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Anatomy of the First Video Game, Born 1958
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 23, 2008 06:33 PM
from the go-ahead-and-present-your-counter-theories dept.
from the go-ahead-and-present-your-counter-theories dept.
afabbro writes "Fifty years ago, before 'Pong' and 'Space Invaders,' a nuclear physicist created 'Tennis for Two,' a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever. Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"
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Writing quality? (Score:4, Informative)
The prefix "gyn" means female. Maybe you meant "ginormous", but even so...
Re:Writing quality? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Re:Writing quality? (Score:5, Funny)
With all the rental services around now, that's inexcusable.
Parent
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Agreed. Using ginormous at all is a sure sign of a retard, but misspelling it is next level.
Re:Writing quality? (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed! Clearly "hugantic" is the preferable adjective.
Parent
Re:Writing quality? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Where can I download the emulator? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a great game!
And I don't want to play pong tennis. I want the whole analog computer emulated in some way and the oscilloscope's vector graphics too.
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Depends how anal you want to be - you could write code that would put out the relevant signals from a soundcard using 3 channels - one for X, one for Y, one for Z (brightness), or perhaps add another channel and run dual-trace with the second one generating the net along the bottom. A standard old dual trace scope for £50 from eBay would be fine for the display.
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I actually really want an emulator for this as well.
Shopping Cart Pants. (Score:2)
"Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"
Guess no one had the foresight to invent baggy pants. Youngsters have it easy now.
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That's because marine aircraft were smaller in those days. You wouldn't more than three of today's planes into the back of a 1950s station wagon, and even they'd be a tight fit.
Nope, it was the second video game. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nope, it was the second video game. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
And now for the biggest old game: CDC 6600 (Score:2)
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a far more sophisticated effort, actually.
No it's not, tic-tac-toe is a trivially solved game and anyone can tie (or win) if they following something like nine rules. It'd actually be sad if you couldn't write an AI to play it perfectly given that.
The rest of the game wasn't exactly complex either since it didn't have to actually compute much (ie: a bunch of if loops were all it really needed). Computing the physics, edge cases, etc. for something akin to pong is on the other hand can be a major pain in the ass (if done in hardware, for example).
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Not the first (Score:3, Insightful)
Tax money (Score:2)
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Yeah, because video games haven't contributed anything to the economy, created any jobs or in any way driven forward our technological development.
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Good to see where US tax money spent in past.
And think of how much revenue & jobs it has created for US companies many years later. I would say it was a damn good investment.
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The video on the TFA answers that. Apparently, the game was strung together with demos in the instruction book regarding bouncing balls or ballistic missiles. Higinbotham hadn't even considered it to be patentable before being asked because he felt it was an "oh so obvious" thing to do. Also, the gov't would own the patent.
What was interesting though was his "oh so obvious" thought -- 50 years later and we have companies patenting breathing, eating, and sleeping. I guess not all social values of the 50s
gynormous? (Score:2)
Gynormous? (Score:2)
Come on, /. editors, I'm pretty sure the proper English word is "ginormous" (as in gigantic), not "gynormous" (as in a big thing that spins really fast). Look it up.
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Games as inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember the first computer I ever saw, on display in a mall, circa 1975-76. Some homebrew thing, probably about as beefy as a VIC-20. It was playing the old "guess the card" game: think of a card? Is it red? Is it a spade? Is it higher than 8? And so forth, guessing your card fairly quickly (basic binary search).
At 9 years old, I thought that was pretty cool. My dad bought me a few computer mags of the day (Creative Computing and the like), and I got the gist of basic. I remember writing out my first "program" in a Hilroy scribbler, trying to clone what that computer did. Basically 52 or so IF/ELSE statements for every case. Brute force, but hey, I was 9. When I learned that I could use variables to reduce it to a few lines of code, I was hooked; there was no going back.
Got my first computer, an Exidy Sorcerer (Z-80, 1Mhz or so), and had a great time learning the ins and out, writing and selling a few games, pimping it out, and pushing it to the limits. Even got a job (at 11) working on an APL Interpreter for the Z-80. (I was basically paid in hardware :).
