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Gottlieb's countertop pinball game became one of the Depression's unlikely bestsellers, and the network of Chicago manufacturers, distributors and route operators that grew around machines like it became the commercial ancestor of the American arcade.
Coin-operated play became an industry before it became electronic. The supply chain, the low price per attempt, the split with location owners and the geographic concentration in Chicago were all in place by the mid-1930s, and the video game business inherited them intact when screens replaced steel balls.
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.
Long before anyone spoke of computer games, a large manufacturer decided that a game was the clearest way to show the public what automatic machinery could do. That instinct, using play to make an unfamiliar technology legible, recurs in nearly every later demonstration of computing, from exhibition halls to chess matches carried on television.
Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty gave players flippers to keep the ball alive, moving pinball from a game of chance toward a game of skill. That distinction later did real work in fights over municipal bans.
One control scheme changed the legal and cultural standing of an entire class of machine. Pinball's long argument that skill separates amusement from gambling shaped how American cities regulated public play, and video games later inherited both the argument and the suspicion that made it necessary.
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.
Here the idea of using a television tube for play is written down, dated and witnessed, twenty years before anyone built a product around it. The patent also shows how much early game hardware came out of wartime electronics, since the mechanism is essentially a radar display with the targets drawn on plastic.
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.
Among the earliest machines built so that members of the public could play a game against electronics, and one of the first to treat difficulty as something an operator could tune to the person in front of it. It also shows how quickly the exhibition hall became the standard place to explain computing to an audience.
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.
One of the first computers built to be played with rather than used, and an unusually clear case of a company discovering that people will engage with a machine through competition when they will not engage with an explanation. It is often listed among the earliest computer games, with the caveat that its makers did not think of it that way.
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.
This is the earliest well-documented case of a game drawn on a computer display and played by a person in real time, produced not for amusement but to study how people and machines could work together. It set out in miniature the arrangement of screen, input device and immediate feedback that every later game depends on.
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.
This is where machine learning acquired a public face. A program that improved through experience, shown to a television audience, made an abstract research idea concrete, and its use of self-play as a training method returned decades later at the center of the most capable game-playing systems ever built.
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.
Earlier machines played games of logic. This one simulated physical behavior and asked two people to compete in real time, with enjoyment as the entire purpose and no educational or promotional argument attached. That makes it the closest thing in the 1950s to a game built simply because it would be fun.
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.
The programs themselves were slight. What formed around them was not: a group of people who treated an interactive computer as a place to make things, expected a screen to respond to them, and passed both attitudes along. Accounts of early game development trace back to this environment rather than to any single program written in it.
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.
The first computer game to spread widely, and the first shaped by many hands rather than a single author. It also established that real-time competition between two people, built on simple physics with no scoring beyond survival, was compelling enough that expensive machines would be borrowed to run it.
Sega's Periscope let players sight through a submarine viewfinder at ships crossing on chains, firing torpedoes traced by sequenced lights. It sold well in Japan, was exported widely, and pushed American arcade prices up to a quarter.
A price point and a trade route were established here. The quarter play funded bigger and more ambitious machines in American arcades, and the successful export of a Japanese cabinet set the precedent that Taito, Namco, Nintendo and Sega itself would follow with video games in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ralph Baer, a division engineer at a New Hampshire defense contractor, wrote a short proposal for games played on ordinary television receivers. His management funded the work quietly, and the first home console followed.
The home console begins as a memo. Its premise, that the screen most people already owned was the platform, separated Baer's approach from every laboratory game before it and from arcade machines, which brought their own hardware. That premise governed console design for the next forty years.
A small team at Sanders Associates worked through a series of television game prototypes, ending with a box covered in brown vinyl that played chase games, a ball-and-paddle game and a target game with a converted toy rifle.
This is the direct ancestor of every home console. It proved that acceptable interactive graphics could be produced by cheap analog circuits with no computer involved, which is why a console could be priced for a household in 1972, and its patents became the legal foundation of the early industry.
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.
One of the clearest cases of play driving infrastructure. The routines and file handling written to keep a space simulation running on a spare computer belong to the earliest history of an operating system whose descendants now sit under servers, phones, consoles and most of the internet.
A programmer at UCLA typed the first characters sent between two host computers on ARPANET, addressed to a machine at Stanford Research Institute. The connection failed after two letters, and the network it began carried everything afterward.
Online play needed a network before it needed anything else. This is the first working demonstration of general-purpose communication between distant host computers, and every later form of connected gaming, from university dungeon worlds to global shooters, rests on the approach proved here.
Two engineers built a cabinet that charged coins for a game of Spacewar running on a minicomputer and set it up in a Stanford building, weeks before the first commercially manufactured arcade video game shipped.
Before any company had a video game business, a single cabinet in a campus building answered the question that business would rest on: people would put money into a computer game. It also marked the meeting of two worlds that had grown up separately, the university computer room and the coin-operated amusement trade.
Nutting Associates manufactured Computer Space from a design by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, making it the first coin-operated video game produced for sale. Roughly fifteen hundred cabinets were built, and returns disappointed everyone involved.
Whatever its commercial fate, the machine established that a video game could be built from inexpensive components and sold as a piece of furniture, without a computer, a laboratory or a research budget. Every arcade cabinet for the next four years used that approach, and its designers' frustration with the deal produced the company that dominated the decade.
Rather than hand another design to an outside manufacturer, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney set up their own company in California to engineer, build and sell coin-operated games. Its name came from the board game Go.
This was the first company whose entire purpose was making video games, and it set the shape of the business: engineering and manufacturing under one roof, cabinets sold through amusement distributors, consumer products sold at retail. Its founders' habits, good and bad, were copied by an industry with no other model to look at.
Magnavox turned the Brown Box prototype into a consumer product sold through its television dealers. Plastic overlays, plug-in circuit cards and physical accessories compensated for electronics that could produce only a few white shapes.
Home play arrived before the arcade boom rather than after it, which is easy to forget. The console also carried the patents that shaped the industry's first decade of litigation, since the ball-and-paddle claims filed by its designer covered nearly everything that followed and were enforced against manufacturer after manufacturer.
