Slashdot Mirror

Apparently the Magnavox Odyssey was a pure analog console. How can you achieve such a thing?

http://www.pong-story.com/2455992.pdf

My grandmother got the original Sears Telegames-branded Atari C100. I later got a Telstar Ranger, which was pong plus a gun.

I had a stand-alone Coleco pong (telstar) console, it was a small box, with two rotors (paddles), and connected to a TV (black and white game)... to play pong.. was a mid 70's thing... does that count?

Figuring out what the first video game or first computer game is quickly becomes a matter of definitions. If you allow games that could be played without a computer, e.g. Noughts and Crosses, OXO on the EDSAC in 1952 appears to be the first computer game. U.S. patent #2455992 from 1947 describes an early electronic game (arguably a precursor to Missile Command) implemented using technology similar to Tennis for Two.

Pong on the Coleco Telstar Ranger.

You could play any game you wanted to as long as it was:
Pong
Hockey
Tennis
Jai Alai
Skeet
or
Target

http://www.pong-story.com/coleco_ranger.htm

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the show in question, so I may be off here.

A good argument can be made that, while Ralph Baer deserves an absolute mountain of credit, he wasn't the one who invented video games. As part of his dissertation on human-computer interaction, A.S. Douglas created a video game called naughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, producing the earliest video game of which I've been able to find a photograph/working (emulated) model. http://www.pong-story.com/1952.htm

US Patent 2,455,992, however, describes a video game system in which the player adjusts the angle of a missile launcher in an attempt to shoot down targets...an early version of scorched earth, so to speak. It was filed on January 25, 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man, making it the earliest video game I've been able to find evidence of. http://www.jmargolin.com/patents/2455992.pdf

Geez, kids nowadays...;-)

Actually, we're talking about the original electronic version, you insensitive clod!

Which, incidentally, was on an oscilloscope...circa 1958 (I was three! :-))
Check out the site, which includes photos, and 'spacewar'...true classics...

http://www.designboom.com/eng/education/pong.html

'tennis for two' on an oscilloscope
working at brookhaven national laboratory, a us nuclear research
lab in upton, new york, william a. higinbotham, a chain-smoking,
fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player, wants to
develop an open house exhibit at bnl that will entertain people as
they learn. his idea is to use a small analog computer in the lab to
graph and display the trajectory of a moving ball on an oscilloscope,
with which users can interact.
missile trajectory plotting is one of the specialties of computers at
this time, the other being cryptography.
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 open house in october 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.
the game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious.
http://www.pong-story.com/inventor.htm
brookhaven national laboratory - www.bnl.gov
tribute to william higinbotham, inventor of 'pong' - fas.org/cp/pong_fas.htm

It partly depends on whether you're using something like this or something like this.

Now, more seriously, the fact is that the dynamic range of vinyl records is about 60dB in the best case, as opposed to about 100dB for a CD. What makes a vinyl actually sound good (or at least 'different') is all the sound enhancement process which is performed to overcome the 'poor' dynamic range.

There's also some maths behind that if you're curious: RIAA curve. (And yeah, that was way before these guys were most known for their efforts against file sharing.)

It partly depends on whether you're using something like this or something like this.

Now, more seriously, the fact is that the dynamic range of vinyl records is about 60dB in the best case, as opposed to about 100dB for a CD. What makes a vinyl actually sound good (or at least 'different') is all the sound enhancement process which is performed to overcome the 'poor' dynamic range.

There's also some maths behind that if you're curious: RIAA curve. (And yeah, that was way before these guys were most known for their efforts against file sharing.)

Yeah, but the 2600 was not one of those old "Pong/Table Tennis/Football/etc" TV games with the two analog paddles.

I was confused because Pong (a table tennis sim) and Football were early 2600 titles, if not launch titles. A lot of the early dedicated consoles just used various Pong-on-a-chip ASICs.

I had a Telstar Arcade when I was a kid. It would have maybe been marginally cool if I had been able to get more than the original cartridge that came with it. :-(

I've never seen brown succeed with any piece of consumer electronics.

Incidentally, Bushnell's company, Atari, was the first to take a license under my patents in the 70's. The fact that Nolan Bushnell developed PONG after he played a ping-pong game on an Odyssey 1TL200 at a L.A. Magnavox dealership demo in May of 1972 is also well-known.

The Odyssey 300 was my first system:

http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey_other.htm (it's the yellow one).

True story about that one though - the RF modulators in those days were a joke. They were basically just air (we cracked one open), and allowed the companies to dodge FCC violations on interference by putting the crime into the hands of the people (customers) who hooked it up. At the time I was living some 60 miles south of St. Louis, and to get TV reception of any decent kind, you needed an arial similar in height and construction to ones used by HAM radio operators.

