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  • 8/11/2019 WHO REALLY INVENTED THE VIDEO GAME?

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    9/7/08 2:eatures: Who Really Invented The Video Game?

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    CREATIVE COMPUTING VIDEO & ARCADE GAMES VOL. 1, NO. 1 / SPRING 1983 / PAGE 8

    WHO REALLY

    INVENTED

    THE VIDEO GAME?

    There was Bell, there was Edison,

    there was Fermi.

    And then there was Higinbotham.

    By John Anderson

    The Space Age had just been birthed. Sputnik was a new and somewhat ominous presence in the eveningsky--my father tells me he carried me to the roof of our apartment building to see it. I don't remember. Theyear was 1958, and I was two years old.

    Dave Ahl, my boss, was a high school student. He had won a scholarship, one benefit of which was a tourof Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. Something he saw on an oscilloscope there remainedfixed in his mind for many years, and caused, among other things, a recent pilgrimage of my own.

    Nearly 25 years after the fact, I found myself on the Long IslandExpressway. I was trying to pass an eighteen-wheeler spewinggravel off its trailer, while I looked for the Brookhaven exit. Itoccurred to me that the Lab was hardly a stone's throw from

    Shoreham Nuclear Power Station, that controversial patch ofmulti-billion-dollar poured concrete. I wondered if the proximitywas mere coincidence.

    Brookhaven is a government installation, and I get nervous atcheckpoints. The guard at the gate had a familiar kind ofhypertensive bearing. I wished then I had shaved that morning. Iproffered my press card with clammy claw. He told me to pullmy car off to the side; I knew the jig was up. I was a spy, anagent, a saboteur, and it was all over.

    He handed me a piece of paper and said those chilling words:"Have a nice day." Upon inspection, the paper seemed to be avisitor's map. My adrenalin level began to subside.

    It's really very simple to get to the Department of NuclearEnergy. You make a right near the linear accelerator, and pullinto the lot next to the alternating gradient synchotron. If you seethe tandem Van de Graff, you've gone too far.

    From there, only one flight of stairs separates you from one ofthe great, unsung heroes of our time, Willy Higinbotham.

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    Dave Potter (left) and Willy worked on the

    original design.

    Willy describes the innards of his electronic

    tennis game. His rendering of the screen

    appears at right.

    There was Bell, there was Edison, there was Fermi. And thenthere was Higinbotham.

    Willy was responsible for the display Dave saw on that fatefulday in 1958. Willy, you see, invented the video game.

    We've received several manuscripts which attempt to set therecord straight on the history of the video game. If you claim andcan document a video game predating 1958, let us know.

    Otherwise, give Willy Higinbotham his profound and historicdue. Much to the chagrin of large corporations involved incurrent litigation, he did it first, and he has proved it.

    Though he stands about five feet four inches tall, Mr.Higinbotham commands quite a stature. He very nearlychainsmokes unfiltered cigarettes, which he wolfs down withgreat voracity for a man of 72 years. His eyeglasses magnify tothe point where his corneas seem as large as quarters. He laughseasily and likes to play the accordion, though he admits it's beena while since he's played at a party.

    And, as a physicist in the Manhattan Project, he witnessed thedetonation of the first atomic bomb.

    Before we sat down to speak in earnest, Willy called an oldfriend, Dave Potter, and asked him to join us. Dave had workedwith Willy on the original game designs. We adjourned to aconference room. As Willy got started, other scientists wouldwander into the room, find a perch, and listen along. "Isn't he something?" one of the scientists whispered.He sure is.

    Back in the 1950's, when tours of the Laboratory were first instituted, they were rather static affairs, usuallyconsisting of a group of photographs to depict some facet of research at the facility. Willy, who discoveredhis penchant for physics at Cornell and electronics at MIT, explained that he wanted to make his displaymore dynamic. Give it a little punch. Wouldn't it fill the bill, he thought, if we got some sort of little gamegoing on a CRT, so visitors could have some "hands-on" interaction with the hardware? He and hisassociates fashioned a tennis game played on the five-inch screen of an oscilloscope.

    Digital computers were coming into their own in 1958; in fact, Willy's own Instrumentation Division wasbuilding one at the time. However his game contraption made use of an analog computer, one that usedvariable voltages rather than on-off pulses to represent information. To this was hardwired anonprogrammable assemblage of electro-mechanical relays, potentiometers, resistors, capacitors, and "op-amps," short for operational amplifiers.

    Willy himself is the first to admit that the arrangement was rather inelegant. But he also points out that itworked. He did make use of some recently invented transistors as flip-flop switches--a harbinger of things

    to come. Willy simply did the job in the shortest time with whatever parts were handy. The result was avideo game, something no computer, digital or analog, had been harnessed to do before.