On through the PC generation, university, 286, 386, a career in programming, emergence of the Internet, founding a .COM (worth $100M on paper at one time, whoo hoo, damn paper :), and two more subsequent companies.
But it all really started seeing that 8080 play a simple game of "guess the card." If it weren't for seeing that, and getting inspired, who knows where the career might have led.
I'm not sure if today's games could inspire kids in the simple way that old game did for me. The skills and techniques involved in a modern rendered game are so far beyond the grasp of the average kid, the inspiration might be lost, requiring too great a leap to "get it."
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PhotoGuy:
I read a sf story about 25 years ago about a human expedition to a planet with a humanoid civilization at a roughly mediaeval level. They identified a native scientist who was on the brink of discovering Newtonian mechanics, and be
Technically it isn't (Score:2, Insightful)
because an oscilloscope screen is not the same as a video screen. It is the first oscilloscope game, but not the first video game.
A video screen is like a TV set or Monitor, an oscilloscope screen is something quite different. It shows waves not pixels. Video games have pixels. Even vector video games still use pixels and not waves. It is like saying that a curved line is the same thing as a square or dot, or that a screwdriver is the same thing as a hammer. While they may have things in common, they are no
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And even if it were a video screen and not an oscilloscope screen, it still wouldn't be the first, as OXO in 1952 on the EDSAC predated it.
(Yes, there was NIMROD, but that didn't use a video screen. Although, sounds like the first computer game ever, in 1947, a missile simulator game (going from wikipedia here) used a vector video screen.)
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Man do you fail. "Vector" games used CRTs much like oscilloscopes. Some even used storage scopes. The video in video game does not need to be a raster display.
Anyone have more information? (Score:2)
How does a player know where they are standing on the tennis court? If you watch the movie you can see that they can volley the ball back from multiple positions on the court, but I couldn't see where the player was standing on the court.
Anyone know? I have some colleagues that are out at Brookhaven the next few days, but I doubt they'll have time to stop by a
Balin (Score:2)
Look, I have no idea how it happened - I'm just really sleepy and can barely keep my eyes open - but when I first read the story title, I thought it said it was a "Vice President Game". Which I assume would consist of starting up the game and waiting upwards of four years for a dialog box to pop up letting you choose between "Yea" and "Nay".
It's not a _video_ game (Score:4, Insightful)
It'S not a video game, it has nothing to do with video. It's just an analog computer game, that's all. No video involved. And computer games are in fact probably even older, even digital ones.
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Wait! If it's programmed it includes a computer which makes it a computer game.
There are only very few video games around. The most famous one is Pong. Games on consoles like the 2600 or the Nintendo NES are computer games as they are completely done in software executed by a computer.
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Exactly my point. Tomato, toemahtoe
I don't remember properly, but... (Score:2)
Before Tennis for Two at MIT back in 56 a game was created on the huge machine, operated with a bunch of switches, was an asteroid-like game but multiplayer against each other, not asteroids.
I need to re-read Stephen Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" again, that's where I read about it.
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Spacewar! - mistakenly said to be the first video game ever.
Magnavox - first ever commercially available home videogame
Nolan Bushnell's - Atari
All with more detail than the main article, along with video.
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spacewars was the first game on something recognizable as a "computer", and so on.
if stretching the definition of computer to include oscilloscope is valid, then I propose as first video game gladiators fight, which uses swords as controller and display the game trough a high fidelity real real
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It is nice that the summary informs me that something the size of a microwave is, in fact, NOT a gameboy and I can't put it in my pocket. I woulda never figured that out.
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Re:Thank you, captain obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Yeah but it don't work so well in MAME so some people forget that the original had plastic colored strips over the screen.
I still remember the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders, Invisible Invaders was hard to beat.
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Pong, Breakout, and Tank are all solid state hardware machines that didn't run on software in their original, coin-operated forms, and I can safely assume that they're true video games.
There is a debate over Tennis For Two and whether it can be called a video game. I think Steven Kent called it the "first computer game" in his book The Ultimate History Of Video Games, and I took him to task about it in