Anyone for Tennis?

Most people, when asked for the name of the first video game, usually give the name of the oldest arcade game they’ve ever played or been told about by an older friend or relative. Pong, Pac Man, and Asteroids are all early games from the 1970s and 1980s. To find the first video game, however, you need to dig deeper–all the way back to the 1950s.

In 1958 William Higinbothan, an American physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, created Tennis for Two to entertain visitors.

Higinbothan was inspired to create the game while reading the manual for a small analog computer; the manual included instructions on how you could use it to make curves on a screen that were like bouncing balls. Higinbothan set to work. The game was simple. There was a net, a ball that bounced over the net, and a large aluminum controller that allowed visitors to hit the ball over the net. Tennis for Two was an enormous success and people lined up by the hundreds to play the game.

In the 1970s and 1980s, video games were made popular in arcades and a series of lawsuits decided that a “video game” was something that used video display signals on equipment such as a television set or a computer monitor. By this definition nearly everything before 1970 was not considered a video game. But Tennis for Two was a computer game that was designed for play, and had its own graphics. It was a simple and enjoyable game and nearly a quarter of a century before Pong became a household name.