Games before there was a games industry
Long before anyone sold a computer game, people who built computers played with them. Early machines were rare, expensive and shared by many users, so a game was usually a side project: a way to show what a machine could do, to test it, or simply to have fun after hours. That is why the history of early video games is better described as a set of separate experiments than as a single line of invention.
It also explains why “the first video game” is a contested title. The answer depends on what you count: a program that plays a game, a game shown on a screen, a game two people can play at once, or a game sold to the public. Different projects satisfy different definitions, and several of them were built without knowing about each other.
Experiments of the late 1940s and 1950s
Some of the earliest game-playing programs were aimed at research rather than entertainment. Games such as chess, checkers and Nim have clear rules and a measurable winner, which made them useful for testing what a machine could do. Researchers in Britain and the United States wrote programs for these games in the late 1940s and 1950s, and these are often discussed as early steps in what later became artificial intelligence research.
A few of these projects were also shown to the public:
- Nimrod, a special-purpose machine built by the firm Ferranti, played the game of Nim against visitors at an exhibition in 1951. It displayed its state with lights rather than a screen.
- OXO, a noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe) program written by A. S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge in about 1952, ran on the EDSAC computer and used a small cathode-ray tube to show the board. It was part of a doctoral project on how people interact with computers.
- Tennis for Two, built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958 by William Higinbotham and colleagues, drew a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope. It used an analog computer and was shown to visitors, who played with simple controllers.
None of these was a product, and each was a one-off. Still, they established that a machine could show a game and respond to a human player in real time, which was the central idea behind everything that followed. The screens themselves were adapted from other uses, a topic covered in the history of CRT displays.
Spacewar! and the campus computer
The next widely remembered step came at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. A group of students and staff, with Steve Russell often named as the principal programmer, wrote Spacewar! for the PDP-1, a relatively small and affordable computer from Digital Equipment Corporation. Two players controlled spaceships that fired at each other while circling a star’s gravity, and the display was a vector screen.
Spacewar! mattered less for being first than for spreading. Because the PDP-1 was sold to universities and laboratories, copies of the program reportedly moved from site to site, and it became a demonstration that visitors could understand in seconds. It gave a generation of programmers a shared reference point and showed that a game could be an ambitious program in its own right.
Mainframes, terminals and text
By the late 1960s and 1970s, many universities and schools offered time-sharing, in which dozens of users connected to one large machine through terminals. These were typically mainframe computers or minicomputers, and screens were still uncommon. Many terminals were teleprinters that printed on paper, so games were text-based.
Several well-known examples came from this setting:
- Simple simulations and strategy games, including text versions of space exploration and lunar landing.
- Educational games for classrooms, of which the pioneering Oregon Trail, written in Minnesota around 1971, is a commonly cited example.
- Exploration and puzzle games that eventually led to the genre covered in text adventures.
- Multi-user games on systems such as PLATO at the University of Illinois, which served schools and universities and supported early online multiplayer play over a network of terminals.
Because these games ran on machines that few people could use, they stayed within a limited community. They were nonetheless influential, since many later designers and programmers first played them as students.
The step to coin-operated machines
Arcades already existed in the early 20th century, full of mechanical games such as pinball. The change in the early 1970s was that electronics became cheap enough to put in a cabinet and charge a coin per play. A game at Stanford University called Galaxy Game appeared in 1971 as a coin-operated version of a Spacewar!-style game, and Computer Space, designed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, reached the market the same year. Neither became a lasting commercial hit, but they showed the idea could work.
Pong, released by Atari in 1972, was far simpler to understand and became the first widely popular arcade game. Around the same time, a home system developed by Ralph Baer and others, and sold as the Magnavox Odyssey, offered simple games on a household television. The arcade and home boom that followed is the subject of our look back at the arcade era.
A key technical point is that these machines did not look like computers. Early arcade games often used dedicated logic circuits rather than a general-purpose processor. As integrated circuits and later microprocessors became cheaper, designers moved toward programmable hardware, which allowed more complex games and, eventually, game consoles that could play many titles.
What the early period left behind
Taken together, the 1950s to 1970s produced several lasting ideas: that a game could be a real-time interaction, that a player could control something on a screen, that games could be shared across a network, and that people would pay to play. It also established an unplanned pattern in which research hardware, once it became cheaper, fed a commercial entertainment industry.
Details of this story are often uncertain. Many early programs were never preserved, dates differ between sources, and credit is frequently shared among teams. Anyone who names a single inventor or a single first game is simplifying, and the more careful claim is that several groups worked on similar ideas at about the same time. The broader context of the period appears in the timeline of 1960s computers and 1970s computers, and the larger story of play is told in video game history.