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Tennis For Two
On the 6th August 1940, the Enola Gay flew over Japan and dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The next day America dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Japan surrendered thus completely ending the Second World War (Europe finished fighting in May after the allies and Russia surrounded Berlin). After America's involvement in the war they retired their RADAR equipment (which we touched on when we were looking at the Magnavox Odyssey) and from this came a crucial moment in the history of the video game industry we know today: the creation of Tennis For Two.
The game was developed by physicist William Higinbotham and was completed on October the 18th 1958, the game has a similiar premise as Pong although the gameplay was much different. The reason the game was created for the upcoming open day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. The game was intended to make the event more exciting. For this game the computer used was an army computer used to calculate the trajectory of ballistic missiles. Higinbotham knew what he had made was special and in 1960 the machine was dismantled.
The game was two player (hence the title) in which the players would hit the green dot meant to resemble the ball to eachother. The screen was round with a grid structure as the background of the game. In 2008, the Brookhaven National Laboratory tried to recreate the game for its 50th anniversary. The only problem with this was that the vaccum tube analog computers used to create the original machine were largely destroyed in the 1960s making it harder to recreate the machine. The team decided to use modern technology to recreate the game, unfortunately the chips they were using kept out due to sudden high voltage spikes during the game. The team at Brookhaven finished the recreation after many months and the game can still be played today.
This game is considered one of the first video games of all time but there is a lot of debate surrounding that, the games OXO and Cathode-Ray Tube Amusment Device came out years before but we'll save that for another time. Higinbotham died in 1994 and is considered the pioneer of gaming as his game was the first one meant for entertainment. Higinbotham, however, felt it was a shame he was more well remembered as the pioneer of video games than for his work trying to stop the development of nuclear warheads. However, Tennis For Two will go down in history as one of gaming's earliest adventures.
