Early history of video games

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The early history of video games dates back to 1947, with a missile simulator that uses analog circuitry.

The origin of video games lies in early cathode ray tube-based missile defense systems in the late 1940s. These programs were later adapted into other simple games during the 1950s. By the late 1950s and through the 1960s, more computer games were developed (mostly on mainframe computers), gradually increasing in sophistication and complexity. Following this period, video games diverged into different platforms: arcade, mainframe, console, personal computer and later handheld games.

1889

• Nintendo is founded.

1940

• Sega is founded.

1946

• Sony is founded.

1947

• The earliest known interactive electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.

1948

Alan Turing and colleague D. G. Champernowne wrote a chess playing algorithm. At the time, there was not a computer powerful enough to run the algorithm. The algorithm was tested two times by human versus algorithm matches. The algorithm won once and lost once.

1950

In March 1950, Claude Shannon devised a chess playing program that appeared in the paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" published in Philosophical Magazine. This was the first article on the problem of computer chess, published before anyone had programmed a computer to play chess.

1951

• On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented at the Science Museum (London) during the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.

• TV engineer named Ralph Baer was asked by the chief engineer at Loral to build "the best television set in the world". Baer came up with an idea for playing games on the television set, but the idea was turned down.

• In November 1951, Dr. Dietrich Prinz wrote the original chess playing program for the Manchester Ferranti computer.

1952

• In 1952, one of the first video games ever made, OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) by A. S. Douglas. OXO was written for the EDSAC computer. The game was a Tic-tac-toe based game, played against the computer, and although OXO never gained any real popularity, because the EDSAC was available only at Cambridge, it was still a milestone in the history of video games.
• Christopher S. Strachey created a program on the Ferranti machine which, by the summer of 1952, "could play a complete game of draughts (checkers) at a reasonable speed". Arthur Samuel built on his work to make a checkers-playing program for the IBM 701, which ran at the end of the year.

1958

• Tennis for Two was a computer game developed in 1958 on an oscilloscope which simulated a game of tennis or ping pong. It was created by William Higinbotham. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side instead of a top-down perspective. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game was controlled by an analog computer and "consisted mostly of resistors, capacitors and relays, but where fast switching was needed – when the ball was in play – transistor switches were used".

1959

In 1959-1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 machine at MIT:

• Mouse in the Maze: which allowed users to place maze walls, bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini by way of a light pen interacting with the screen. One could then release the mouse and watch it traverse the maze to find the goodies.

• Tic-Tac-Toe: Using the light pen, the user could play a simple game of naughts and crosses against the computer.

1961

• A DEC memo M-1098 from March 31, 1961 references a Kalah game playing program developed for the PDP-1.

1962

File:Spacewar!-PDP-1-20070512.jpg

Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1

• Spacewar! is released, one of the earliest known digital computer games. Conceived and written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students including Stephen Russell who programmed it, the Spacewar! game first ran in early 1962 on the PDP-1 donated to the school by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Early versions of the game contained a randomly generated background starfield.

• Later, a program called Expensive Planetarium (referring to the price of the PDP-1 computer) was incorporated into the main code, replacing the randomly generated star field. The program was based on real star charts that scrolled slowly: at any one time, 45% of the night sky was visible, every star down to the fifth magnitude.

1965

• First ever baseball simulation game written in BASIC by John Kemeny and later edited by Keith Bellairs on January 13, 1965.

1966

• Larry Bethurum, from the Phillips Exter Academy, submitted the BASIC source code of a bingo game to the DECUS user group. Comments in the code suggest the game was written on January 23, 1966.

• Sega introduced an early electro-mechanical arcade game called Periscope. It was an early submarine simulator and light gun shooter, which used lights and plastic waves to simulate sinking ships from a submarine. It became a worldwide success in Japan, Europe, and North America, where it was the first arcade game to cost a quarter per play, which would remain the standard price for arcade games for many years to come.

1967

• First basketball simulation game written in BASIC by Charles R. Bacheller in May, 1967.

• A baseball game that simulates the 1967 World Series written in BASIC by Jacob Bergmann in August 1967.

• Taito released an early electro-mechanical arcade game, Crown Soccer Special, a two-player sports game that simulated association football, using various electronic components, including electronic versions of pinball flippers.

1969

• Space Travel is written by Ken Thompson for a Multics system.

• Hamurabi, one of the first strategy games, is released.

• Sega produced gun games which resemble first-person shooter video games, but were in fact electro-mechanical games that used rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. The first of these was the light gun game Duck Hunt, which featured animated moving targets on a screen, printed out the player's score on a ticket, and had sound effects that were volume controllable.

• Sega released an early electro-mechanical arcade racing game Grand Prix, which had a first-person view, electronic sound, a dashboard with a racing wheel and accelerator, and a forward-scrolling road projected on a screen.

• Sega's Missile was an electro-mechanical shooter and vehicle combat simulation that featured electronic sound and a moving film strip to represent the targets on a projection screen. It was also the earliest known arcade game to feature a joystick with a fire button, which was used as part of an early dual-control scheme, where two directional buttons are used to move the player's tank and a two-way joystick is used to shoot and steer the missile onto oncoming planes displayed on the screen; when a plane is hit, an explosion is animated on screen along with an explosion sound.

1970

• A number of games programmed in BASIC can be found in the DECUS library back-up tapes. Unfortunately, most games do not include the name of the programmer or the date when the program was written.

• Sega released Jet Rocket, an electro-mechanical combat flight simulator featuring cockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit.
• Sega's electro-mechanical Misile game was released in North America as S.A.M.I. by Midway.

1971

• On 22 March, Ralph Baer files with the United States Patent and Trademark Office regarding a patent for "television gaming and training apparatus."
• In June, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck form Computer Recreations, Inc.
• Magnavox signs a license agreement with Sanders Associates regarding the Odyssey video game console.
• Nintendo enters the video game industry, working with Magnavox on developing the Shooting Gallery light gun accessory for the Odyssey game console.
• Nakamura Manufacturing Ltd. adopts "Namco" as a brand name.

Notable releases

• August: Computer Space, the first commercially sold arcade video game, and the first commercially sold video game of any kind, is location tested by Nutting Associates.
• In September, Computer Recreations, Inc. installs Galaxy Game, a version of Spacewar! for PDP-11 hardware and one of the first coin-operated video arcade games, in Tresidder Union at Stanford University.
• In November, Nutting Associates releases 1,500 cabinets of Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space, the first commercially released video game in the arcades.
• Don Rawitsch, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, students at Carleton College develop The Oregon Trail for a mainframe with teletype terminals.
• Don Daglow programs the computer baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College.
• Mike Mayfield develops Star Trek on a Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 minicomputer.

Early video game industry (1971-1977)

See also: Golden age of arcade video games

The first commercially viable video game was Computer Space in 1971, which laid the foundation for a new entertainment industry in the late 1970s within the United States, Japan, and Europe.