History of computer and video games

The 1950s


Three people are usually cited as the sole inventor of video games. The first is television engineer Ralph Baer, who conceived the idea of an interactive television while employed by Loral Electronics in 1951 in Bronx, New York. No game was produced because his employer rejected the design, but he continued this early work 15 years later.
A.S. Douglas developed OXO, a graphical version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe), in 1952 at the University of Cambridge in order to demonstrate his thesis on human-computer interaction. It was played on the now archaic EDSAC computer, which used a cathode ray tube for a visual display. In spite of its technological antiquity, the game is still playable on an emulator available on the Internet. OXO is the first known graphical game to run on a computer.
Many people attribute the invention of the video game to William Higinbotham, who in 1958 created a game called Tennis For Two on an oscilloscope to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis For Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game is played with two bulky controllers each equipped with a knob for trajectory and a button for firing the ball over the net. Tennis For Two was exhibited for two seasons before its dismantling in 1959.