What Was The First Ever Video Game?

When do you think gaming started? Was it in the years prior to the video game crash of 1983, or perhaps with the birth of arcades in the 1970s? Gaming has been around for a while, though to say exactly when it started is a slightly complicated question.

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Long before we had arcades and consoles, computers were the real birthplace of video games. Except answering the question of what the first video game actually was isn't exactly easy. What really is a video game when it break it down? We're going to debate what that means so we can discern what precisely the first ever video game was.

What Exactly Is A Video Game?

It seems like such a silly question to ask. Video games are those things you play on your PC, phone, console, and so on. But what qualifies them as a game, really? By that merit, you could call the calculator app a game. Video games are just something we instinctively know what to call nowadays, but how would you brand it before it even existed?

That's the debate on defining the first ever video game. At what point does something turn from just being a computer program and become a video game? Computers experienced a massive amount of technological growth during World War 2 as decoding tools, and in the years following the war became complex problem-solving and task automation tools. It was once they started to become available to universities and households that they needed to become more multi-functional.

So, what is a video game? It's hard to put into specific words, but for the sake of historical clarification, we will define it by a few metrics:

• It has to have human interactivity.
• It has to run in a digital environment.
• It has to push a video signal to a display, rather than use static graphics.

In short, it has to be something that can be played in a similar vein to what other things classed as games would be, but in a digital environment. This is the defining characteristic between just an electronic game and a video game.

As a result of the 'video' part of video games, certain early digital displays would not be counted as they used a static image rather than a dynamically changing video signal.

With this definition underway, we can take a relatively broad but still concisely focused view on the early period of gaming history.

The Potential First Video Game

Because of the relatively loose definition of what a video game actually is, defining what the earliest video game is can run into multiple problems. Using our own definition, we can decide on the first every video game more cleanly.

While we may think we know what a video game is nowadays, some genres still face criticism as to their qualification as video games, such as Visual Novels.

The Earliest Video Game

In 1950, Josef Kates created Bertie the Brain, a massive computer designed to showcase his additron tube technology as well as to test human-computer interaction. This struggles upon some of our own definitions, using light bulbs rather than a strict video signal, though it is still a live image with an interactive element.

It was primarily made to showcase the additron tube to potential investors, though ended up enticing people more by the merits of its interactive element. It was a variant of Tic-Tac-Toe, with the human end inputting a command, and the computer responding in an attempt to beat you. As such, it also showcased an early era of artificial intelligence.

Seeing as the entire intent was to showcase a technology rather than create a game, after the exhibition ended, Bertie the Brain was disassembled and never heard from again.

The Definitive First Video Game

In 1958, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two. In the years following the creation of Bertie the Brain, many pseudo-video games were created, included many that utilized a true video signal to create real-time graphics. However, all of these games were still intended the showcase the capabilities of computers, rather than an actual game to be played on them.

Higinbotham created Tennis for Two with the genuine intent of entertainment. Computers had proven many times over they could simulate interactive games, but no one had made them for that exact purpose. It is in this regard that Tennis for Two is regarded as the first ever video game.

As the name of the game implies, Tennis for Two simulated the game of tennis, with a knob available to each player to control the angle at which they hit the ball. It too proved massively popular in the brief period in which it was showcased, and thankfully has been preserved in the years since its initial debut.

Higinbotham was also one of the designers on the first nuclear bomb and after seeing its destructive potential, spent the remainder of his life championing nuclear nonproliferation.

When Did Video Games Start To Become Popular?

Regardless of the definition used, we can now definitively say that the first video game originated somewhere between 1950-58. While gaming is a massive industry now, one of the biggest in the world, at what point did it really start to pick up steam? Even at this point, computers were still an expensive product to have in the home that few would have had a casual use for.

As computers got smaller, they became something that more casual users could access. This existed almost exclusively for university students who studied at institutions that could afford these newer, smaller machines. With these computers more easily accessible and the concept of games prominent within computer science circles, many students began making games in their spare time, eventually culminating in Spacewar!, the first video game that could be transferred to other computers.

In this sense, we mean that the game was no longer proprietary to the machine it was built on and could have its source code run in a separate machine than the one it was built on.

While home computers were still a rare commodity by the early 1970s, the advent of more a social use of computers became prominent. Nolan Bushnell, who would later go on to found Atari, was shown a demo of Spacewar! at Standford, and became inspired to create a commercial version of it. This then resulted in the creation of the first ever arcade machine with Computer Space in 1971.

The first ever home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, released the following year, and then Atari created the world-famous Pong arcade machine. From there, both home consoles and arcades grew in popularity, leading not just to a clearer definition of what a video game was, but to the birth of the entire video game industry.

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