The signals from the game sprayed all over the town as a result. This wasn't a faint jittery ghost image on Channel 3 - this was clear-as-a-bell-as-if-I'd-hooked-the-unit-up-to-yo ur-tv-myself, image. Kids at school were wondering who was playing on the left and the right - which is what caused a series of long-range bike rides to check our broadcast range later. Of course to this day I'm wondering what the ratings on "Pong TV" were from 7pm-830pm CST.

No, I'd never use dorktype . . .

Maybe not. But I find it hilarious. (In a sort of contorted way.) :-P

Anyway, I *am* thinking of the Odyssy 2, not the Odyssy^2. Two different machines.

The Odyssy 2 came with screen overlays, two controllers, and a light-rifle. It had verticle, horizontal, and english controllers.

You're describing the Odyssey. (Why do you keep dropping the 'e', BTW? Is that some sort of British thing?) After that there was the improved versions known as the Odyssey 200 through the Odyssey 3000. The only other machine in the line was the Odyssey^2, sometimes referred to as the "Odyssey 2". I really have no idea why you're appending the '2' to the name of your original Odyssey machine. :-)

Odyssey FAQ

The tennis for two game was created in 1958...

I teach a class on videogame history, and this game of knots-and-crosses (OXO) in 1952 appears to be the earliest well documented computer game.

You can even download a simulator and play/modify it.

A noughts and crosses/tic tac toe game on the EDSAC system, was possibly the first ever computer game, created in 1952 by A. S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge, though not really a true video game like Tennis For Two,

Linky

We had one of the original Odyssey units (none of this 2 nonsense). Mom worked for a Magnavox dealer so we got the first one that came into the store. IIRC it would have been in 1972/73 -- I was in grade school at the time.

In the original Odyssey, all the games were basically variants of Pong. The console only painted a few white squares (basically the game pieces -- no walls/obstacles), and you put a plastic overlay on your TV screen to simulate the court/maze/whatever.

Nolan Bushnell may be a hugely cool dude who I respect a lot, but he did not invent Pong. That honor goes to Ralph Baer

And the statement "Konrad Zuse, inventor of the computer" isn't exactly accurate either.

I know, off-topic, but someone already took my FreeDoS joke and I had to post something.

I believe that Ralph Baer's Odyssey prototype was built in 1966. But the first interactive "video" game was actually Willy Higginbotham's Tennis For Two, built in 1958 on an oscilloscope. It wasn't a true video game, but I believe it was the first of its kind in interactive CRT entertainment (until I am otherwise proven wrong).

Google to the rescue

maybe we could it turn into a big game of pong

WTF are you smoking?

Try this
Or this

All of those newer systems like NES, SNES, etc. are not gaming "history", they're just fancy Fairchild/A2600 systems.

I suppose you think Street Fighter is a classic historical video game, eh? Young'uns... so lame.

Something tells me Dubya is still trying to comprehend Pong.

What we need is someone to play PONG on a building!

Atari 2600: 1977 to ~1984 (~7 yrs)

Nintendo Famicom: 1983 to 1990 (7 yrs)
Sega SG-x000 (later Sega Master System): 1983 to ~1988 (5 yrs)

Sega MegaDrive/Genesis: 1988 to 1994 (6 yrs)
Nintendo Super Famicom: 1990 to 1996 (6 yrs)

Sony Playstation: 1994 to (1999, but now rereleased as PSOne today)
Sega Saturn 1994 to 1998 (4 yrs)
Nintendo 64: 1996 to 2001 (5 yrs)

Sega Dreamcast 1998 to 2003 (5 yrs)
Sony Playstation 2: 1999 to ?
Nintendo GameCube: 2001 to ?
Microsoft Xbox: 2001 to ?

The video game industry is well over 30 years old, with the Magnavox Odyssey released in January 1972. It is just plain wrong to say the video game industry is young.

As for this being the longer generation, that's a hard claim to pin down. You can't really say "X generation lasted Y years" because consoles are not released all at once. The 8-bit generation either lasted until the introduction of the Sega Genesis in 1988, or it ended when Nintendo began selling the Super Famicom in 1990? (Or you could even say it never really ended, since Nintendo was still producing Famicoms long after 1990.)

I suppose you could say the Sega Dreamcast marks the start of this generation in 1998, and then if the first next-generation console comes out in 2006 it would make this the longest run without new blood. But wait, couldn't you say the Microsoft Xbox is "next-generation" along with the GameCube, having almost double the power of the Dreamcast and PS2?

Or you could ignore all of this, realize that we're all just waiting for "the next big thing" and start saving your pennies now. ; )

This site and Google are your friends.

No, Atari Games was the original operation -- Atari started out as an arcade game company, then branched out into consumer electronics. Time Warner spun off the consumer division as Atari Computer.

