Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 34)

Trigger Happy
36
Well, that’s how the story usually goes.
4
But
beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world’s
first videogame was created four years earlier, at a U.S.
government nuclear research facility, the Brookhaven
National Laboratory. William A. Higinbotham, an
engineer who had designed timing devices for the
Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb and helped in the
first developments of radar, worked at Brookhaven in
charge of instrumentation design. He was trying to
dream up an entertaining exhibit for visiting members
of the public, and he hacked together a rudimentary
two-player tennis game. An analogue computer showed
the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips
on an oscilloscope, controlled by a button and a knob. It
was a smash hit with the visitors for two years.
But owing to this lone pioneer’s modesty—he
didn’t think he had created anything earth-shatteringly
novel—the game never left the confines of the facility.
“I considered the whole idea so obvious that it never
occurred to me to think about a patent,” Higinbotham
said wryly, years later. Luckily for the future of games,
_________________
4 Both J. C. Herz (in Joystick Nation) and Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder
(L’Univers des jeux vidÉo) give this erroneous starting point. A thorough
history is provided by Leonard Herman’s excellent Phoenix: The Fall and
Rise of Videogames, to which I am indebted in this section.