    The screen display was a side view of a tennis court. It looked like an upside-down " T, " with a shortenedstem. This was the "net. " Each player held a prototypical paddle, a small box with a knob and button on it.The knob controlled the angle of the player's return, and the button chose the moment of the hit. A playercould hit the ball at any time, providing it was on his side of the net. Gravity, windspeed, and bounce wereall portrayed. For example, if you hit a ball into the net, it would bounce lower than a bounce off the"ground," and would eventually die.

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    The oscilloscope on which the game

    appeared.

    Note the date of the blueprint: Oct. 1958.

    This date has been verified.

    Willy describes the sight at Alamogordo in

    1945.

    The game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious. Potter remembers the popularity of thegame: "The high schoolers liked it best. You couldn't pull them away from it." He's probably rememberingyoung Dave Ahl, staring at the screen with a little voice inside him saying "this could be somethingimportant."

    The ball and court lines were drawn and redrawn sequentially, at a rate that made for a flicker-free view ofground, net, and ball. This is an approach still used in game playfield display. However the method of ballmanipulation was and remains unique.

    Without becoming too bogged down in explanation, consider the following. An oscilloscope is capable ofgenerating cartesian coordinate displays. That is to say, a dynamic "graph" can be drawn, plotting thedeflection of x or y proportionally to the voltages input as x or y.

    Higinbotham rigged up a circuit wherein the plot of thesefunctions simulated the trajectory of a bouncing ball. Op-ampsfrom a Donner Labs analog computer were used to generate thistrajectory and to sense when the ball had struck the ground. Whenthis occurred, a relay would be thrown, reversing the polarity ofanother op-amp, so that the ball would reflect its path and "take abounce." Primitive, but effective.

    Other op-amps and relays were used to determine whether or notthe ball had hit the net. As mentioned earlier, rebound velocityfrom the net was lower than from the ground, providing an extrabit of realism.

    Velocity, slowed continually by wind-speed, was simulatedstraightforwardly with a 10 meg. resistor.

    A toggle switch allowed players to choose which side to servefrom, and net height, as well as court length, were adjustable.There was no way a player could "miss" the ball, as a push of thepaddle button would always result in a hit when the ball was onthat player's side of the net. Unless the player chose the correct

    angle and timing for a return, however, the shot would not make itback to the opponent's side.

    The implementation was very much more sophisticated than thefirst "Pong" games. It was the hit of the Brookhaven "visitors'days" for two years running. Eventually, however, it wasdismantled.

    I asked Willy why he hadn't patented the thing at the time. He isresponsible for over 20 patents, each of which reverted to the U.S.Government.

    "We knew it was fun, and saw some potential in it at the time, but

    it wasn't something the government was interested in. It's a goodthing, too. Today all video game designers would have to licensetheir games from the federal government!" The idea somehowpleased Willy, and his laughter signalled it.

    To Magnavox, however, the rights to video games are no laughingmatter; they could mean millions. The corporation seeks a patenton video games using bouncing balls, and has taken sworndepositions from Higinbotham concerning his own invention.Though Willy stands to make no monetary gain whatsoever, he

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    has a personal stake in the contest.

    One must take a broader view of Willy's career to see the game from the perspective that he himself does.

    Higinbotham was a graduate student in Physics at Cornell University at the outbreak of World War II. Hewas invited to join research at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he worked on an advanced andimportant technique known as radio detecting and ranging, later shortened to RADAR.

    From there he joined the Manhattan District Project, working as a physicist on another exotic and potentially

    important technology. He became head of the Electronics Division there in 1945. Higinbotham devised thetiming circuits that took the first atomic bomb through the last few milliseconds preceding detonation.

    He worked with and knew J. Robert Oppenheimer quite well. "He was a charismatic man," says Willy."People tended either to worship or detest him. I did neither. He was brilliant, though. There's no doubt ofthat."

    At the time of the blast at Los Alamos, Willy was 24 miles from ground zero, able to watch the entiredetonation through welder's glass so thick, he couldn't see an illuminated headlight through it.

    I asked him what it had been like. He grew quiet. He said that he and the other observers got into the trucksand made the long trip back to the compound in utter silence. No one had anything to say.

    Willy spent the next two years as executive secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, inWashington, D. C. He acted as a liaison between Congress and scientists, lobbying for the nonproliferationof nuclear weapons.

    "It's taken over thirty years," Willy observes," but the message is finally beginning to get through." His facebrightens. Today, as a senior scientist at Brookhaven Laboratory, he and his colleagues have amassed thelargest and most comprehensive library in the world concerning nuclear safeguards.

    I was warming up the car for the long trip home, staring across a field at the building housing the cyclotron.He's not only something, I thought to myself. He's a walking bit of history. He also invented the videogame!

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