The Worlds First Computer Game Developer William Higinbotham

William Higinbotham

The invention was a tennis game simulated by a few resistors, capacitors, relays and transistors that reacted with the controller in order to make a ball bounce back and forth on the black and white screen, just like in a tennis game. The actual players couldn't be seen, actually they didn't exist at all, they were there theoretically but didn't show up on the screen. The only way the player became aware of his position was remembering the last impact with the ball, as far as I could realize. I may be wrong.

That's because 1958 is the actual year when the world's first computerized game was created by William Higinbotham. Manipulating the motion on a screen using an analog controller was something the world had never seen before and the man became famous for it.

Even if the game was created in 1958, it was pretty good for its time, I must say. The ball was affected by gravity much like in real life, and to make it even more realistic, players had to carefully launch it over the net into the adversary's court. The perspective was a 2 dimensional one obviously, and player's were playing it watching from the side (not looking at the court from above).

The game was invented with the purpose to cure the boredom of visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which Mr. Higinbotham worked. The game was only brought out twice, on "Visitor's Day" at the power plant. Tennis for Two was the predecessor of PONG, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first

So what happened to Higinbotham's video tennis game? He improved it for Visitor's Day 1959, letting people play Tennis for Two in Earth gravity, or low gravity like on the moon, or very high gravity like that found on Jupiter. 

Tennis Game

Then when Visitor's Day was over, he took the video game apart and put the pieces away. He never brought them out again, never built another video game, and never patented the idea. 

Willy Higinbotham would probably be completely forgotten today were it not for a lawsuit. When video games began taking off in the early 1970s, Magnavox and some other early manufacturers began fighting in court of which one of them had invented the games. A patent lawyer for one of Magnavox's competitors eventually learned of Higinbotham's story and brought the Great Man into court to prove that he, not Magnavox, was the true founder of the video game. 

In 2001, Americans spent more on video game systems and software -$9.4 billion- than they did going to the movies -$8.35 billion. What did Higinbotham, who died in 1994, have to show for it? Nothing. He never made a penny off his invention. Not that he could have- he worked for a government laboratory when he invented the game, so even if he had patented the idea, the U.S. government would have owned the patent. 

Be amazed at what 1958 technology was giving birth to the world's first computer video game..