• 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?
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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.
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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.