50 Years Computer Games
50 years computer games - It all started with a green dot
Two dashes and a smudged green dot - that were the tender beginning of computer games. In 1958, the physicist William Higinbotham crafted a tennis automat for visitors of the research centre Brookhaven. It did, however, not occur to him to have the billion-dollar idea patented.
The screen was just about the size of a CD and the graphics were no more than green luminous dashes on a black background - not what video games look like now. However, half a century ago, the black-green monitor was the attraction at the US Medical Research Centre Brookhaven near New York. The visitors on the Open Day in October 1958 were standing in long queues to get the chance of playing a game of computer tennis.
And that is how it went in 1958: the two players (one couldn’t play against the computer) stood in front of an oscilloscope (actually a measuring device that views signal voltages), whereby each held a control box the size of a bar of chocolate in his hand. One of the buttons delivered the ball on the screen, the other, by turning, determined the spin.
The tennis ball showed its movements on the screen (it really had a tail), it was possible to make out a net, but there was no racket. There was no points total - if a player failed to get the ball, it rolled out of the field at the back and appeared immediately with the opponent who could then deliver it again (see video below).
When he invented this game in 1958, it probably never occurred to William Higinbotham that this device would one day be regarded as the prototype of an industry worth billions and as the forebear of video game classics such as Pong. The physicist, who was born in 1910, was then head of the Instrumentation Division) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
Among others, the scientists at the centre worked with three research reactors and the particle accelerator "Cosmotron". Higinbotham intention was to use his computer tennis (he christened the development Tennis for Two) for public relation purposes. The BNL quotes from Higinbotham’s notes this rather modest evaluation of his game: "It could make the place it bit more cheery if we had a game people could play and which would demonstrate who relevant our research is to society."
Thanks to screen and simple controls, William Higinbotham only needed a few weeks in 1958 to succeed in constructing an intuively easy to understand game. When the current Head of Instrumentation at the BNL, Peter Takacs, reconstructed Tennis for Two on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, he needed significantly longer, as he tells in a video of the Research Centre: "We had to succeed. It had been done once by someone, hence we must be able to construct this too."
In 2008, it took three months to reconstruct Tennis for Two. Higinbotham und Dvorvak only needed a few weeks for the original.
Two dashes and a smudged green dot - that were the tender beginning of computer games. In 1958, the physicist William Higinbotham crafted a tennis automat for visitors of the research centre Brookhaven. It did, however, not occur to him to have the billion-dollar idea patented.
The screen was just about the size of a CD and the graphics were no more than green luminous dashes on a black background - not what video games look like now. However, half a century ago, the black-green monitor was the attraction at the US Medical Research Centre Brookhaven near New York. The visitors on the Open Day in October 1958 were standing in long queues to get the chance of playing a game of computer tennis.
And that is how it went in 1958: the two players (one couldn’t play against the computer) stood in front of an oscilloscope (actually a measuring device that views signal voltages), whereby each held a control box the size of a bar of chocolate in his hand. One of the buttons delivered the ball on the screen, the other, by turning, determined the spin.
The tennis ball showed its movements on the screen (it really had a tail), it was possible to make out a net, but there was no racket. There was no points total - if a player failed to get the ball, it rolled out of the field at the back and appeared immediately with the opponent who could then deliver it again (see video below).
When he invented this game in 1958, it probably never occurred to William Higinbotham that this device would one day be regarded as the prototype of an industry worth billions and as the forebear of video game classics such as Pong. The physicist, who was born in 1910, was then head of the Instrumentation Division) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
Among others, the scientists at the centre worked with three research reactors and the particle accelerator "Cosmotron". Higinbotham intention was to use his computer tennis (he christened the development Tennis for Two) for public relation purposes. The BNL quotes from Higinbotham’s notes this rather modest evaluation of his game: "It could make the place it bit more cheery if we had a game people could play and which would demonstrate who relevant our research is to society."
Thanks to screen and simple controls, William Higinbotham only needed a few weeks in 1958 to succeed in constructing an intuively easy to understand game. When the current Head of Instrumentation at the BNL, Peter Takacs, reconstructed Tennis for Two on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, he needed significantly longer, as he tells in a video of the Research Centre: "We had to succeed. It had been done once by someone, hence we must be able to construct this too."
In 2008, it took three months to reconstruct Tennis for Two. Higinbotham und Dvorvak only needed a few weeks for the original.
