Every year Brookhaven National Laboratory would hold a public exhibition. Why would a nuclear and high-energy laboratory have a public exhibition? Because the ’50s were insane. During this public exhibition, there would be three days of visitors. One day for the general public, when everyone could come, one day for college students, which seems sensible, and one day for high schoolers, which is how we get Spider-Men.
11 years into being the Head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven, William Higinbotham wanted to make something to entertain people who stopped by the Lab. So he created Tennis for Two, now believed to be the world’s first video game.
The screen for Tennis for Two wasn’t LCD or even a CRTV- it was played on an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope hooked up to the original Atari Missile Comand, by which I of course mean a computer designed to calculate ballistic missile trajectories. So Higinbotham took a computer meant to help track missiles, hooked it up to radar, and made tennis. The controllers were something he rigged together leading up to the exhibition, each sporting a single button to hit the tennis ball, and a dial to set the angle that you’d hit it at. All of this came together and looked like absolute garbage, as you can see here.
How 'The Manhattan Project' Directly Led To Video Games
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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