Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  In 1947, the pioneering TV network Dumont became first to try and explore the idea of allowing people to play games on their TV sets. Two of the company’s employees – Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann – came up with the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Based on a simple electronic circuit, the device would allow people to fire missiles at a target, such as an aeroplane, stuck onto the screen by the player. The device would use the cathode-ray tube within the TV set to draw lines representing the trajectory of the missile and to create a virtual explosion if the target was hit. [2] Goldsmith and Mann applied for a patent for the idea in January 1947, which was approved the following year, but Dumont never turned the device into a commercial product.

  A few years later another TV engineer had a similar thought. Born in Germany in 1922, Ralph Baer had spent most of his teenage years watching the rise of the Nazi Party in his home country and the subsequent oppression of his fellow Jews. Eventually, in September 1938, his family fled to the US just weeks before Kristallnacht, the moment when the Nazis’ oppression turned violent and Germany’s Jews began to be rounded up and sent to die in concentration camps. “My father saw what was coming and got all the paperwork together for us to go to New York,” he said. “We went to the American consulate and sat in his office. I spoke pretty good English. I guess being able to have that conversation with the consulate might have made all the difference because the quota for being let into the US was very small. If we hadn’t got into the quota then it would have been…[motions slicing of the neck].”

  In the US, Baer studied television and radio technology and eventually ended up working at military contractors Loral Electronics, where in 1951 he and some colleagues were asked to build a TV set from scratch. “We used test equipment to check our progress and one of the pieces of equipment we used put horizontal lines, vertical lines, cross-hatch patterns, and colour lines on the screen,” he said. “You could move them around to some extent and use them to adjust the television set. Moving these patterns around was kind of neat and the idea came to me that maybe we wanted to build something into a television set. I don’t know that I thought about it as a game, more something to fool with and to give you something to do with a television set other than watch stupid network programmes.” Baer’s idea proved fleeting and he quickly ca it aside. But a seed had been sown.

  * * *

  By the start of 1958, the video game was still an elusive concept. Computer scientists still saw games as foil for their research and the engineers who saw potential for TV to be a two-way experience between screen and viewer had failed to develop their ideas further. Bennett’s reporter-scaring Nimrod was still the nearest thing to a video game anyone outside the engineering workshops or university computer lab had seen. But 1958 would see the concept of the video game come one step closer thanks to William Higinbotham.

  Higinbotham had worked on the Manhattan Project, building the timing switches that made the bomb explode at the correct moment. Like many of the scientists who created the bomb, he harboured mixed feelings about what he had done and would spend much of his post-war life campaigning against nuclear proliferation. After the war, he became head of the instrumentation division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory – a US government research facility based on Long Island, New York. Every year Brookhaven would open its doors to the public to show off its work. These visitor days tended to contain static exhibits that did little to excite the public and so, with the 1958 open day looming, Higinbotham decided to make a more engaging attraction.

  He came up with the idea for a fun, interactive exhibit: a tennis game played on the screen of an oscilloscope that he built using transistor circuitry with the help of Brookhaven engineer Robert Dvorak. The game, Tennis for Two , recreated a side-on view of a tennis court with a net in the middle and thin ghostly lines that represented the players’ racquets. The large box-shaped controllers created for the game allowed players to move their racquets using a dial and whack the ball by pressing a button. Brookhaven’s visitors loved it. “The high schoolers liked it best, you couldn’t pull them away from it,” recalled Higinbotham more than 20 years later. In fact Tennis for Two was so popular that it returned for a second appearance at Brookhaven’s 1959 open day. But neither Higinbotham nor anybody else at Brookhaven thought much of the game and after its 1959 encore it was dismantled so its parts could be used in other projects. With that Higinbotham went back to his efforts to stop nuclear proliferation, eventually forming a division at Brookhaven to advise the US Atomic Energy Agency on how to handle radioactive material.

  The 1950s had been a decade of false starts for the video game. Almost as soon as anybody started exploring the idea they walked away, convinced it was a waste of time. Computer Chess had proved a fruitful line of inquiry for artificial intelligence research – indeed many of the principles pioneered by Shannon and others would later be used by video game designers to create challenging computer-controlled opponents for game players – but remained steadfastly about research rather than entertainment.

  But as the 1960s dawned, the idea that computers should only be used for serious applications was about to be challenged head on by a group of computing students who rejected the po-faced formality of their professors and saw programming as fun and creative rather than staid and serious.

  * * *

  The Tech Model Railroad Club lived up ts name. Based in Building 20 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students in the club were united by an interest in building elaborate model railroads using complex combinations of relays and switches. Many of the club members also shared a love of computing and trashy sci-fi books such as Buck Rogers and, in particular, the work of E.E. Smith. Smith wrote unashamedly trashy novellas telling stories of romance, war and adventure in outer space that were packed with melodramatic dialogue and clichéd plot twists. His Lensman and Skylark series of books, written in the 1920s and 1930s, helped define the space opera genre of science fiction and fans such as Tech Model Railroad Club member Steve Russell lapped up his trashy tales.

