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The Earliest Documented Video Game

Posted by Zonk on from the truly-old-school dept.

AsiNisiMasa writes "The first documented video game was created in 1952 by a scientist who felt the need to give his work relevance to society. It was called 'Tennis for Two' and took up about as much room as one would expect. The article at Brookhaven History comes complete with several pictures and even video: 'A two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court was displayed on an oscilloscope, which has a cathode-ray tube similar to a black and white TV tube. In order to generate the court and net lines and the ball, it was necessary to time-share these functions. While the rest of the system used vacuum tubes and relays, the time-sharing circuit and the fast switches used transistors, which by 1958 were coming into use.'"

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. very cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    that game seems much more complex than Pong. The only thing I don't get is how the players know where their 'racquet' is...

  2. Not just old school - old news too :P by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This has been widely reported in a lot of different places for a long time now; it is still kind of interesting, I guess, but it's not exactly a recent discovery. Most video game historians discount it entirely, as Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell had no knowledge of its existence. Much like Charles Babbage's steampunk computers actually! A curiousity but not much more.

  3. Old News by Landshark17 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This was in David Kushner's "Masters of Doom"

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