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The Origins of Pong

Posted by Soulskill on from the back-and-forth-back-and-forth dept.

Gamasutra is running a feature about the origins and development of Pong, and how it helped to kick start the gaming industry. Quoting: "... games found their way onto even the earliest mainframes, starting the ongoing trend of implementing video games wherever a viable platform presented itself. The first known instance of an actual implementation was Alexander Douglas's 1952 creation of OXO (also known as Naughts and Crosses), a simple graphical single-player-versus-the-computer tic-tac-toe game on the EDSAC mainframe at the University of Cambridge. Although more proof of a concept than a compelling gameplay experience, OXO nevertheless set the precedent of using a computer to play games. The first known precursor of Pong debuted in 1958 on a visitors' day at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. It was there that William Higinbotham and Robert Dvorak demonstrated Tennis for Two, a small analog computer game that used an oscilloscope for its display."

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. according to the discussion page by wjh31 · · Score: 3, Informative

    on the very article you linked to, even OXO was predated by a missile game in 1947 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_computer_and_video_games&oldid=50887750#The_beginning

    1. Re:according to the discussion page by pines225 · · Score: 1, Informative
      The 1947 missile game may not have been built (we only know that it was patented), though the circuit diagrams would have allowed it. Which may be why the article calls OXO the first actual implementation in 1952.

      But there were other working games before 1952. Two machines for playing the game Nim were built and demoed to the public before 1952: the Nimatron http://www.goodeveca.net/nimrod/nimatron.html was built by Westinghouse in 1940 and played 100,000 games against members of the public, winning 90% of them. The Nimrod http://www.goodeveca.net/nimrod/index.html was demoed in 1951 in Germany and reportedly caused such a furore that (a) the cops had to be called in, and (b) the free beer at the other end of the hall was ignored, according to Turing.