The earliest known interactive electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube2 in 1947. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.1
1951
On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented at the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game.3 NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.
TV engineer named Ralph Baer was asked by the chief engineer at Loral to build "the best television set in the world". Baer came up with an idea for playing games on the television set, but the idea was turned down.
1952
In 1952, one of the first video games ever made, OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) by A. S. Douglas. OXO was written for the EDSACcomputer. The game was a Tic-tac-toe based game, played against the computer, and although OXO never gained any real popularity, because the EDSAC was available only at Cambridge, it was still a milestone in the history of video games.
Christopher S. Strachey created a program on the Ferranti machine which, by the summer of 1952, "could play a complete game of draughts (checkers) at a reasonable speed". Arthur Samuel built on his work to make a checkers-playing program for the IBM 701, which ran at the end of the year.
Tennis for Two was a computer game developed in 1958 on an oscilloscope which simulated a game of tennis or ping pong. It was created by William Higinbotham. It was the predecessor of Pong, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side instead of a top-down perspective. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game was controlled by an analog computer and "consisted mostly of resistors, capacitors and relays, but where fast switching was needed – when the ball was in play – transistor switches were used".
Later, a program called Expensive Planetarium (referring to the price of the PDP-1 computer) was incorporated into the main code, replacing the randomly generated star field. The program was based on real star charts that scrolled slowly: at any one time, 45% of the night sky was visible, every star down to the fifth magnitude.
