Between "Tennis for Two" and "Spacewar!"

In this article, I'd like to talk about a subtle but important question.

• Tennis for Two - the first video game recognized by the public - was born in 1958 and played by hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people.

• Spacewar! - a legendary video game which paved the way for the creation of the industry - was born in 1962.

As you know, every innovative product spawn copycats, which sometimes surpasses the original in popularity (and in rare cases makes another innovation). But during the four years, no other notable video games were developed, why?

To make an innovation, you need two things: strong will and proper technologies. Considering the fact that Tennis for Two attracted many people's attention, there should have been some people who tried to mimic the success, but failed. Therefore, what lacked was some essential technology for video games - then what was it?

--

Earliest digital computers (excluding experimental ones) were developed to solve complex math problems, mostly related to national defense programs. For example, "Colossus" was developed by the British government in 1943 to decode Nazi Germany's military messages encoded by the famous Enigma; "ENIAC" was developed by the US government in 1946 to improve aiming accuracy of artillery.

In 1952, IBM released their first mass-produced large-scale electronic computer called "IBM 701", which meant digital computers gradually had been expanding their territory towards other industries. But since it cost around a hundred thousands dollars (in today's dollars) per month, only handful of giant companies like Boeing and GE could afford to rent it.

Although those computers cost vast amounts of money, their computing power and functionality were not so high by today's standards.

The most important thing is, those machines didn't have "real-time processing capability". In other words, they could not deal with multiple tasks in parallel.

Today, even with the cheapest computers, we can do many things simultaneously; you can do your taxes while watching videos on YouTube and chatting with your friends online. But those early computers had no such capability, and even worse, computers were very scarce in proportion to demand. So, the users had to wait hours or even days before receiving a calculated result.

In such circumstances, it was practically impossible to develop a video game which must process your inputs in real time; no one would play a game which takes minutes to move a character after pushing a button.

That was the reason why there was four years' gap between Tennis for Two and Spacewar's respective debut.

Actually, both of those two games were developed in exceptional environments.

As I described briefly in the last article, Tennis for Two was running on an ANALOG computer. In contrast to digital computers familiar to us, which deal with discrete numerical values (0 and 1), analog computers use physical length or angle of objects to solve problems; the most primitive form of analog computer is slide rules.

By their nature, analog computers are not suitable for works which require high precision. But they gave nearly real-time response to inputs and were much more affordable compared with digital ones. So, it was a very smart choice.

It reminds me of a development history of Game Boy. When the handheld gaming device was being developed, color liquid-crystal displays were already available for mass production. But Gunpei Yokoi, its producer, instead decided to use common black-and-white displays because they were much more cheaper and energy-efficient.

A year and a half after Game Boy's debut, SEGA released a would-be competitor with a color-LCD named Game Gear. Although its color display was truly appealing to the possible customers, it ended up gaining only a small portion of the market because it cost about twice as much as Game Boy and it drained batteries too fast (nearly unimaginable to play it without an AC adapter).

Gunpei Yokoi (1997 @ KOTO Laboratory):

The only big advantage of color-LCD was its vivid first impression. At that time, it had more disadvantages than advantages.

- Yokoi Gunpei game kan (ISBN: 4480432930) published by Chikumashobo on 6 August 2015, p.156

Anyway, history tells us when it comes to entertainments like video games, people doesn't care whether its underlying technologies are advanced or not. All they care is what kinds of new fun it brings.

--

The other innovative game, Spacewar, was developed by some students and faculty members at MIT who belonged to the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC).

In the early 1960s, some universities in the US already owned digital computers, but only limited number of people were allowed to use them. In that sense, MIT, one of the world's centers of technology, was no exception.

However, some members of TMRC were exceptionally lucky because a former member of the club one day assumed the management of a latest digital computer called PDP-1. It was relatively smaller and cheaper than other machines, but very powerful and functional. In fact, it was the world's first commercially available digital computer with real-time processing capability.

From that day, a room which housed the machine became their second clubhouse and they began to compete each other over how effectively they could demonstrate its power, which lead to the creation of Spacewar.

But before moving the story forward, I'd like to turn the clock back to the days when the world's first real-time digital computer, which was an ancestor of PDP-1, was being developed.

We don't have to go anywhere - because it occurred here, MIT.

The birth of the world's first video game

Before go into the details of the creation of modern video games, I'd like to talk a bit about the earliest video games. Although the video game industry, which was created by Atari, has only less than 50 years' history, computer games are said to be as old as computers themselves.

Unfortunately, no one knows who invented the world's very first computer game - probably, the inventor and people around him thought it was too trivial thing to record.

