What Was The First Computer Game?

Do you know the name of the first computer game? I confess I didn't and I learned programming on a Univac 1100/62 so I am a lot closer to the origination date of computer games than most people who will read this.

I assumed it was a kind of punchcard-loaded word game, like a 1960s Leather Goddesses of Phobos only without the divine genius of Dostoyevsky that game possessed, but the history of video games is much more elaborate than that.

So depending on how you look at it, the first computer game may be a Brookhaven tennis game that recently turned 50; as you will see, it looked pretty terrific. Or it may be something no one outside a patent office has ever seen.

Like all awesome things, video games began as a science experiment. In the case of William Higinbotham (1910-1994), a physicist at Brookhaven National Lab who had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, he wanted to 'liven up' science for visitors during the Lab’s annual visitors’ days. On October 18, 1958, his vision was realized and hundreds of people, not surprisingly a lot of enchanted high school students, lined up to play what they called Tennis For Two. So at least in terms of a video game that got attention, this would seem to be first.

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