Where Did Video Games REALLY Start?

So, way back when I started the blog, I made the assertion that I believed that Christopher Strachey's Draughts was the first video game ever. My stance on that solidified as a result of watching Stuart Brown's (Ahoy) video essay on the subject of the definition of a "video game", and what, based on that definition, ought to be classified as the first "true" video game. Incidentally, I don't think you should really read those early posts - my writing and research was quite lazy. Putting multiple games in a single post was a mistake - a mistake I may potentially look to rectify in the near future.

I still agree with Ahoy's assessment that Draughts is the first true video game ever made. However, that's not a consensus opinion. Plenty of people would disagree with me. There's plenty of other takes on the "first video game", and games that predate Draughts that could be argued as the first. Some say it's OXO, others Tennis for Two, and some would even say Spacewar! or Pong is the first. Ralph Baer, of course, argued that his "Brown Box" that would become the Magnavox Odyssey was the first. Here in this article, I'm going to discuss those other contenders (except Pong and the Odyssey, because ignoring 25 years of prior history to them is absurd), and attempt to settle on a definite date for when the concept of the "video game" was born.

As I'm sure we're all aware of, especially if you've been around this blog for any length of time, the video game spawned out of the world of computer science. Computing technology had been slowly developing over about a century, starting with the mechanical computing devices invented in the 19th century - Charles Babbage being the chief instigator of that with his "Difference Engine," and later the "Analytical Engine." Calculators and other similar, mechanical and non-electronic devices continued development (we can't forget that the arcade existed, either) up until just prior to the outbreak of World War Two. 

The war seriously accelerated the progress of computer development, in the West especially to counter the advances of the Germans in their Enigma encryption technology. The Germans also had access to one of the world's first digital computers: Konrad Zuse's Z3. The Brits countered first with their "British Bombe" electro-mechanical codebreaker, and then with the Colossus computer in 1944 - the ultimate code breaking machine.

After the war, however, there was naturally less of a push for state-of-the-art defense technology, allowing for peacetime efforts in computing to be directed elsewhere, particularly games. For instance, Turing, in 1948, began experimenting with creating a Chess program, which he called "Turbochamp." He worked out the algorithms by hand and tested them against his colleagues, before getting to work programming it on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer - a task he would never finish. Despite him not finishing the program, it shows that there was interest in using computers for gaming purposes very early on in the minds of the great coding wizards.

Several other computer scientists experimented with games programming, though not initially for the sake of leisure, but more for the purposes of developing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Particular interest was given to what are called "solved" games - games that had a "perfect" way to play them, discoverable through use of computers calculating the algorithms. Chess and Checkers are such games, hence why there was much interest in them early on, but also Tic-Tac-Toe and Nim were also of interest as much simpler "solved" games. Some games were designed purely for recreational purposes, but those were much rarer across the early decades of video games (1940s - 1960s.)

Now that I've given more of a surface-level overview, we're going to zoom into a few examples of early computer games. Timing wise, I'm going to end off in 1952 with a revisit of Draughts and OXO. I'm only interested in the origins of the computer game here, so going beyond that point is unnecessary in such an introductory article. Each game will only be getting a brief summary, both to prevent this article from becoming a master's thesis, and to leave room for expanding this article into a "revisit" of my prehistory series. If I'm honest, I'm not totally satisfied with my early articles and the lacking research I did, so revisiting the series is something I'm strongly considering, both to fix my mistakes and refine my research methodology further.

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947)

Patent schematic.

An electronic game designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. This is usually cited as the earliest example of a video game by most historians I've read. Personally, I don't think it really counts, as it was only ever a patent. Never was this device constructed, and I think that's important when discussing the "first video game." It's one thing to have the idea and the blueprint for it, but it's another thing to actually build the device to see if it works. 

However, the description of it may sound vaguely familiar. The player would sit in front of the CRT, presented with a game in which you fire artillery shells at designated targets painted on the CRT's screen. The shells, represented by a dot on the screen, were able to be manipulated by the player with a control knob. The player was to move the dots over targets painted on the CRT screen that represented aeroplanes, pushing a button to then fire the shell. If successful, the screen would simulate an explosion.

