The First Video Game

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Tennis For Two

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Way back in 1958, William Higinbotham invented “Tennis For Two” to liven up visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory, his workplace. The game uses an oscilloscope with two control pads. It remained largely unknown until 1981 when a lawyer trying to break Magnavox's patent for video games came across writings talking about the game.

Blueprints of it were found to predate Magnavox's game, the case was settled out of court, and the game found fame as the second ever invented, since it was later predated by A.S. Douglas' 'OXO' game from 1952.

In retrospect, Higinbotham agreed he should have applied for a patent. But if he had, the patent would have belonged to the Federal government, and no riches would have come his way, anyway. The reason he did not apply, was that at the time, it didn't seem to be any more novel than the bouncing ball circuit in the instruction book

(Music on the video is 'To Find Our Freedom' by Peacekeepers, from the album 'Message From Planet Earth')

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The First Video Game

March 13, 1981 was the day the Brookhaven Bulletin published a story on employee William Higinbotham, speculating that he may have invented the first video game, with his tennis game of 1958.

Creative Computing magazine picked up on the idea and published it in an October 1982 article, crediting Higinbotham as the inventor, that is, 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. To date, no one has been able to prove an earlier claim.

Higinbotham designed the game as entertainment for visitors' days at BNL. In the1950s, most of the exhibits were static displays. Higinbotham, who was then head of the Instrumentation Division, said it occurred to him that "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."

The division had a small analogue computer that contained ten direct-connected operational amplifiers. The computer's instruction book described how to generate various curves on the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays. Among the examples were the trajectory of a bullet subject to gravity and wind resistance, missile trajectories and a bouncing ball. The bouncing ball inspired Higinbotham to design a tennis game. Four of the operational amplifiers were used to generate the ball motions and the others to sense when the ball hit the ground or the net, and to switch the controls to the person in whose court the ball was located.

A two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court was displayed on an oscilloscope, which has a cathode-ray tube similar to a black and white TV tube. In order to generate the court and net lines and the ball, it was necessary to time-share these functions. While the rest of the system used vacuum tubes and relays, the time-sharing circuit and the fast switches used transistors, which by1958 were coming into use.

Tennis For Two was part of the division's exhibit for two years, and it turned out to be a real crowd pleaser. The oscilloscope display in 1958 was only five inches in diameter. The next year saw some improvements: a bigger tube ten or 15 inches in diameter was used, and players had a choice of tennis on the moon, with low gravity, or on Jupiter, with high gravity.

Considering Higinbotham's background, his invention of the game in1958 was a natural outgrowth of his schooling and work experience. During his senior year at Williams College, he used an oscilloscope to reproduce a system to display the audio modulation of a radio station's high frequency radio output.

At Cornell's physics department as a graduate student, he worked as a general purpose technician, learning the new and rapidly developing field of electronics.

The BNL Instrumentation Division's Visitor Day display from 1958 showing the oscilloscope and electronics which ran the Tennis For Two video game (below arrow).

When he joined the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, he worked on cathode-ray tube displays for airborne, shipborne and land-based radars. This involved designing a way to display the echoes returned from distant targets, similar to the problems involved in the tennis game display.

Later, he worked on the Eagle radar display system, which showed the radar returns of ground targets as seen from a high flying B-28. The picture of the target area stood still on the display, in spite of the yaw, pitch or roll of the aircraft while maneuvering toward the target. This work led to patents for inventing circuits using operational amplifiers like those in the analogue computer which was used in the tennis game.

See a streaming video of the Tennis For Two video game in action. (RealPlayer required.)

All in all, then, when Higinbotham designed his video game, he incorporated much of what he had done before. As he recalls, it took him about two hours to lay out the design and a couple of days to fill it in with components on hand. Technician Bob Dvorak put it together in about three weeks, and the two of them took a day or two to debug it.

Was Higinbotham's game the first? Unofficially, it appears so. Here is what Higinbotham knew about the legal side of that question. Sanders Associates applied for the first videogame patent in 1964. The patent was purchased by Magnavox, which put out the first simple game in 1971. Magnavox sued all other entrants to the field.

About 1976 a competitor's lawyer found David Ahl, who had been a high school visitor to the Laboratory in 1958. Ahl had written in his book, Basic Computer Games, that he had played an early video game in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The lawyer tracked down Higinbotham, who had blueprints of the game to prove its date of creation. Other lawyers followed. Said Higinbotham, "In 1981 one lawyer determined to break the Magnavox patent. In February 1982, I made a deposition in this lawyer's office, before the Magnavox lawyers and others. In June, David Potter, Seymour Rankowitz and I were scheduled to testify at a trial in Chicago to break the Magnavox patent. At the last moment the case was settled out of court."

In retrospect, Higinbotham agreed he should have applied for a patent. But if he had, the patent would have belonged to the Federal government, and no riches would have come his way, anyway. The reason he did not apply, was that at the time, it didn't seem to be any more novel than the bouncing ball circuit in the instruction book.

http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp