By Staff Writer: Jerri Clewis
Visitors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory were treated to an interactive experience called Tennis for Two in 1958 to generate interest in what science can do for society, but little did anyone know the impact that experience would have.
Physicist William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two to “liven up the place” during annual visitor days when thousands of people toured Brookhaven, according to Brookhaven National Laboratory. His device allowed visitors to play a version of tennis on a court, represented by two lines, with a ball in the form of a bouncing dot on a screen. It was a hit with the visitors, and so one of the first video games was born.
Other devices came before Tennis for Two. In 1948, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle R. Mann were responsible for the earliest-documented video game predecessor in 1948 with their patented “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device.” Their device required players to overlay pictures on the screen to play, unlike Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, in which users played entirely on a screen. Ferranti International displayed the Nimrod computer, used to play a logic and strategy game, at the Festival of Britain’s Exhibition of Science in 1951, while A.S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge created OXO, an electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe, in 1952. Both were for academic purposes.
For a few years, these inventions were the closest to what we call video games today. Then Ralph Baer, engineer for Sanders Associates Inc., came onto the scene. Widely considered the father of video games, Baer wanted to find a way to play games on television in 1966. He and his colleagues, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, built various test devices from 1967 to 1969 until they developed the “Brown Box,” the prototype for the first multiplayer, multiprogram video game.
Sanders Associates Inc. licensed the system to Magnavox, and Magnavox released the design in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console, according to the National Museum of American History. The console was not a commercial success partly due to poor marketing, and the immensely popular ping-pong arcade game Pong, released by Atari only a few months later, quickly overshadowed the Odyssey.
Despite its limited success, the Magnavox Odyssey led the way for the video game console industry to become the booming market it is today, where more and more realistic releases come out every year and even virtual reality has become a thing.