  The club members’ attitude to computing was in stark contrast to that of their professors and the computer scientists of the previous two decades. They saw merit in creating anything that seemed like a fun idea regardless of its practical value. Club member Robert Wagner’s Expensive Desk Calculator was typical. Written on MIT’s $3 million TX-0 computer, it did what a desktop calculator of the day did only on a machine worth thousands more. Wagner’s professors were unimpressed by what they saw as a contemptible misuse of advanced computer technology and gave him a zero grade as a punishment. Such disapproval, however, did little to quash the playful programming spirit of the club’s members and in late 1961, their unorthodox attitude really got a chance to shine when the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT its latest computer, the PDP-1.

  The $120,000 PDP-1 may have been the size of a large car, but with its keyboard and screen it was in many ways the forerunner of the modern desktop computer. The imminent arrival of the cutting-edge machine caught the imagination of the Tech Model Railroad Club. “Long before the PDP-1 was up and running Wayne Witaenem, Steve Russell and I had formed a sort of ad-hoc committee on what to do with it,” club member Martin Graetz told Edge magazine in 2003. After some debate the students hit on the idea of making a game. “Wayne said: ‘Look, you need action and you need some kind of skill level. It should be a game where you have to control things moving around on the screen like, oh, spaceships’,” recalled Graetz.

  And with that comment Spacewar! , a two-player spaceship duel set in outer space, was born. Russell took on the job of programming the game, but his progress was slow. He would repeatedly make excuses about why the game was still not finished when questioned by other club members. Eventually Russell’s excuses ran out when he told club member Alan Kotok that he could not start work on the game until he had some routines that could carry out sine-cosine calculations. [3] Kotok went straight to the Digital Equipment Corporation, g
ot the routines and handed them to Russell. “Alan Kotok came to me and said: ‘Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines. Now what’s your excuse?’,” said Russell.

  Out of excuses, Russell finally got to work and completed the first version of Spacewar! in late 1961, complete with a curvy rocket ship inspired by the stories of Smith and another based on the US military’s Redstone Rocket. [4] But the club’s members felt Spacewar! needed improvement and quickly started adding enhancements. Russell’s use of real-life space physics meant there was no inertia in the game, making it hard to play. So Dan Edwards inserted a star into the play area that had a gravitational pull that players could use to swing their rockets around. The lack of any background in the game made it hard for players to judge how fast the rocket ships were travelling, so Peter Sampson added the star map from another of the club’s professor-annoying programs: Expensive Planetarium . Kotok and Bob Saunders then created a dedicated controller to replace the PDP-1’s in-built bank of 18 switches that made Spacewar! uncomfortable to play. By spring 1962 Spacewar! was finally finished.

  Word of the club’s groundbreaking game quickly spread among PDP-1 users at MIT and soon students were staying at the lab well into the night for a fix of Spacewar! . For a brief moment Russell and the others thought about trying to sell the game but concluded that since you needed a $120,000 computer to play it there wouldn’t be much interest. So they gave it away, handing copies of the game to any PDP-1 user who wanted one. Soon word spread beyond the confines of MIT. In computer labs without a PDP-1, programmers recreated the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game for their systems, spreading its reach even further. DEC began using the game to demonstrate the PDP-1 to potential customers and eventually included a copy of the game with every PDP-1 it sold. And despite attempts by computer administrators to delete the time-wasting program that they saw as an affront to the seriousness of computing, Spacewar! continued to thrive, growing in influence and popularity all the way.

  But while computer students got to sample the delights of Spacewar! , few expected it to go any further. After all, computers were simply too big and too expensive for anyone who didn’t have some serious application in mind. Few expected the situation to change. When film director Stanley Kubrick consulted more than 100 experts about what the technology of 2001 would look like for his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey , he came back with tales of intelligent machines that would play Chess to grandmaster standard and would be capable of voice recognition. But they would still be huge. Spacewar! , it seemed, was destined to remain a treat for the computing elite.

  * * *

  While Spacewar! was imprisoned by the technology needed to run it, the idea Ralph Baer had as an engineer at Loral back in 1951 was about to come of age. In August 1966 Baer, now head of instrument design at New Hampshire-based military contractors Sanders Associates, went on a business trip to New York City. After finishing his work, he headed to the East Side Bus Terminal to wait for his ride bk home. And while he waited, Baer had a brainwave. “I remember sitting on a stoop somewhere at the bus station in New York waiting for my bus to come in. The idea came full-blown:‘Hey! Let’s play games’,” he recalled. The next morning he set about writing a four-page proposal setting out his ideas for a $19.95 game-playing device that would plug into a TV set. “I was a bit conflicted when writing the proposal,” he recalled. “I am the chief engineer and a division manager at a big military company, so how the hell do I write this stuff? I start off calling it by some terminology that sounds like military terminology, by the time I get halfway through it changes and by the end I’m calling it Channel LP – for let’s play.”

