Retro Computing Corner: The World’s First Videogames

Author: Rees | Date: May 17, 2008

The games industry these days is a multi-million dollar business, ruled over by huge multinational corporatons such as Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, as well as the third party games developers, and the entire PC gaming industry, of course. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that boffins were using their computers for more than just “serious business”, putting simple games together up to 20 years before the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari’s PONG hit the scene in 1972.

Let’s take a look at three of these early games, and explore what made them unique and important to the early videogames, and indeed computer, industries.

OXO Running On An EDSAC Computer Emulator

“OXO” In An EDSAC Emulator For MacOS. Screen Outputs Are Top Left And Right.

The game widely considered the be the “first ever” computer-based game was written for EDSAC, one of the first digital computers, built in Cambridge in 1949. It was a simple tic-tac-toe game (known in the UK as noughts and crosses) called OXO, and was programmed by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952. The game was played against the computer on the system’s 35×16 pixel screen, with the player selecting their move using a dial.

The actual game data itself was supposedly highly efficient, as code had to be in those days due to extremely limited RAM (EDSAC had 1024 bits of delay line memory). Also, as there was only ever one EDSAC in existence, the game didn’t see any commercial success and was only played by a handful of people. There are EDSAC emulators available today, though.

Tennis For Two Running On An Oscilloscope

“Tennis For Two” Ran On An Oscilloscope And Featured Fluid Motion

In 1958, American physicist William Higinbotham developed Tennis For Two. Although a step backwards technologically (the game used analog, rather than digital circuitry), this game is of particular note because it allowed for two player simultaneous play, and featured fluid motion. It’s also a precursor to the hugely successful 1972 hit PONG, although the gameplay is side-on rather than top down.

If you fancy a go at Tennis For Two, there are some modern remakes here, or you can see it in action in this great video over on YouTube. This game, much like OXO above, was never sold or distributed outside of the lab where it was created – the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, in fact. It was only ever played by the public twice.

Spacewar! Was A Game For The PDP-1 Computer

“Spacewar!”, Written For The PDP-1 In 1962 And Ported To Other 1960s Systems

Perhaps the first successful, widely distributed computer game was Spacewar! pictured above. The game was originally written for the PDP-1 by Steve Russell, and was completed in 1962. The game’s original code took 200 hours to write, although it was later improved upon by his co-workers Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Martin Graetz, as well as Russell himself.

Spacewar! was a two player game, where the players took control of a spaceship each and tried to shoot each other down. The center of the screen featured a star, whose gravity affected the movement of the ships (but not the ships’ missiles, as there wasn’t enough processing power available). The game is very similar to Asteroids, including the hyperspace feature which can move the player’s ship to a random location on screen to escape danger.

The game was so popular at the time of its making that it was ported to other systems of the era, such as the CDC machines and the later hugely popular PDP-10 and PDP-11. The game was such a good test of the system’s hardware that PDP-1 systems were shipped with it loaded into memory, so that the computer technician could finally relax and have some fun testing after hours spent assembling the machine.

There is an online version of Spacewar! here, running the original PDP-1 code in a Java emulator.

If you enjoyed this article, please check out the other articles in our Retro Computing Corner!