Platform · 13 entries · 1940 to 1978
Before there was an industry there were computers the size of furniture, owned by universities, laboratories and corporations. The people with access to them wrote games anyway, and almost none of those games were ever sold.
The earliest records in the archive sit here because the earliest playable machines were not products. A relay-driven cabinet that played the mathematical game Nim at a world's fair, a vacuum-tube tic-tac-toe machine built for a Canadian exhibition, a British computer shown at a national festival to explain what computing even was: all of them were demonstrations. Their builders wanted to make an abstract technology legible to a crowd, and a game turned out to be the clearest way to do it. Play was the teaching method rather than the product.
Research machines produced a second wave. An oscilloscope at a national laboratory volleyed a ball across a simulated net for visitors on an open day. Doctoral work at Cambridge put noughts and crosses on a cathode-ray tube. Students at MIT wired a light pen to a computer and watched a simulated mouse search a maze they had drawn themselves. None of this was commercial, and much of it was dismantled or forgotten once the demonstration ended. Recovering the record has taken decades of patient work by archivists and by the surviving participants.
The category matters because it set patterns the business later inherited. A space duel written on a PDP-1 in the early 1960s was copied freely from one installation to the next and became a standard way of showing what a computer could do, which is roughly how software moved before anyone charged for it. Text adventures, networked shooters and shared multi-user worlds all began on institutional hardware paid for by somebody else. Entries filed here are the prehistory of everything that follows, and they read best in that light.
13 entries filed under laboratory and mainframe systems. Expand any of them for the key facts, or open an entry for the full record and its sources.
Physicist Edward Condon and colleagues at Westinghouse built a relay-driven cabinet that played the counting game Nim against visitors to the New York World's Fair, signaling its moves with light bulbs rather than any kind of screen.
Two engineers at a television manufacturer applied for a patent on a missile game played with knobs against a cathode-ray tube, with targets printed on a plastic overlay taped to the glass. Nothing was ever manufactured.
Josef Kates built a tic-tac-toe machine taller than the people playing it for the Canadian National Exhibition, using a vacuum tube of his own design. Visitors queued to take a turn, and it was scrapped when the fair closed.
Ferranti's NIMROD, a cabinet of lights built to play Nim, went on show at the Festival of Britain as a lesson in how a computer follows rules. Visitors were mostly interested in beating it.
For his doctoral research at Cambridge, A. S. Douglas programmed EDSAC to play noughts and crosses and drew the board on a small display tube, one of the earliest games rendered on a screen by a stored-program computer.
Arthur Samuel's checkers program for the IBM 701 improved by playing against itself, and a televised demonstration introduced American viewers to the idea of a machine that got better at a game over time.
Staff at Brookhaven National Laboratory built a tennis game on an oscilloscope for the laboratory's public open house, with a net, a ball that arced under simulated gravity, and a control box for each of the two players.
Around MIT's TX-0, an early transistorized computer with a display and a light pen, small programs appeared for the pleasure of writing them, including one in which a hand-drawn maze was searched by a simulated mouse.
Written for a new PDP-1 at MIT, Spacewar! set two rocket ships dueling in the gravity well of a star. Copies traveled to other installations on paper tape until it became a standard demonstration program.
Ken Thompson's Space Travel, a program for flying a craft among the planets and setting it down on them, moved with him to a disused PDP-7 at Bell Labs, where the work of supporting it ran alongside the beginnings of Unix.
Students working at a NASA research center turned a wireframe corridor display into a game where players stalked one another across cabled-together machines, an early ancestor of the first-person shooter.
Will Crowther turned his own survey work in Mammoth Cave into a program players explored by typing instructions. Don Woods expanded it with fantasy elements, and distribution over the research network created interactive fiction.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle built a text world at the University of Essex that many people inhabited at the same time. It named the genre and set the social patterns of every online world since.
