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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.
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.
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.
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.
Networked multiplayer play was demonstrated two decades before it became a commercial product, and by students with no market to sell into. The design vocabulary they arrived at, a first-person viewpoint moving through connected rooms with other players inside it, was rediscovered rather than invented in the 1990s.
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.
Text was enough. With no graphics, no sound and no real-time action, the program produced the sensation of being somewhere, establishing that games could be built out of description and language. It also created the puzzle-solving adventure, the first genre that belonged to computers rather than to arcades or board games.
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.
The persistent shared world begins here, along with the abbreviation that named the form. Long before graphics or subscriptions, this program established that the compelling part of an online game is other players, and that a world continuing while you are away is qualitatively different from one that waits for you.
