Condensed History of Video Games: From Tic-Tac-Toe to Pong (1952-1975)

This is part of a series. Please also see:
Condensed History of Video Games: The Rise and Fall of Atari (1975-1984)
Condensed History of Video Games: Nintendo Seal of Quality (1984-1989)


What was the first video game? The answer is not easy, because what we recognize as a "video game" has gone through much metamorphosis since the first efforts 60 years ago.

The main unifying feature of the early video games was a lack of microprocessor. All the logic was implemented in a finite-state-machine using discrete transistors or relays and vacuum tubes (for the 1950s examples) or transistor chips like the 7400-series, wired together on PCBs. Because of the cost and complexity of microcontrollers of any size, it was still de rigeur for the next decade to implement the game machine using discrete chips. The only microprocessor in the world in 1971 was the brand new Intel 4004, and that would have been extremely expensive for the simple computing needs of these machines.

Earliest efforts 

The first graphical interactive computer video game was Noughts and Crosses (that's the British term for tic-tac-toe) in 1952. It was built for the EDSAC machine at Cambridge University, which was unique to the institution. It didn't play in real time, and it was complicated. The moves were entered into the machine on a rotary telephone dial, and appeared on a dot-matrix style display of small light bulbs. It could be considered genesis, but it was unique to the EDSAC architecture and could not be ported. Nobody was interested.

The first real-time graphical interactive video game was Tennis for Two, a game quite similar to Pong, implemented on an oscilloscope by the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. It was devised as a means to alleviate the boredom of visitors of the lab on the annual Visitor's Day, and quickly became popular, attracting long queues of hundreds of people. Evidently, nobody at this establishment thought that such a device was commercializable. This was clearly a missed opportunity- imagine if the first video games hit the market in the early 1960s rather than the early 1970s. This is probably the earliest video game that would be recognizable as such to a modern observer.

Respectable-looking people playing Spacewar! in 1962.

Another university effort would follow in 1962, with Spacewar! implemented on a $120,000 DEC PDP-1 mainframe at MIT. Spacewar! was just a showcase for the creativity of MIT's engineers. It was considered fun to play and it was ported to university computers throughout the United States. Such hardware was very expensive and it would have been ludicrous to dedicate a full-sized computer to running a game program all the time. It also ran on a very expensive vector display.

Paid gameplay would not yet be profitable for operators for loose change. To make the step to commercialization, video games needed something incredibly simple that could run in real-time with instantly-understandable controls, using cheap hardware, and capable of being displayed on a CRT television.

Computer Space

Nolan Bushnell first played Spacewar! in 1964 at the University of Utah, and when he graduated in 1968, he moved to California shortly thereafter. As the 1970s dawned, with prices of computer parts coming down massively, he revisited an earlier idea of making Spacewar! for a dedicated coin-operated machine for profit. Thus, the first commercial video game was Computer Space, a copy of Spacewar!'s gameplay.

 Ironically, this game was significantly more complicated than Pong or most games of the 1970s in terms of its controls. It had a button for thrust and directional buttons for motion of the craft. The machine broke gameplay down into 90-second blocks. If, after 90 seconds, you had a higher score than the two UFOs trying to shoot your craft down, you got to play another 90 seconds. Computer Space was implemented using three PCBs and some 7400-series TTL (transistor-transistor logic) chips. The device had no memory. Display was a 15" black-and-white CRT television set.

Computer Space was a minor flop and few noticed it. It worked and it was fun if you wanted to learn the controls, but customers of such devices want immediate entertainment, and coming from pinball machines, they found Computer Space a bit too geeky. What amused engineering students clearly was not the same thing as what amused the general public. Bushnell and Ted Dabney had released Computer Space through pre-existing coin-op disbtribution company Nutting Associates, but he would found Syzygy later that year. Syzygy's first design engineer was Al Alcorn, and he would work with Bushnell and Dabney to release Pong the next year. By that time, Syzygy had changed its name to Atari, Inc. Atari's name would last basically forever (since 2009, it's been used to rebrand Infogrames, a French studio with no connections to the old company), even long after the original magic was gone.

