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The Early Years: From Oscilloscopes to Pong (1950s–1970s)

In short

Long before Mario, Sonic or Lara, video games were curiosities built by scientists and students on machines that filled whole rooms. This is the story of how a handful of experiments became an industry in barely fifteen years.

Fun fact: Pong had no microprocessor at all. Its whole game was wired from about 66 simple logic chips.

The full story

Tennis for Two (1958)

On 18 October 1958, visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual open day in New York found something unexpected: a tennis game on an oscilloscope screen. Physicist William Higinbotham built it to liven up a dull exhibit, using the lab's Donner Model 30 analog computer to work out the ball's path. Technician Robert Dvorak helped him build it in about three weeks.

Two players each had a small aluminium controller with a knob to set the angle of a shot and a button to hit. The court was viewed from the side, with a net in the middle. People queued to play it. After a couple of years the parts were reused, and the game was largely forgotten until lawyers dug it up in the 1970s, during patent battles over home video games. Higinbotham himself wanted to be remembered for his work on nuclear non-proliferation, not as a games pioneer.

Spacewar! (1962)

In 1962 a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Steve Russell with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen and others, wrote Spacewar! for the university's new DEC PDP-1 computer. Two spaceships, the "needle" and the "wedge", duelled around a star with its own gravity well. Peter Samson later added an accurate starfield, and Dan Edwards improved the gravity code.

Copies soon travelled to other PDP-1 owners, so Spacewar! became perhaps the first game to be enjoyed at several different sites rather than just one lab. But a PDP-1 cost US$120,000 and only 53 were sold, so very few people ever got to play the original. Its influence came through the students who did, and one of them was about to try to turn it into a business.

Computer Space (1971)

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney took the Spacewar! idea and built a coin-operated version, Computer Space, released in 1971. It was the first commercial arcade video game. Its fibreglass cabinet looked like something from a sci-fi film, but the controls were confusing for people in a bar, and it was only a modest success: about 1,500 cabinets is the figure usually quoted. Bushnell and Dabney learned the lesson and founded Atari in 1972.

Magnavox Odyssey (1972)

Meanwhile, engineer Ralph Baer had been working since 1966 on an idea that seemed outlandish: playing games on an ordinary television. After years of prototypes, Magnavox released his design as the Odyssey in September 1972, the first home video game console. It was analog, not digital, and had no sound. Players taped plastic overlays to the TV screen to provide the colour and scenery. The US price is generally given as US$99.95. Magnavox's TV-only marketing led many people to believe it only worked on Magnavox televisions.

The Odyssey included a table tennis game, which turns out to be important.

Pong (1972)

Bushnell asked new Atari engineer Al Alcorn to build a simple tennis game as a training exercise. The result, Pong, was tested at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, and became a sensation from November 1972. Famously, the test machine stopped working because the coin box was overflowing.

Magnavox sued, arguing that Pong copied the Odyssey's tennis game. Atari settled in 1976, paying US$700,000 for a licence. Baer's patents went on to earn Magnavox a great deal in licensing over the following years.

The rest of the 1970s

Pong spawned endless clones, and dedicated home Pong machines followed, including Atari's own Home Pong in 1975. Cartridge consoles arrived with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976 and the Atari VCS (later known as the 2600) in 1977. Then, in 1978, Taito's Space Invaders kicked off the arcade golden age – but that's a story for our arcade golden age page.

Why it matters

In twenty years, video games went from a science fair novelty to an industry with arcades, home consoles and the patent lawsuits to match. Almost every idea that followed – competitive two-player games, coin-op business models, home consoles on the family TV – traces back to these early experiments.

For the nerds (click to open)

How the early machines worked

  • Pong (1972 arcade): no CPU, RAM or ROM. About 66 TTL 74-series logic chips are driven by a 7.159 MHz clock (half of a 14.318 MHz crystal), and the image is generated in step with the TV's scan.
  • Magnavox Odyssey (1972): also had no microprocessor. It was built from discrete transistors and diodes, and used plastic screen overlays for colour and scenery.
  • Atari 2600 (1977): one of the machines that moved home gaming to microprocessors, with a MOS 6507 at 1.19 MHz and just 128 bytes of RAM. It had no frame buffer, so the program redrew each line as the TV scanned it.

Playing, values and builds

Where to buy now

These early machines are museum pieces, but there's plenty to read and the odd reissue to try.

Find Atari Pong console on eBay UK (opens in new tab) (Ad: affiliate link)