Early history of video games
The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the early 1970s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and personal computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early personal computer and arcade video games in the 1970s, followed by Pong and the beginning of the first generation of video game consoles with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.
Following the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device—the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to use an electronic display—the first true video games were created in the early 1950s. Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the Bertie the Brain and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951 and a bouncing ball program in 1951, video games also became the purview of academic research. A series of games, generally simulating real-world board games, were created at various research institutions to explore programming, human–computer interaction, and computer algorithms. These include Sandy Douglas' OXO, Christopher Strachey's Checkers, and Stanley Gill's Sheep and Gates, the first software-based games to incorporate a cathode-ray tube display, and several chess and checkers programs.
Possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958's Tennis for Two, featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. As computing technology improved over time, computers became smaller and faster, and the ability to work on them was opened up to university employees and undergraduate students by the end of the 1950s. These new programmers began to create games for non-academic purposes, leading up to the 1962 release of Spacewar! as one of the earliest known digital computer games to be available outside a single research institute.
Throughout the rest of the 1960s increasing numbers of programmers wrote digital computer games, which were sometimes sold commercially in catalogs. As the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers, and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created, a wider variety of games began to be developed. Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry in 1971 with the release of the first arcade video game Computer Space, and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game Pong and the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which launched the first generation of video-game consoles.
Defining the video game
The term "video game" has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment. Technically, for a product to be a video game under early definitions, it needed to transmit a video signal to a display.This can include a cathode ray tube, oscilloscope, liquid crystal display, or vector-scan monitor. This definition would preclude early computer games that outputted results to a printer or teletype rather than a display, as well as games that used static LCD graphics, for example Nintendo's Game & Watch, or most Tiger Electronics handhelds. From a technical standpoint, these would more properly be called "electronic games" or "computer games".
Today the term "video game" has completely shed its purely hardware-dependent definition and encompasses a wider range of technology. While still rather ill-defined, the term "video game" now generally encompasses any game played on hardware built with electronic logic circuits that incorporates an element of interactivity and outputs the results of the player's actions to a display. Going by this broader definition, the first video games appeared in the early 1950s; they were tied largely to research projects at universities and large corporations, though, and had little influence on each other due to their primary purpose as academic and promotional devices rather than entertainment games.
The ancestors to these games include the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to incorporate a cathode-ray tube screen. The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope, with a set of knobs and switches. The device uses purely analog electronics and does not use any digital computer or memory device or execute a program. It was patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947. While the idea behind the game was potentially to use a television set as the display and thus sell the invention to consumers, as Goldsmith and Mann worked at television designer DuMont Laboratories, the patent, the first for an electronic game, was never used and the device never manufactured beyond the original handmade prototypes.
This, along with the lack of electronic logic circuits, keeps the device from being considered the first video game. In 1948, shortly after the patenting of this device, Alan Turing and David Champernowne developed the earliest known written computer game—a chess simulation called Turochamp—though it was never actually implemented on a computer as the code was too complicated to run on the machines of the time. Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a real chess-game against an opponent, but was never able to run the program on a computer.
Initial games
The first electronic digital computers, Colossus and ENIAC, were built during World War II to aid the Allied war effort. Shortly after the war, the promulgation of the first stored program architectures at the University of Manchester, University of Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University allowed computers to be easily reprogrammed to undertake a variety of tasks, which facilitated commercializing computers in the early 1950s by companies like Remington Rand, Ferranti, and IBM. This in turn promoted the adoption of computers by universities, government organizations, and large corporations as the decade progressed. It was in this environment that the first video games were born.The computer games of the 1950s can generally be divided into three categories: training and instructional programs, research programs in fields such as artificial intelligence, and demonstration programs intended to impress or entertain the public. Because these games were largely developed on unique hardware in a time when porting between systems was difficult and were often dismantled or discarded after serving their limited purposes, they did not generally influence further developments in the industry. For the same reason, it is impossible to be certain who developed the first computer game or who originally modeled many of the games or play mechanics introduced during the decade, as there are likely several games from this period that were never publicized and are thus unknown today.
The earliest known publicly demonstrated electronic game was created in 1950. Bertie the Brain was an arcade game of tic-tac-toe, built by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. To showcase his new miniature vacuum tube, the additron tube, he designed a specialized computer to use it, which he built with the assistance of engineers from Rogers Majestic. The large metal computer, which was four meters tall, could only play tic-tac-toe on a lightbulb-backed display, and was installed in the Engineering Building at the Canadian National Exhibition from August 25 to September 9, 1950. The game was a success at the two-week exhibition, with attendees lining up to play it as Kates adjusted the difficulty up and down for players. After the exhibition, Bertie the Brain was dismantled, and "largely forgotten" as a novelty. Kates has said that he was working on so many projects at the same time that he had no energy to spare for preserving it, despite its significance.
A year later on May 5, 1951, the Nimrod computer—created by engineering firm and nascent computer developer Ferranti—was presented at the Festival of Britain, and then showcased for three weeks in October at the Berlin Industrial Show before being dismantled. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of Nim; moves were made by players pressing buttons which corresponded with the lights. Nimrod could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game. The machine was twelve feet wide, nine feet deep, and five feet tall. It was based on an earlier Nim-playing machine, "Nimatron", designed by Edward Condon and built by Westinghouse Electric in 1940 for display at the New York World's Fair. "Nimatron" had been constructed from electromechanical relays and weighed over a ton. The Nimrod was primarily intended to showcase Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than entertain, and was not followed up by any future games. Despite this, most of the onlookers at the Festival of Britain were more interested in playing the game than in the programming and engineering logic behind it.
File:Strachey draughts ferranti.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Christopher Strachey's 1952 draughts program on a Ferranti Mark 1
Around this time, non-visual games were being developed at various research computer laboratories. The first of these was Christopher Strachey's Checkers for the Pilot ACE, which he unsuccessfully attempted to run for the first time in July 1951 at the British National Physical Laboratory and completed in 1952; Checkers was the first known computer game to be created for a general-purpose computer, rather than a machine specifically made for the game like Bertie the Brain. Strachey's program inspired Arthur Samuel to develop his own checkers game in 1952 for the IBM 701; successive iterations developed rudimentary artificial intelligence by 1955 and a version was shown on television in 1956. Also in 1951, Dietrich Prinz wrote the first limited program of chess for the University of Manchester's general-purpose Ferranti Mark 1 computer, one of the first commercially available computers. The program was only capable of computing "mate-in-two" problems as it was not powerful enough to play a full game, and it had no video output. Around the same time in the early 1950s, military research organizations like the RAND Corporation developed a series of combat simulation games of increasing complexity, such as Air Defense Simulation, developed by the Army Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University in 1948. It was followed by the Carmonette series, beginning in 1953, featuring ground combat at the levels of the individual soldier and company and expanded through the 1970s. Hutspiel, created in 1955, was a theater-level war game for an analog computer also by the Operations Research Office. The game was played by two people, red and blue, representing a war simulation between NATO and USSR forces, and was designed to study the use of tactical nuclear weapons and air support in Western Europe in the case of Soviet invasion. These simulations were not yet true video games, as they required human intervention to interpret the player's orders and the final results; the computer only controlled the paths that the enemies would take, and the programs were focused on simulating events and probabilities.