When did video games first come out?

Answer 1

Before the era of electronic ping pong, hungry yellow dots, plumbers, mushrooms, and fire-flowers, people waited in line to play Video Games at roller-skating rinks, arcades, and other hangouts. Fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play "Tennis for Two," an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game. Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab's annual visitors' days. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game's creator, William Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists. Higinbotham realized how static and non-interactive most science exhibits were at that time. As head of Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division, he would change that. While reflecting on his creation, Higinbotham wrote, "it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society."

Visitors playing Tennis for Two saw a two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court on the oscilloscope screen, which used a cathode-ray tube similar to a black and white television tube. The ball, a brightly lit, moving dot, left trails as it bounced to alternating sides of the net. Players served and volleyed using controllers with buttons and rotating dials to control the angle of an invisible tennis racquet's swing. Liven up the place it did! Hundreds of visitors lined up for a chance to play the electronic tennis game. And Higinbotham could not have dreamed that his game would be a forerunner to an entire industry that less than fifty years later, would account for $9.5 billion in sales in 2006 and 2007 in the U.S. alone, according to a report published by the Electronic Software Association. In 1982, Creative Computing magazine picked up on the idea that Tennis for Two might be the first video game ever and it published a story on the game in that year's October issue. It credited Higinbotham as the inventor of the video game - until they heard from someone who could document an earlier game. The same story was reprinted in the Spring 1983 issue of Video and Arcade Games, a sister magazine to Creative Computing.