Robert McNees
Physicist William Higinbotham was born OTD in 1910. During the Manhattan Project he was the Electronics Group leader at Los Alamos.
In 1958, while working at Brookhaven Lab, he invented one of the first video games: “Tennis for Two.” It ran on an oscilloscope.
Image: Brookhaven
Robert McNees
Higinbotham devised the game for a public exhibition at Brookhaven Lab, and built it with Robert Dvorak.
"It might liven up the place to have a game... which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”
He apparently got the idea after looking through the manual for the analog computer in his lab (a Donner Model 30). It showed how, when modeling the flight of projectiles, the computer could be hooked up to an oscilloscope to display their trajectories.
Robert McNees
The computer was meant to model missiles, but Higinbotham figured it could just as well model the path of a tennis ball moving under the influence of gravity and air resistance.
So he sketched out an interface, gave it to Dvorak who assembled the system, and then they debugged it together.
The whole thing took just a few days. To handle the fast switching between components they had to incorporate a relatively new technology: transistors.
Robert McNees
There were other game-like inventions before Tennis for Two, and there's no reason to think it was a profound influence on later game designers. But it might be the first such invention that resembles what we now call video games.
Years later, companies would invoke Higinbotham's invention as "prior art" in commercial lawsuits over video games.
Higinbotham’s deposition from a 1976 court case where lawyers tried to use Tennis for Two to shoot down claims by Magnavox:
https://www.bnl.gov/about/docs/higinbotham_deposition.pdf
Robert McNees
And here are Higinbotham's recollections, prompted by a 1982 Creative Computing article that called him the inventor of video games.
“Whether or not inventing video games is something to be proud of is another matter.”
Robert McNees
It's not surprising that Higinbotham essentially repurposed a system meant for modeling missile trajectories. He was a founder and inaugural chair of the Federation of American Scientists.
Like many Manhattan Project scientists, he devoted his life to nuclear nonproliferation.
When he summarized his accomplishments, he preferred to be remembered for his nonproliferation work, radar work during the war, and Manhattan Project contributions. Work on video games was a distant fourth place.
Robert McNees
Higinbotham ends his recollections with a passage that basically says “I guess my opinion on video games is have you noticed that 30 years of intense nonproliferation work has failed to slow the nuclear arms race?”
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