Where my addiction began

Right... I’ve been searching around the internet for the best part of a week trying to find out the answer to the question, ‘When did computer games begin?’. After reading through loads of websites and writing down tones of notes, this is what I’ve got.

The idea of a computer game and the creation of one began mostly created by individuals as a hobby on university mainframe computers, but the main ones that I found interesting, I’ve talked a little about them below.

The first human vs. computer game is called ‘OXO’ or another name for it ‘Tic-tac-toe’. It was created by A.S Bouglas in the year 1952 at the University of Cambridge. It was created on the EDSAC computer which I guess to some people it would look something like the Holy Grail in the computer world, but I have little knowledge of computer specs so I’ll stop pretending that I know about it…

Even through that it was the one of the first computer games crated, it is still played all over the internet today. I even played it a few days ago on MSN. The image below is an example of the game.



Jumping 6 years into the future to 1958, a man called William Higinbothan created a game called ‘Tennis for Two’. The game was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The game was played with two box shaped controllers with a knob for trajectory (joystick) and a button to hit the ball back across the court. The graphics showed a basic image of a tennis course featuring a gravity-controlled ball, hitting over a net in the middle.

In 1961, a group of students at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) created a game called ‘Spacewar!’ The game was played with two human controlled spaceships simultaneously shooting other ships and avoiding hitting a star in the center of the screen. Or apparently it could be played human vs. human, circling around the star trying to hit one and other, the site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! Explains both versions, but I’ll have to find out which one is which. The game is credited as the first influential computer game.

Right... Now onto the first video games console. In the year 1966 a man named Ralph Baer worked on an idea that he originally had in 1951, to create seven prototypes that played different video games. The first playable video game was a ‘Chase Game’ where two squares chased each other, sounds rather fun. The last prototype that he built in 1968, and is known as ‘Brown Box’ which played ball and paddle games, target shooting games, and many more. After he won the battle to convince the TV manufacturers that it worked, a company called ‘Magnavox’ signed an agreement with him and in May 1971 the first video game system was released.

After reading all through the websites and the notes I’ve taken, I’ve come to realize that the lovely people who blessed us with gift of games were mainly students or were working for the military. To be honest this shocked me, I thought that the idea behind creating one was going to be some big company who spent many years trying and failing until they got it right, but instead it was students taking advantage of the university’s computers and creating one for a hobby.