Video game (Tennis for Two, Spacewar!)
Videojuego (Tennis for Two, Spacewar!)
- Date
- 1958 · confidence high
- Place
- Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, United States; MIT (Spacewar!, 1962)
- Credited to
- William Higinbotham (Tennis for Two); Steve Russell and others (Spacewar!, MIT PDP-1)
- People
- 👤 Steve Russell1937–👤 William Higginbotham1910–1994
- Field
- Tools
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
The earliest interactive games on an electronic screen: a tennis game on an oscilloscope and a space combat game on a minicomputer. They inaugurated the video game as a cultural form.
The cathode-ray tube amusement device (1947) and Cambridge's OXO (1952) are precursors; Spacewar! was the first to spread widely.
What it led to
- The video game industry, today larger than film and music combined
- Arcade machines and the home console
- Computer graphics and interactive simulation
Built on
- Oscilloscope1897-1931
- PDP-1 minicomputer
- analogue computer