Inside the Guide: The Early History of Video Gaming

Though common knowledge might place the beginning of video gaming in the 1980s arcade scene, or with the first Pong home editions, the history of video games actually goes back much farther than that. The technical definition of the term “video game” would require the game to have a video signal transmitted through a cathode ray tube – though the current interpretation is more along the lines of “anything on electronic hardware that contains an element of interactivity,” or something along those lines. Using this broad definition, the first video games actually surfaced in the 1950s, using technology created during World War II.

The earliest known written computer game was a chess simulation, developed by none other than Alan Turing (the man behind the cracking of the Enigma Machine and the Turing Test) and David Champernowne (a mathematician and economist at the University of Oxford and later at Cambridge). The game was called Turochamp and the pair completed it in 1948, but it never actually made it to a proper computer.

As far as games that were actually implemented, the earliest one was Bertie the Brain, a tic-tac-toe machine built by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition; and Nimrod, built in 1951 by Ferranti for that year’s Festival of Britain, which played the game of Nim. Both Bertie and Nimrod allowed people who attended their respective events to play their games against an artificial intelligence (AI). They were created not so much for the purpose of entertainment, but rather for the purpose of showing off the AI programs that the developers had created.

Tennis for Two, developed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958, was the first game created for entertainment purposes. It used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to play the game, and was therefore one of the first games to have a proper graphic display. It debuted at an open house on October 18, 1958, and was brought out just once more after that before it was dismantled. It’s generally considered the predecessor to Pong.

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