EARLY EFFORTS TO GAMES

In 1958 Willy Higginbotham, an engineer at the Brook haven National Laboratory, used an oscilloscope to build what is considered the first electronic game. In this game-which he called Tennis for Two-players used knobs to control rectangular paddles as they batted a “ball” back and forth over a vertical line representing a net. Higginbotham never made any attempt to market or patent his game.Steven Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created the first computer game-Space war!-on a Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer in 1962. The PDP-1 was unusual for the time because it featured a screen, unlike most computers that still had only printed readouts. In Space war!, two players dueled using tiny ships that flew around a screen representing a star field. The game attempted to mimic the actual physics of space flight. Like Higginbotham, Russell did not patent or market his game; one use was to test computers during installations.While attending the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell became familiar with Space war! In 1968 Bushnell moved to California and experimented with reproducing Russell’s game without using a computer, which at the time were too large and expensive for a commercial game. Eventually, he created a version of Space war! that used a black-and-white television set and dedicated circuit . He persuaded a company called Nutting Associates to manufacture the game, and in 1971 the company began marketing the first video arcade game: Computer Space.