That does sound very much like an early arcade or second-generation console video game to me - part artillery game, part flight combat simulator. Considering what was to come after this patent was filed, this electronic game concept was quite ambitious and forward-thinking. Certainly not a "solved" game, like most of the other early examples of computer games. It does make one wonder what might have been if the thing was built, though...

Bertie the Brain (1950)

Comedian Danny Kaye was a fan.

Electronic game development goes quite for a couple of years after the CRT Amusement Device was patented. 1948 and 1949 don't see much progress in electronic game development, outside Alan Turing's previously mentioned Turbochamp Chess program, and some other computer scientists doing similar experiments that were strictly not intended for recreational purposes.

That leads us to a new decade - the 1950s - and the next milestone game: Bertie the Brain. Like the computer scientists' experiments, this machine wasn't entirely intended to just be a for-fun amusement. Its creator, Dr. Josef Kates, created it as a marketing ploy for his newest invention: Additron tubes. Kates intended for these tubes to replace the earlier, more fragile Thermionic valves. One Additron tube was equivalent to ten Thermionic valves!

With support from his former employer, radio and electronics company Rogers Majestic, Kates' went about constructing a machine to display the potential of his new invention. What he decided on was to make a device that was able to play Tic-Tac-Toe against a human opponent. The result was Bertie the Brain, a four-metre tall electronic box that offered passersby at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition (where Bertie the Brain was put on display) a novel game of *Noughts & Crosses.

The display consisted of incandescent tubes that lit up with an X or O - not really a true "video" display if we're working with Ahoy's definition of a video game. The control panel was quite intuitive - nine buttons, one for each box of the game grid. What I find most interesting about Bertie the Brain from a game-design standpoint is that it had adjustable difficulty. Kates was able to adjust the level of challenge to suit whoever was playing at any given moment. Accommodating for a child, merciless and unbeatable for a skilled adult player. It's a clear forerunner to the varied DIP switches found on just about every single arcade video game from Pong onward.

Nimrod (1951)

Looks like the lair of an evil genius.

Across the Atlantic, something curiously similar to Bertie the Brain was being developed. British computer manufacturer Ferranti were gearing up for the 1951 Festival of Britain. However, their promise of preparing a new computer for the festival was seeming less and less likely to be fulfilled. That's when John M. Bennett, an Australian (hype!) computer scientist and employee of Ferranti suggested the idea of making a computer that played a single game: Nim. Bennett was inspired by a similar, electro-mechanical Nim-playing machine that had appeared a decade prior called the Nimatron.

Once again, however, the purpose of this "game" was not to simply be a game. Bennett wanted Nimrod to be a display on the basics of computer programming. Most onlookers were, according to Bennett himself, "quite happy to gawk at the flashing lights and be impressed." Some were more determined to try beat the artificial intelligence. Like Bertie the Brain, Nimrod used incandescent lamps to indicate game progress, and used a push-button panel as the control scheme. With the lack of video display, Nimrod also fails to perfectly meet the definition of a video game.

Nimrod also went on a small world tour, heading to Germany after the Festival of Britain exhibition concluded, and then after Germany to Canada. Also like Bertie the Brain, once Nimrod had fulfilled its purpose, it was sadly dismantled. This wouldn't end Ferranti's contributions to early video games, however.

Draughts (1952)

Recreation of what the game would've look like.

Now for my first true revisit on the blog. Christopher Strachey's Draughts was one of the very first games I covered on the blog. There wasn't a whole lot of depth to the research in that article, as I paired the game with A. S. Douglas' OXO. At the time, I thought it made more sense, since Draughts is a game lost to time, to pair it with another game to make the article more substantial. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake.

The story of Strachey's Draughts goes back into 1951, parallel with the time Nimrod was in active development. Strachey has just joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England. Just prior, the NPL had completed the Pilot ACE - one of the country's first computers, based on an Alan Turing design. Strachey, wanting to familiarise himself with programming on the Pilot ACE, chose to create a Draughts (or Checkers, if you prefer) program.

However, his program was too much for the Pilot ACE, and totally consumed the system memory. This led him to look elsewhere for a more capable computer to run his game. Ferranti re-enters the scene, as they happened to have just the computer Strachey needed - the Manchester Mark 1. Incidentally, Stracey and Alan Turing were colleagues, and so Strachey was able to request that Turing send him the manuals for the Mark 1. By October of 1951, Strachey had transcribed the program, but it took until July 1952 to get the game fully functional.

