Video Game Inventor

Sometimes when looking through the history of video games, determining who is a video game inventor and who isn't can be hard. Resources often list people as being "credited" and often names so-and-so as the inventor of this for video game and that for consoles. The bottom line is asking yourself, "Who did it first?"

The birth of video games is credited to William Higinbotham. He worked as a nuclear physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and in 1958, he wanted to create something more interesting for the annual visitor's day. Normally, the Laboratory tacked up posters or had high school-like science displays. Higinbotham wanted something more interactive so he designed some circuitry that would play a rudimentary tennis game on an analog computer. "Tennis for Two" allowed two players to hit the ball across a line that represented the net. The game was programmed on an oscilloscope that had a screen only five inches in diameter. Players used controllers that had a dial that let them adjust the angle at which the ball is hit and a button that was pressed to hit the ball. The game was a smash hit.

Technically, a video game must have some kind of video involved. There are a few types of computer programs that occurred before "Tennis for Two". The first was the "Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device", which was patented in 1948. The major difference is that you had to place plastic sheets over the screens in order to progress through the actions, which could also be played away from the computer. So this video game computer wasn't completely played on a screen, like Higinbotham's machine.

The second machine, built a few years later, was called the Nimrod computer and played a strategy game called Nim. While a truer video game, the action was actually indicated by a number of lights that only turned on and off signifying what was going on.

A Noughts and Crosses game was programmed in 1952, but wasn't made for entertainment purposes. It was only created as a way to study computer and human interactions.

The first video game that was programmed to be played on a computer was Spacewar! in 1962. Steve Russell created the game at MIT on their PDP Mainframe computer.

So when would a video game inventor utilize a television set for games? Ralph Baer did it in 1967 when he created Chase, which was made to be played exclusively on a television screen. He claims that he conceived the idea in 1951 when he work at Loral, which was a television company.

Ralph Baer also invented the first commercial video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972. The original company that he designed if for declined to produce it and see it beyond its inception and let Baer keep the rights.

Two video game inventors, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney developed and released the first arcade game called Computer Space which was loosely based on the earlier game Spacewar!.

For more hardware inventions, you can farm Nintendo's history. The GameBoy, NES (or Famicom in Japan), and the Virtual Boy were created by video game inventor Gumpei Yokoi and with the exception of the Virtual Boy, put Nintendo on the map within a few years time.

That question can probably cause much debate. There really hasn't be a significant invention for video games for quite some time. Characters can be invented, storylines can be invented, and video game series can be invented. What the video game industry has seen over the past decade is innovation. Nintendo's Wii, Xbox Live, and backwards compatibility are all ideas that were improvements of previous inventions. Who knows? Maybe in the next decade we will see something that blows our minds, like Tennis for Two did in the 50s.

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