The first well-documented and widely recognized example of entertaining use of computers is "OXO", which was developed by a scientist in Cambridge using a huge computer called EDSAC. Some researchers and journalists argue this is the world's first video game, but I don't agree with them.

The game undeniably has some historical importance - it was made in 1952 - but it's not more than a single-player version of Tic-Tac-Toe, as you can see in the video below.  So, it should rather be regarded as a digital simulation of an analog game.

YouTube: OXO on an emulator (University of Cambridge, 1952)

Actually, there are records about some other computer games older than OXO, but all of them were too primitive and they share few common features with modern video games.

However, we can't blame their creators for not making an effort to develop more fun and sophisticated games because computers back then were too expensive and scarce to use for entertainment purposes. In fact, OXO was not developed to create a new form of entertainment. It's main purpose was to research on interactions between computers and human beings.

Then, a natural question arises: what was the first video game which was developed solely to entertain the public and achieved it?

If you know much about the history of video games, you may think the famous "Spacewar!" (1962) is the first such one. But it has a not so famous, not so frequently quoted, but very important predecessor called "Tennis for Two" (1958).

Although the game itself - unsurprisingly, a tennis game for two human players - is not so attractive or exciting one by today's standards, its history is interesting.
Besides, I think it's worth to mention that those two games both have strong connections to a historic event: the creation and spread of nuclear weapons.

--

The (probably) world's first tennis game was made by a physicist named William Higinbotham. His profession was to develop electronic measuring instruments. After hired by MIT in 1940, he worked on projects related to radar systems for warships and warplanes including B-29 bombers, which devastated populous cities in Japan during the WWII. In 1943, he was invited to Los Alamos, NM, where he worked on the Manhattan Project and saw the birth of nuclear weapons.

In the summer of 1945, two atomic bombs dropped from B-29 caused the largest man-made disaster in history.

After the end of the war, he and his fellow researchers jointly formed a lobby group to call for the limitation of nuclear weapons. So, it was a natural choice for him to join Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was founded in 1947 to conduct research on peaceful use of nuclear energy.

The lab was built on the site which was used as a military camp during the war and it housed some large particle accelerators and latest nuclear reactors. For people back then, those unfamiliar machines and nuclear technologies itself were a cause of fears. Therefore, a couple of years after its foundation, the lab decided to open its doors to the public for a few days every year to mitigate concerns of people living nearby.

The event became an annual tradition of the institute. But it was unpopular among ordinary people because they were not allowed to access important facilities due to security reasons. So, the visitors had to spend time walking around looking at boring posters and inactive machines.

To make the event more vibrant and attractive, in 1958, Higinbotham decided to create a new kind of enjoyable display from which people can learn some scientific knowledge by actually touching it. Fortunately, the lab had an analog computer which could simulate the movement of a bouncing ball. I don't know if he was particularly interested in tennis, but the function was convenient for simulating the sport.

With help from one of his colleagues, he was able to build the machine before that year's annual event.

The resulting game named Tennis for Two was a very simple one.

YouTube: Tennis for Two history and gameplay (Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1958)

• There's a tennis court on the screen and each of the two players holds a controller, which has a button and a knob.
• When the ball is in your court, you can hit it by pushing the button.
• You can change the angle of the (invisible) racket face by rotating the knob.

Despite having such a simple and unsophisticated structure, it was an enjoyable game for the public. In fact, hundreds of people lined up to play the game.

Why it was so popular?

That's because it contained the most important element of successful video games, which I wrote in the last article - instinctive pleasure.

Actually, the game apparently lacked many common characteristics of today's video games.

It didn't contain high quality graphics - a circle for the ball, two lines for the court and that's all.
It didn't have an ultimate objective - even scores were not shown on the screen.
It was a very shallow game - all you needed to win was good reflexes.

But it did contain an instinctive pleasure - to hit a ball back and forth -  and they simply loved it.

Seeing many people surrounding the machine, he noticed he made something special. But he didn't bother to devote his time to developing another game. The lab also had no interest in researching on the new form of entertainment they discovered by chance. After the next year's annual event, they disassembled the machine to reuse its parts for other more important scientific researches.

It was not until video games became popular in the US that they understood the game's importance. Today, they are boasting they made the world's first video game and created the industry.

I think they are exaggerating their achievements too much. Rather, they should be proud of having developed a computer game solely to entertain the public, because it was an unprecedented attempt.

Thus, the era of video games had begun. But unfortunately, the world had to wait nearly four years before meeting a truly revolutionary video game - Spacewar.


Primary reference:
"The First Video Game?" on Brookhaven National Laboratory
https://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php