Week 2 Task

Despite some argument it seems to me that Willy Higinbotham was the first person to think of using a computer for playing games. There was a guy who made a computer version of noughts and crosses in 1952 before Higinbotham made his game but there doesn’t seem to be much information on him anyway. There was also missile game made in 1947 but it didn’t involve a computer and so was not classed as a computer game.

In 1958 Higinbotham was head of the Brookhaven Nation Laboratory's Instrumentation Division which was a nuclear research facility in New York that was sponsored by the government. In an attempt to demonstrate how safe the facility was (nuclear radiation being very scary at the time) Higinbotham decided to go on tours but he didn’t want to bore people to death with diagrams and talks and so decided to do something slightly different. After three or so weeks with some help from Rovert Dvorak “Tennis for Two” was invented (not quite the same as pong but nearly).

I think this would have been a significant event in gaming history had Higinbotham patented it and tried to sell it but he didn’t and so it wasn’t even widely known about until much later. David Ahl who had played the game as a child brought the game to the attention of the general public in 1983 in order to give Higinbotham the recognition he deserved.