  Unsure how his bosses would react, Baer used his position as the head of a large division in Sanders to start work on the Channel LP in secret. He acquired a room and brought in one of his technicians, Bill Harrison, to help out with the project. “My division was on the fifth floor of a large building. On the sixth floor, right opposite the elevator, there was an empty room that I commandeered and I gave Bill Harrison keys. Later Bill Rusch joined us as chief engineer. Rusch was constructive, creative and a pain in the ass. He’d come in late and break off for an hour before he got started, no discipline. I hated that, but he was very creative and very smart. There were just the three of us and nobody knew what we were doing in that room.”

  By March 1967 the trio had a working machine and bunch of game ideas. There was a chase game where players controlled dots trying to dodge or catch each other. Another game was a remake of Ping-Pong where players controlled bats at either side of the screen to deflect a ball that bounced around the screen. Baer and his team also devised a game where players used a plastic rifle to shoot on-screen targets and another where the player had to furiously pump a plunger-type controller to make the screen change colour. With a working prototype complete and a selection of games on offer, Baer decided to face the music and show his bosses what he had been doing. He showed his games machine to Herbert Campman, the corporate director of research and development at Sanders, in the hope of getting funding. Interested, but unsure where Baer’s work would lead, Campman agreed a small amount of investment. “He gave me $2,000 and five months of labour on it,” said Baer. “It wasn’t very generous, but it made it official.” As the project progressed Campman kept a close eye on the developments made by the team, becoming a fan of their shooting game in particular. “He would shoot from the hip and was pretty good at it,” said Baer.

  Other bosses were less supportive: “I had to tell my boss, who was the executive vice-president at the time, about the project. At regular intervals he would ask me: ‘Are you still screwing around with this stuff?’. Of course a few years later when the licence money started rolling in, everybody was telling me how supportive they’d been.” Baer also had to demonstrate his creation, which was now being called the Brown Box, to the company’s executive board, including founder Royden Sanders. “Everybody was stone-faced during the demonstration, especially Royden Sanders,” said Baer. “But there were two guys among the directors who got very enthusiastic and said ‘that’s great’. Everybody else thought I was nuts.”

  By the end of 1967 the Brown Box was near complete and had attracted the interest of TelePrompter Corporation, a cable TV company that saw it during a visit to Sanders. Sanders’ position as a military contractor meant it couldn’t just start making Baer’s toy, so the hope was that TelePrompter would buy the rights to produce it. But after two months of talks, cash-flow problems at TelePrompter resulted in the talks being abandoned. And since neither Baer nor Sanders had any idea who else might want to buy the rights, the Brown Box was left to gather dust.

  [ 1 ]. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Far, far longer than the 13.7 billion years estimated to have elapsed since The Big Bang.

  [ 2 ]. Cathode-ray tubes are devices that fire electron beams at TV screens to create a picture and were the basis of every TV set right up to the end of the 20th century, when the arrival of plasma and LCD flat screens made them obsolete.

  [ 3 ]. As part of his studies Kotok created a computer Chess program of his own that in 1962 would become the first one capable of defeating amateur players of the board game.

  [ 4 ]. The Redstone Rocket was a direct descendent of Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets and created by many of the same German scientists, who the US government secretly employed after the end of Second World War.

  Hand-made: Bill Pitts (left) and Hugh Tuck constructing the first coin-op video game, Galaxy Game . Courtesy of Bill Pitts

  2. Avoid Missing Ball For High Score

  As a student Bill Pitts lived for life underground. Instead of attending lectures, Pitts spent his time at Stanford University, California, combing the sprawling network of steam tunnels beneath the 8,000-acre campus for access points into off-limits buildings. “I went to Stanford in the fall of ’64 and for the first two years my h
obby was breaking into buildings,” he recalled.

  While Pitts was not the only student exploring the ill-lit and noisy tunnels, his expeditions were mainly a solitary affair. “There were others, but we didn’t really know each other,” he said. “Sometimes there would be a brick wall and the tunnel would go through and others before me had knocked the bricks out so you could crawl through.” Exploring the tunnels was a risky business: “It was pretty dangerous. I had a very heavy leather jacket; it was all raggedy, the lining on the inside was falling out. I would wear it in the steam tunnels even though it was hotter than 120° Fahrenheit down there. If any of the steam pipes broke I thought it would protect me, but actually I would have just cooked a little bit more slowly.”

  Pitts’ interest in exploring Stanford’s campus would prove fateful. One evening in 1966, while driving to meet some friends at a bar, he spotted a driveway going up into the hills about five miles from the centre of Stanford. “I could tell by the sign right at the front that this was a Stanford facility,” he said. “It was also a building I hadn’t broken into yet, so I figured I needed to come back later that night and break into this building.” Armed with the toolkit he used for picking locks and unscrewing grates on his adventures, Pitts returned to the mystery site at 11pm that night to break into the laboratory. His initial reaction was disappointment. “It’s all lit up and there’s lots of doors and they are all unlocked, but I go inside and what’s inside is the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project. They had a big huge time-sharing computer system called the PDP-6 – one big computer and probably 20 Teletypes connected to it so lots of people could each be developing code simultaneously and each one thought they had the computer to themselves. Back then it was magical. It was amazing that this single computer could be servicing 20 people at the same time. I was enthralled by it.” [1]