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.
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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