1947: Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device
The earliest known interactive electronic game was by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.
The earliest known interactive electronic game was by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube. The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.
1950-1951: Chess
In March 1950, Claude Shannon devised a chess-playing program that appeared in the paper "Programming a Computer for Ferranti computer."
In March 1950, Claude Shannon devised a chess-playing program that appeared in the paper "Programming a Computer for Ferranti computer."
In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display. OXO, also known as Noughts and Crosses, is a version of tic-tac-toe for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. It was designed for the world's first stored-program computer, and used a rotary telephone controller for game control.1958: Tennis for Two
In 1959-1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 experimental computer at MIT. These included Mouse in the Maze[9] and Tic-Tac-Toe. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to place maze walls, dots that represented bits of cheese, and (in some versions) glasses of martini. A virtual mouse represented by a dot was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. Tic-Tac-Toe used the light pen as well to play a simple game of naughts and crosses against the computer.1961: Spacewar!
In 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1 mini-computer which also used a vector display system. The game, generally considered the first Shooter game,[citation needed] spread to several of the early mini-computer installations, and reportedly was used as a smoke test by DEC technicians on new PDP-1 systems before shipping, since it was the only available program that exercised every aspect of the hardware. Russell has been quoted as saying that the aspect of the game that he was most pleased with was the number of other programmers it inspired to write their own games.1966: Odyssey
1971: Galaxy Game
In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed the first coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, at Stanford University using a DEC PDP-11/20 computer; only one unit was ever built (although it was later adapted to run up to eight games at once).
1971: Computer Space
Two months after Galaxy Game's installation, Computer Space by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney was released, which was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind, predating the Odyssey by six months). Both games were variations on the vector display 1961 Spacewar!; however, Bushnell and Dabney's used an actual video display by having an actual television set in the cabinet.
1972: Pong
Pong, also by Bushnell and Dabney, used the same television set design as Computer Space, and was not released until 1972 – a year after Computer Space.
