The Internet's Largest List of Gaming Systems
​Introduction | Table of Contents | Early Gaming | Home Pong | Pong Chips | Consoles | Plug and Play | Downloadable | Microconsoles | Educational | Dedicated Portable | Handheld | Mobile | Mainframe and Minicomputer | Microcomputer | Home Computer | Modern PCs | Microprocessors | Online Gaming | Arcade | Resources
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DID YOU KNOW:
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, an earlier design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until the 1940s that the first general-purpose computers were actually built, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine.
Intro
According to Wikipedia, the technical definition of 'video game' is that "there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube (CRT) that creates a rasterized image on a screen." This would define, say, a VIC20, or a Super Nintendo, but it leaves out many others: modern systems on high definition screens, systems with vector graphics displays, pretty much all handhelds, and much more.
Some might also say a video gaming system must have computer chips, or memory to store a program. Many of the earliest computers didn't have any of these, but neither did the Magnavox Odyssey (1972), considered by pretty much everyone to be the very first home video gaming system.
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I think the term 'video game' needs a new definition: an electronic device that one or more people interact with, which is capable of visually displaying the results of that interaction, and must have at least basic gaming elements (win/lose, hit/miss). By this definition then, the first video game wasn't Pong (as many laypersons have suggested), or Spacewar! (as many video game enthusiasts have been telling us), or even Tennis for Two (as most historians have assumed). By this definition, the very first video game may well have seen the light of day back in 1947.
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Though some of the entries here don't fit neatly into even the broadest definition of video game, like printing to paper instead of a display or not having direct input from the user, all of them have contributed significantly to the development of video games as we know them today.
1947
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Cathode-ray Tube Amusement Device
First Human/Machine Interactive Game
Developed by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann of DuMont Laboratories
in New Jersey, for which a patent was applied for on January 25, 1947.
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Several knobs allowed adjusting the curve and speed of the moving point representing the missile. Because graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets drawn on a simple overlay were placed on the CRT (sounds like the Magnavox Odyssey).
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"It never registered that this would have been the first video game," says Bill Brantley in an interview with Popular Mechanics in 2016. "He said if you turn these knobs and dials, you could make a little beam move across the image orthicon... and then by turning these other dials and knobs, you can change the electric field and magnetic field... and if you had the skills enough, you could hit the various little targets. If you think about the fact that you're controlling it like a joystick, in a way it was a pretty advanced game."
1948
Turochamp
First Computer Game Code... maybe?
According to Wikipedia, "the earliest known written computer game was developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948, a chess simulation called Turochamp, though it was never actually implemented on a computer as the code was too complicated to run on the machines of the time. Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a real chess game against an opponent, but was never able to run the program on a computer."
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Machiavelli
However, Turochamp might or might not be the earliest computer game, because around the same time Donald Michie and Shaun Wylie also wrote another chess simulation called Machiavelli. In fact, Turing did not actually complete Turochamp until late 1948 after hearing about a rival chess-playing program called Machiavelli.
1950
Bertie the Brain
First Publicly Demonstrated Computer Game with a Visual Display
Built by Josef Kates of Rogers Majestic, Bertie the Brain was installed in the Engineering Building at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition from August 25 to September 9, 1950.
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From Wikipedia: Bertie the Brain was a game of tic-tac-toe in which the player would select the position for their next move from a grid of nine lit buttons on a raised panel. The moves would appear on a grid of nine large squares set vertically on the machine as well as on the buttons, with either an X- or O-shaped light turning on in the corresponding space. The computer would make its move shortly after. A pair of signs to the right of the playfield, alternately lit up with "Electronic Brain" and an X or "Human Brain" and an O, marked which player's turn it was, and would light up along with "Win" when a player had won. Bertie could be set to several difficulty levels.
1951
Nimrod
"faster than thought"
Designed by John Makepeace Bennett and built by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams for Ferranti, Nimrod was displayed at the Festival of Britian on May 5, 1951 and again in October at the Berlin Industrial Show. The custom built computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of Nim against an artificial intelligence. The player pressed buttons on a raised panel corresponding with lights on the machine to select their moves, and the Nimrod moved afterwards, with its calculations represented by more lights. The Nimrod was intended to demonstrate Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than to entertain, though Festival attendees were more interested in playing the game than the logic behind it.
"It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems."
- from pamphlet sold to attendees to Festival of Britain for one shilling and sixpence
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English Draughts
First known computer game created for and run on a general-purpose computer
Finished in February, 1951, English Draughts (known by Americans as "checkers") was a game program by Christopher Strachey for the National Physical Laboratory’s Pilot ACE computer. The game completely exhausted the Pilot ACE’s memory. The draughts program ran for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL. When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. The program could "play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed".
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Chess
First computer game created for a commercially available computer
In November 1951, Dr. Dietrich Prinz wrote one of the oldest computer games, a chess-playing program for the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 computer. The limitation of the Mark 1 computer did not allow for a whole game of chess to be programmed. Prinz could only program mate-in-two chess problems. The program examined every possible move for White and Black (thousands of possible moves) until a solution was found, which took 15–20 minutes on average. The program’s restrictions were: no castling, no double pawn move, no en passant capture, no pawn promotion, and no distinction between checkmate and stalemate.
