50 years anniversary of Tennis for Two, the World’s First Graphical Videogame
I don’t know about you, but I am mostly old-school to the bone in almost everything. This article I wrote is about something real old-school: old-school gaming. 50 years ago Dr. William Higinbotham, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory was cooking a simulation of bouncing balls and missile trajectories that could predict the paths objects could take. Boring until now. But in the middle of the process he thought he might apply this to tennis. And thus he created Tennis for Two, the world’s first video game. The circuits and components too a few days to design and the actual machine was built in about three weeks.
On the 28th of October, 1958 the game got its first test by a public. But it wasn’t average public, as the game didn’t get patented because it was made in a federal-owned lab and the rights for the game would have belonged to the government. But, in some way, Dr. William Higinbotham is the godfather of video games.
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