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They hired engineer Allan Alcorn as its first employee, and he created a coin-op version of the Magnavox tennis game and named it “Pong”. The following year, 1972, Bushnell and Dabney formed a new company, Atari. While this was a commercial success, making over US$1,000,000, it was a disappointment to Nutting. By spring 1972 the game had sold over 1,000 unit. Unfortunately, the reaction from distributors was mixed while some were excited by the game, others felt it to be confusing and part of a passing video game fad. The display was rendered on a specially modified General Electric 15″ black-and-white portable television vacuum tube set. A few months later came the first commercially sold arcade video game, Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney of Nutting Associates. The console incorporated a DC PDP-11/20 with vector displays. The first coin-operated video game was a version of SpaceWar developed by students at Stanford University in 1971. It is considered by many to be the first influential video game. Tennis For Two was actually more a diversion than an entertainment because the first video game that people were actually eager to play was SpaceWar, programmed by a group of MIT students on a PDP-1 computer in 1961. Higgenbotham (love that name!) was actually developing missile technology, but he created the game to entertain visitors to his lab. The first video game ever actually made was Tennis For Two, created by physicist William Higginbotham on a Donner Model 30 analog computer in 1958. However, this invention was apparently never built. It was a missile simulator using analog circuitry to control the CTR beam and position a dot on the video screen. Our story starts just after the end of World War II, when the earliest known interactive arcade electronic game, the prosaically named Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, patented in 1947 by Thomas T. However, many of the young folks who play video games today on their Xbox’s, PlayStation’s, and Wii’s are unaware of the history behind this holiday tradition, and so I will use this week’s blog post to tell the story of the first console systems. Video games have long been a popular gift for good little boys and girls, and nothing can make a child happier than seeing a new console system under the tree on Christmas morning. Consequently, some have labelled Higinbotham the Grandpapapapa of Video Games.The Christmas shopping season has always been very important to the game industry, and many video game developers target their release dates so that their games hit the store shelves in October or November. Nintendo lost the court case, when the judge ruled that Tennis For Two didn't use video signals, and could therefore not qualify as a video game.īaer is widely considered to be the Father of Video Games. Nintendo stated that Baer had stolen his idea for a tennis game from Tennis For Two. Baer - creator of the first games console, the Magnavox Odyssey - in a bid to invalidate his patents. In 1985, Nintendo sued Magnavox and Ralph H. Viewed on yet another oscilloscope, whatever that is, Higinbotham created a pair of familiar-looking aluminium paddle controllers. Unlike the top-down Pong, Tennis For Two adopted a side-on perspective, simulating a ball's trajectory based upon wind resistance. That accolade had already been taken by Tennis For Two, created by William Higinbotham for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual public exhibition. In actual fact, Pong wasn't even the first tennis game. Pong is considered the first proper video game - even if most people forget that it was a proven rip-off.
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