The first video game ever made ?

Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two was actually preceded by several other inventions — one in the late 1940s and two in the early 1950s. But it would not be fair or correct to award the title of “the first video game” to any one of these specific inventions.

In 1948, ten years before Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle R. Mann patented the “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device,” making this currently the earliest-documented video game predecessor. The amusement device, however, required players to overlay pictures or illustrations of targets such as airplanes in front of the screen, dovetailing the game’s action. This was unlike Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two, which entirely displayed the game’s visuals on the screen.

Another video game-like device, the Nimrod computer, was built by Ferranti International and first displayed at the Festival of Britain’s Exhibition of Science in 1951. Although the computer was built to play the century-old game of logic and strategy called “Nim,” the electronic version of the game was specifically designed to demonstrate the processing power of the new computing device. This was in contrast with Tennis for Two, which was designed to be played for fun. In addition, the Nimrod computer did not use a cathode-ray tube display with elements that appeared to “move” on screen like Tennis for Two. Instead, it used a set of fixed lights that turned on and off and a legend to describe what was happening throughout the demonstration.

Then, in 1952, A.S. Douglas at the University of Cambridge created an electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe, which he titled “OXO” (or Noughts and Crosses). This single-player “game” was designed for academic purposes — Douglas used the electronic OXO on the famous Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC, to study the “Interactions Between Human and Computer.” Like electronic Nim, electronic OXO was not designed to be entertaining.

Some argue that Tennis for Two or any one of the earlier predecessors to the modern video game cannot be titled the first “video” game because not one of them displayed a “video” signal. The term “video” implies that electronic signals are converted to images on a screen using a raster pattern, a series of horizontal lines composed of individual pixels. Although older oscilloscopes, televisions, and computer screens all used cathode-ray tubes, oscilloscopes visually display changes in electrical voltage; they do not use the raster process. While Higinbotham’s system did not create a video signal, he had created a unique way to alternate among the computer’s outputs with the transistor switching circuit, creating the image of a tennis court and allowing players to control a movable ball seen on a screen, just like a modern video game.