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.

Image of William HiginbothamCreative 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.

Image of the schematic for the 1958 video gameA 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.