The first games:


On today's blog I want to start talking about the first games.
I myself don't know much about the first games, so I have found myself looking up things such as "the first games" on the Internet.

I found out that as in many other occasions, Wikipedia is wrong. It says that the cathode ray tube amusement device is the first game to ever be invented, which is a wrong statement due to that it wasn't a video game (not fully, at least). In  other websites such as "how-to geek" and "infoplease" I found out that the REAL first game was tennis for two, invented in 1985 by William Higinbothan.

Mr Higinbothan (Higin to his friends) realised how boring the science exhibits were at the time, and decided to change that by creating something more interactive that people could play.
Higin's game used a oscilloscope screen to display the game.

Here is a link to an online version of the game, in case any of you might want to try T.F.T. Click here

Representation of tennis for two on the present day using an oscilloscope.
URL of the image: http://www.m-e-g-a.org/research-education/research/t42-tennis-for-two/

Another important early games are Spacewar by Steve Russell and Computer Space by Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell (the future founders of Atari in 1972).

In 1972 Magnavox released Odyssey, the first home video game system.

Magnavox Odyssey - 1972 promotional film

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2EIsnr_cv4

Atari, the creator of pong, was founded also during 1972.

Gunfight was released in 1975, becoming the first game that used a microprocessor instead of hardwired solid-state circuits.

Above all of these minor improvements since TFT, the most important improvement in the video game industry was the creation of The Galaxy Game (1971), the first arcade game to ever exist. We should also give a bit of its merit to Computer Space (1971), a version of Spacewar! that became the first mass produced arcade game.