For those who don't know, the first "video game" was, in fact, a game of tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses for some of you out there)

http://www.pong-story.com/1952.htm

If you don't have an EDSAC at home (of course you don't) you can get the emulator and the origional code A.S. Douglas wrote here:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/

recompile.org

The holodeck first showed up on the Star Trek animated series in 1973. At the time I think the most advanced form of Virtual Reality was Pong!.

I played a lot of violent games as a youth. I smashed balls, I beat people up, I violently ate ghosts , and I even engaged in animal cruelty.

And now I am an axe-murderer.

Don't be like me.

Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but perhaps a paragraph or two on the the Magnavox Odyssey and it's betaMax-like demise may be just the history we need so later failures learn the lesson before trying and dying on the lonely shelves of stores and warehouses.

Not that Nolan Bushnell doesn't deserve a happy birthday, but isn't Ralph Baer the father of video games?

Maybe the father of video games at home.

Ravi

I think it's great that people are doing this. It is an important step in learning how to build much more complex systems, gaming or otherwise. But, it has already been done some 40 years ago. What's more, there weren't all these off the shelf chips that these guys used.

For those that are old enough to remember, I'm sure that you are already having fond memories of Pong. For those that are a bit younger, take a look at this.

Ahhh pong I remember the first time I played pong on one of these pong ah the good ole days.....if only the dog hadn't chewed the thing to bits.. might be worth something now.

I have an idea for the ultimate video game! Picture a dotted line down the middle of a rectangular field, where two line segments hit a small square back and forth in a virtual game of table tennis. Here is a link to what I have so far.

here's info on the gi chips for intellivision...

atari and nintendo stuff...

Before Coleco Vision, before Intellivision, even before the Atari 2600, there was the Coleco's Telstar Arcade. I remember many late nights spent in my jammies with this baby!

Is it compatible with the Odyssey? Can I play pong on it?

For those of you wishing to know more about the history of PONG, you should check out PONG-Story. It's got a lot of great information about Ralph Baer, Atari, etc. A must for any PONG aficionados out there!

Did you have an Odyssey or an Odyssey^2? The original Odyssey was VERY rudimentary. More details cam be found here.

I had one of these machines, and I had a friend who gave me a Channel F years later. I remember liking the airplane dogfight game on that alot, but the controllers were wierd.

According to this page it was 1972 :-)

Although not a video game, Willy Higinbotham built in 1958 the very first game based around a computer and a CRT at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, New-York, USA). The game was shown to the public during two years in the labs, used an oscilloscope to generate the picture, and a vaccuum tube analog computer to calculate the trajectory of the ball. The game consisted in a little tennis court shown in front view: a reversed 'T' as a net, and a bouncing point as the ball (you can read a very interesting article about the story of this game). Unfortunately, Willy Higinbotham did not find any interest in his game, and did not patent it. What a pitty, when we see all the money involved in video games ! This was the short story of the first game.

Although not a video game, Willy Higinbotham built in 1958 the very first game based around a computer and a CRT at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, New-York, USA). The game was shown to the public during two years in the labs, used an oscilloscope to generate the picture, and a vaccuum tube analog computer to calculate the trajectory of the ball. The game consisted in a little tennis court shown in front view: a reversed 'T' as a net, and a bouncing point as the ball (you can read a very interesting article about the story of this game). Unfortunately, Willy Higinbotham did not find any interest in his game, and did not patent it. What a pitty, when we see all the money involved in video games ! This was the short story of the first game.

Actually it wasn't jammed, the coins fell into an empty milk carton, and the coins overflowed the carton, and landed on the PCB. The excellent Pong Story website has all the details.

Spacewar came before Pong, but wasn't very sucessful. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, ported Spacewar, but it wasn't too successful (it had *gasp* instructions), so he made a game simple enough for "a drunk in a bar" to play - Pong. See http://www.pong-story.com/atpong1.htm for more info.

For those who are interested, I found this site a while back, which gives a detailed history of video games through the ages.

http://www.pong-story.com/intro.htm

Remember Pong?

--CTH


---

I look forward to being able to test this out... It looks to be a blast. When you look back, It's increadible how far gaming has come in the last 20 years. This will be great!

--CTH

--

From 'Who did it first?

If this arrangement of hardware still qualifies in anyone?s mind as a video game, then he/she might wish to look into much earlier interactive uses of random access displays such as a scope. During and shortly after WW II both the US and the German army used such displays for missile tracking... definitely an interactive use....but were these video games? Not by any rational definition of that word. Nor is Higginbotham?s demo.

Well, of course it isn't a video game because it isn't a game! They're tracking real, live missiles. Stupid.

That whole entire page is the most self serving load of tripe I've ever read. Ralph Baer apparently managed to fool a judge into believing that HigginBotham's work didn't represent prior art and thinks it means something besides more than him retaining his ability to extort money over a long since dead piece of technology.