time-sharing computer power. Previous demonstration programs (like at Brookhaven, they are developed for public open house purposes) for the TX-0 had consisted of on-screen bouncing balls, user-built mazes for electronic mice to run around in, and the venerable Tic-Tac-Toe. A TMRC brainstorming session is called to create a truly taxing demo program for the enhanced capabilities for the PDP-1. Present are Wayne Witanen and J. Martin Graetz, along with 25 year-old Steve Russell, an AI specialist known as Slug by his buddies due to his tendency to procrastinate. During bull-sessions at the Higham Institute, they recall E.E. Smith's epic space battles, and develop the idea to pit two spaceships with limited fuel supplies against each other in a missile duel. The program becomes Spacewar!, the world's first fully interactive videogame, with Russell as main programmer.

Waging Spacewar!

Two spaceships called the wedge and the needle, according to their shapes, are rendered in rough outline graphics. Other programmers throw aid to Russell, including a sine-cosine routine from Alan Kotok, and a very realistic star field backdrop program called Expensive Planetarium by Peter Samson. Dan Edwards develops the accurate gravity effects in the game, centered around a bright sun at the center of the screen which would draw in ships and shots alike. Graetz develops the Hyperspace feature, which can be used to get a player out of scrapes by disappearing and then randomly reappearing on the screen, but as often as not it put him right back into trouble. By spring of 1962, the game is completed, weighing in at a grand total of 9K. Fed into the PDP-1 via paper tape input and viewed on the attached CRT screen, Spacewar 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. History is also made by two Spacewar addicts at MIT who wire together the first gaming joystick devices to replace the control switches. Spacewar 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, and DEC even uses the program to demonstrate the capabilities of the PDP-1 to new clients and includes it free with every installed system. The fervor over the game among nerds at MIT causes the school to take the step of banning Spacewar, outside of lunch breaks and after work hours.

Once again, just like Willie Higinbotham, Russell doesn't seek to copyright or patent his work. Not only would seeking royalties contradict the hacker ethos revered by these early computer geniuses, but also likely is the fact that the system Spacewar is running on is the size of three refrigerators and costs $120,000. Due to its ubiquitous nature and public domain status, the game will end up as the foundation of the entire videogame industry and one of the most copied concepts in videogame history. It inspires arcade translations such as the first commercial arcade game, Computer Space, as well as Space Wars and even Atari's Asteroids, to home console games for systems like the Atari VCS and Odyssey².