Prehistory: Laboratory Experiments

The story

The first video games were not for sale. In 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a cathode-ray tube amusement device, a game played on a screen, though it was never sold.

Computers that played games were shown off as wonders: Bertie the Brain played tic-tac-toe in 1950, and Nimrod played the old game of Nim in 1951. In 1952 Sandy Douglas wrote OXO, noughts and crosses drawn on the screen of Cambridge’s EDSAC computer.

In 1958 William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two for a visitors’ day at Brookhaven National Laboratory: a ball bouncing over a net on an oscilloscope, with a knob and a button for each player.

In 1962 Steve Russell and colleagues at MIT wrote Spacewar! for the PDP-1: two ships fighting in real time, with real physics. Copies spread to university computers across the United States, and it inspired the people who started the games industry.

The games in the lab here are our own recreations, written from descriptions of the originals. No original code is used.