1952
Samuel Checkers-playing Program
First program used in early research of artificial intelligence
Inspired by a demonstration of Strachey's Checkers program at a computer conference in Toronto, Arthur Samuel developed his own checkers game in 1952 for the IBM 701, IBM's first commercial computer. Successive iterations of the program led to the development of rudimentary artificial intelligence, for which Arthur Samuel is a recognized pioneer. In 1956, a version of Samuel's Checkers was shown on television demonstrating the advances in both hardware and skilled programming. The demonstration caused IBM's stock to increase 15 points overnight.
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OXO
Available now to play on your Windows PC
Created by Alexander S. Douglas, OXO, or Naughts and Crosses, was a software program for the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer, which simulates a game of tic-tac-toe. The EDSAC included three 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tubes to graphically display the state of the computer's memory. As a part of a thesis on human–computer interaction, Douglas used one of these screens to portray other information to the user; he chose to do so via displaying the current state of a game. The player entered input using a rotary telephone controller, selecting which of the nine squares on the board they wished to move next. Their move would appear on the screen, and then the computer's move would follow. The game was not available to the general public, and was only available to be played in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory, by special permission, as the EDSAC could not be moved.
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The EDSAC Simulator – http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/
The Edsac simulator is a faithful software evocation of the EDSAC computer as it existed in 1949-51. The user interface has all the controls and displays of the original machine, and the system includes subroutines, debugging software, and a library of original programs, including OXO.
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Code-names “Casey” and "Cowboy"
War game simulations finally get computerized
The RAND Corporation was formed in 1948, after World War II, from its roots as a United States Air Force "Research ANd Development" project within the Douglas Aircraft Company, to connect military planning with research and development decisions.
A nearly exact physical replica of the Air Defense Direction Center (ADCC) was constructed in a warehouse at 4th and Broadway in Santa Monica and was based around an IBM 701 that would run a simulation of incoming aircraft that the trainees had to identify, pinpoint, and interdict. The display consisted of a faux radar screen drawn by an IBM 407 printer that produced a new paper readout each time the radar changed. The first exercise using the system, code-named “Casey,” ran from February 4 to June 8 1952 and involved twenty-eight students from UCLA. A second run, code-named “Cowboy,” followed in early 1953 with actual military personnel. Shortly after, a cathode ray tube (CRT) display was added for the 701 from IBM to replace the paper readouts of the original system.
1954
Craps and Tic-tac-toe on the MIDAC
More software demonstrating hardware capabilities
Willow Run, a Detroit airplane manufacturer founded by Ford Motor Company, built two digital computers in 1952, the Michigan Digital Automatic Computer (MIDAC) and the more advanced Michigan Digital Special Automatic Computer (MIDSAC). According to the Chicago Tribune, the Willow Run facility publicly debuted the two computers for the first time on June 26, 1954, which were both programmed to play games for the occasion. The MIDAC hosted a craps game that declared its “box point” and then rolled simulated dice until it won or lost, with the results printed on an automatic typewriter attached to the machine. MIDAC also hosted a tic-tac-toe game that pitted a human against a hardware-controlled opponent. If a player attempted to cheat by placing multiple symbols on his turn, the computer would call him out for it.
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Pool game on the MIDSAC
First video game with real time graphics
Unlike MIDAC, MIDSAC was hooked up to a 13-inch CRT display, allowing it to host a far more impressive game. Developed by William Brown and Ted Lewis, the program simulated a standard pool table and a full rack of fifteen balls, which two players would take shots at by controlling a two inch cue stick. The controls consisted of a joystick, which moved the cue stick around the table, a knob, which rotated the cue stick to choose the angle of the shot, and a button to actually strike the cue ball. The program subsequently performed 25,000 operations a second to determine the speed, trajectory, and bounce of every ball as they collided with each other and the sides of the table. Any ball that entered a pocket would disappear. Due to limited processing power, the sides of the table and the pockets were not actually displayed on the CRT, but instead were drawn in grease pencil on a transparent overlay. According to the Chicago Tribune article, the graphics updated seamlessly and gave the illusion of continuous movement, making the MIDSAC pool game perhaps the first computer game to feature real-time graphics.
1955
Hutspiel
More war game simulations
Hutspiel by Operations Research Office (ORO) was a collaboration between the US Army and John Hopkins University. Written for the Goodyear Electronic Differential Analyzer (GEDA), it was a theater-level war game intended to study the use of tactical nuclear weapons and conventional air support in Western Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion. In this game, one player would control NATO forces in France, Belgium, and West Germany, while the other player would control a Soviet force attempting to penetrate the region across a frontage of roughly 150 miles. At the start of the game, each player would allocate his forces across the sectors he controlled and choose targets for his planes and nukes, which could consist of enemy troops, airfields, supply depots, and transportation facilities. GEDA would then determine the results.