Pong

The first successful video game was Pong by any measure. But who is to get credit for it?

Atari is usually credited with it. They released Pong in 1972 at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Worryingly, the Pong machine broke down after its first night of business. Bushnell came promptly to fix it in the morning, and he found a queue of patrons waiting to play the game. The problem was simple and quite relieving: the machine had shorted out because the receptacle for quarters (which was an old bread pan) had been filled to overflowing. Pong was, quite literally, a success from day one. It required virtually no learning curve, and the controls provided immediate feedback. Crucially for its debut, it was not so complicated that it was beyond the reach of simple-minded adults who'd just swigged a few beers.

The first home video game system, Magnavox's Odyssey, would come in 1972. The Oddysey was even simpler than Computer Space, with  logic wired in DTL (diode-transistor logic), a forerunner to TTL, and among the earliest digital logic systems conceived. The Odyssey had no sound or memory; a pad of paper was provided to keep track of  scores. Some of the internal signals sent in the Odyssey were analog. Consequently some have incorrectly labeled it as an analog computer. However, the datapath and control unit of this machine most definitely used bits for data and operated in digital logic.

Magnavox Oddysey, the first home video game system

However, the Odyssey hit the market in April 1972, which is three years earlier than Atari's home Pong game systems. And Odyssey had a Tennis game which was identical to Pong, which came out before Atari's arcade upright Pong machines ever hit the bars. In fact, Ralph Baer, the mastermind of the Odyssey, actually built his first prototype game system in 1968, including a fully-playable version of Tennis. Magnavox successfully sued all of the imitators of their tennis game, including Atari, for copying their design. I am not familiar enough on the topic to claim that Atari actually copied Tennis in making Pong, but Atari settled with Magnavox in favor of the latter, implying that some guilt existed.

Why did Atari do so well while Magnavox failed at the same time? Well, Magnavox was an established home appliance brand and it didn't really know how to sell the new Odyssey. They used them more as a lure to get people to buy high-end Magnavox televisions. Customers, crucially, did not know that the Odyssey would even work with non-Magnavox televisions. This was an enormous hurdle for the new system. Anyone at the time with a modicum of technical sophistication must have guessed that the Magnavox Odyssey would work with any television, because it was simply connected to the twin-lead (or later coax) hookup that the television normally received to connect to an antenna, but the average public wasn't familiar with modifying their televisions in any way, and they were not given confidence in the concept of home video games by Magnavox. Call it one of the most half-hearted marketing attempts of all time.

Consequently, even with a three-year head start, the home Pong systems released by Atari in 1975 put the Odyssey out of business immediately, in no small part because they were well-supported with marketing and proudly displayed: "Works on all televisions, black-and-white or color." 

To say that Pong (no matter whose version is considered) is "the first video game" is not entirely incorrect. It was the first time most average people in Western society became aware of what a "video game" was, and that it was genuinely fun entertainment, and not just a science project. The miracle was making something that did not require an engineer or computer geek to understand or enjoy; it was as easy to operate as a television. No programming or assembly required. It did not have nearly as many moving parts as a pinball machine, and it used relatively simple digital electronic circuits, making it as reliable as a television set. The craze towards video games made it a fixture in bars during the 1970s, and it spelled enormous success for Atari.

This is all a bit of speculation on my part, but looking at the whole history of video games from 1972-1982, it seems Atari might have been too stung by the failure of "nerdy" games like Computer Space and too buoyed by the success of Pong. The lesson was learned too well: from that point on, they would always keep it simple, using one or two buttons to control their games, and using switches or dials rather than multiple buttons. Even six years later, when launching the Atari 2600, one of the most iconic video game systems of all time, the default joystick controller contained just the stick and one button. By comparison, most competitors (the ColecoVision, Intellivision, and others) had at least 10 buttons on their controllers; even the fairly simple NES controller in 1985 had four buttons and a D-pad. If Atari could have imagined the future beyond the 2600, they would see that the simple approach was only temporarily best; it was good for video game beginners, but as the public got used to the simple video games, they would demand something more sophisticated.