Video Game History

Video games were introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the basis for an important entertainment industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the United States, Japan, and Europe. After a disastrous industry collapse in 1983 and a subsequent rebirth two years later, the video game industry has experienced sustained growth for over two decades to become a $10 billion industry, which rivals the motion picture industry as the most profitable entertainment industry in the world.


A device called the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device was patented in the United States by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.

The patent was filed on January 25, 1947 and issued on December 14, 1948. It described using eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at a target and contains knobs to adjust the curve and speed of the missile. Because computer graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets were drawn on a simple overlay and placed on the screen.

In February 1951, Christopher Strachey tried to run a draughts programme he had written for the NPL Pilot ACE. The program exceeded the memory capacity of the machine and by October, Strachey had recoded his program for a machine at Manchester with a larger memory capacity.

OXO, a graphical version of tic-tac-toe, was created by A.S. Douglas in 1952 at the University of Cambridge, in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was developed on the EDSAC computer, which uses a cathode ray tube displaying memory contents as a visual display. The player competes against the computer (which incorporates basic Artificial Intelligence) using a rotary dial.

In 1958 William Higinbotham created a game using an oscilloscope and analog computer.
Aptly titled Tennis for Two, it was used to entertain visitors of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Tennis for Two showed a simplified tennis court from the side, featuring a gravity-controlled ball that needed to be played over the "net", unlike its successors. The game was played with two box-shaped controllers, both equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for hitting the ball.

Tennis for Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantlement in 1959.

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