Theaterspiel
By 1964, the Research Analysis Corporation, an organization founded to continue the work of the ORO after the Army terminated its contract with Johns Hopkins in 1961, was working on a more complex version of Hutspiel called Theaterspiel that ran on an IBM 7094 computer.
1956
Blackjack & Chess on the MANIAC
Designed by a team led by Nicholas Metropolis, the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer (MANIAC I) at the Los Alamos Atomic Energy Laborator was primarily used for weapons research. Influenced by an article called “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack," the the Los Alamos scientists created a program on the MANIAC to run tens of thousands of Blackjack hands to see if the strategy actually worked.
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The MANIAC I chess program was written shortly after by this group of H-bomb researchers. Due to lack of computing power, only a chess variant with a reduced 6 x 6 board was implemented, without bishops, double-step for pawns and castling, later called Los Alamos Chess. Capable of performing roughly 11,000 operations per second, the program only played three games and was estimated to have the skill of a human player with about twenty games experience.
1957
The Bernstein Chess Program
First complete Chess game
A complete chess playing program finally emerged in 1957 from IBM, implemented by Alex Bernstein. Like the MANIAC game, Bernstein’s program only examined two levels of moves, but rather than exploring every last possibility, his team instead programmed the computer to examine only the seven most plausible moves, determined by operating a series of “plausible move generators” that identified the best moves based on specific goals such as king safety or prioritizing attack or defense. Running on the faster IBM 704 computer, the program could handle 42,000 operations per second, though the added complexity of using the full 8×8 board rendered much of this speed advantage moot. Bernstein’s program played at the level of a “passable amateur,” but it apparently never actually defeated a human opponent.
The Top Management Decision Simulation
First business management sim
Impressed by RAND's war games simulators, the American Management Association (AMA) assembled a team that included consultants from both RAND and IBM to create a business management simulation called The Top Management Decision Simulation, which was programmed on an IBM 650 and delivered in May 1957. As with military simulations, the primary purpose of the early business simulations was training. As such these games quickly spread to business schools as evidenced by an article entitled “Business Simulation in Industrial and University Education,” which states there were already at least eighty-nine business simulations in use by the end of 1961
1958
The NSS Chess Program
Finally, a smarter Chess program?
Allan Newell and Herbert Simon were keenly interested in AI and joined with a RAND employee named Cliff Shaw in 1955 to fashion a chess program of their own and completed the program in 1958 on the JOHNNIAC, a stored program computer built by the RAND Corporation. The resulting program, with a name derived from the authors’ initials, improved upon both the MANIAC and Berstein programs. Like the Bernstein program, the NSS program used a combination of minimaxing, static value, and a plausible move generator to determine the best move to make, but Newell, Simon, and Shaw added a new important wrinkle to the process through a “branch and bounds” method similar to the technique that later researchers termed “alpha-beta pruning.” While this still resulted in a program that played at an amateur level, the combination of minimaxing and alpha-beta pruning provided a solid base for computer scientists to carry chess research into the 1960s.
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Tennis for Two
Heralded by many as the true first video game
American physicist William Higinbotham designed the game for display at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual public exhibition after learning that the government research institution's Donner Model 30 analog computer could simulate trajectories with wind resistance. He designed the game, displayed on an oscilloscope and played with two custom aluminum controllers, in a few hours, after which he and technician Robert V. Dvorak built it over three weeks. The game's visuals show a representation of a tennis court viewed from the side, and players adjust the angle of their shots with a knob on their controller and try to hit the ball over the net by pressing a button.
The game was very popular during the three-day exhibition, with players lining up to see the game, especially high school students. It was shown again the following year with a larger oscilloscope screen and a more complicated design that could simulate different gravity levels, low gravity of the Moon or the high gravity environment of Jupiter.
In 1997, a team at Brookhaven recreated the game for Brookhaven's 50th anniversary. The reconstruction took about three months, partially because the parts were not readily available. This recreation was also displayed at the 2008 celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the original game. The replica implemented an analog computer using solid-state operational amplifier devices instead of vacuum tubes as the original Donner Model 30 did. In 2010, it was replaced with a restored Donner Model 3400 analog computer.
1959
Demos on the Tixo
Products of the first hackers
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo, was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was used from 1955 into the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture. Interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, and Bob Saunders. The games included Tic-Tac-Toe, which used a light pen to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and Mouse in the Maze. Mouse in the Maze allowed users to use a light pen to set up a maze of walls on the monitor, and spots that represented bits of cheese or glasses of martini. A virtual mouse was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects.
previous page - Table of Contents | next page - Early Gaming (1960-1972)
​Introduction | Table of Contents | Early Gaming | Home Pong | Pong Chips | Consoles | Plug and Play | Downloadable | Microconsoles | Educational | Dedicated Portable | Handheld | Mobile | Mainframe and Minicomputer | Microcomputer | Home Computer | Modern PCs | Microprocessors | Online Gaming | Arcade | Resources