By all definitions, Draughts is certainly a video game, and the first one that is purely software. It uses two CRT displays to show game progress, and the player inputs are through buttons. Strachey also programmed in various reactions the computer would give depending on player actions, such as telling them to hurry up or berating them for not playing properly. It's apparent to me now that this is where the trend I've seen of text-based games berating the player started. Also noteworthy is that Strachey included one of the earliest instances of computer-generated music in Draughts, where, upon the conclusion of a game, the computer would play a short piece of "God Save the King."

One final distinction earned by Draughts is that it's the first video game to directly inspire a future game. Back across the Atlantic, Arthur Lee Samuel created his own Checkers game for the IBM 701 computer, which became a pioneering work in machine learning, as the game's computer opponent could learn to improve its play.

OXO (1952)

A draw - again.

The final game in this overview of the beginnings of video games sees us staying in the United Kingdom. OXO is another software game developed for the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator - try saying that five times quickly), stationed at Cambridge University. Alexander Shafto Douglas was its creator, a computer scientist with particular interest in the relationship between humans and computers. Once again, this is a game that was not created just to be a game.

Like Draughts, OXO is one of the first games to use a graphical CRT display, making it, by my definition, a full video game. The control scheme is of particular interest, though, as it uses a rotary phone dial as the input. I bet some of you younger readers have no idea what a rotary phone dial is. Google it. Since Douglas' purpose for OXO was to be a part of a thesis on human-computer interactions, any sort of difficulty or gameplay wasn't considered; the computer plays a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe, meaning that the player can never win. The player was never intended to win.

Final Thoughts

If we want to answer the question posed by the article, there's two possible, more definite ways to answer it, in my opinion. The first is to just start at the very very start, saying that the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is first, simply because it was the first video game concept ever created, despite the fact that it was never built.

Video games were invented: 25th of January, 1947.

The second, and this is where I land, is to find or develop a working definition of "video game," and determine what's first from there. As said at the start, I use Ahoy's definition, which sees Draughts and OXO as the first true video games. Although, it could be argued that these two games don't perfectly fit his definition, as his fourth point, "Be principally intended for entertainment", is not directly met by either. They weren't intended exclusively as entertainment, but as training (Draughts) or academic (OXO) exercises. Still, there's enough recreational merit in both to meet the definition of a video game, in my mind.

Video games were invented: 30th of July, 1952. 

There were some other games floating around at the same time, like Sheep & Gates, also on the EDSAC, which Ahoy also briefly mentions, but none of those caught much attention and continue to live in obscurity (perhaps something I will seek to remedy?)

That being said, answering the question is not really that simple. History is rarely ever simple. You could look at the pinball industry, or electro-mechanical arcades and say that the seeds of video games are present there, particularly when a computer game like Nimrod was directly influenced by a similar, electro-mechanical arcade game developed a decade prior. When electronics and technology advance, the effects eventually filter down into other industries, and that's what we see with the origins of video games. Computers become more advanced, then get incorporated into arcade games, etc., etc.

Personally, I always find the origins of things fascinating. There's always an opportunity to see the seeds of what was to come being planted. The curious thing with the origins of video games, is that just about every game is an island. They all exist in their own spaces, not influenced by each other, nor do they influence any future games. While Bertie the Brain and Nimrod were publicly displayed, they had no sequels, nor was anyone inspired to do something similar by them. Draughts and OXO were purely academic works, inaccessible to the public and created as part of personal projects - although Draughts did inspire one other Checkers game. The influence of these games lives far more in the realm of computer science than video games. We don't actually see any substantial video game "family trees" begin, per se, until Spacewar! and The Sumerian Game appear in the early 1960s.

What are your thoughts on the first video game? Do you agree with me? Or do you prefer a different game be labelled the "first"? Did I miss a game? I'd greatly appreciate it if you shared your thoughts in the comments. This is potentially the start of a "prehistory revisited" series that would feature more robust and well-researched articles. Let me know if that's something you would be interested in seeing from me.