No commercial game in 1967
There was no commercial video game in 1967, and no single first video game either. What existed in the 1950s and 1960s were experiments, built on laboratory equipment by people who had access to expensive computers and displays. The first game to be sold to the public did not appear until the early 1970s. The year 1967 does matter to the story, but as the year in which one engineer, Ralph Baer, was building a prototype that would eventually become a consumer product.
Early experiments
Several early programs are sometimes named as the first game, and the answer depends on what counts as a video game.
- In the early 1950s, simple programs that played noughts and crosses, or tic-tac-toe, were written for research computers, including one on Cambridge’s EDSAC in 1952. These were experiments in computing, not products.
- In October 1958, William Higinbotham, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, built Tennis for Two for visitors’ days. It used an analogue computer and an oscilloscope screen to show a side view of a tennis court, with a ball arcing over a net, and players held small controllers. It is often cited as one of the earliest games designed for pure entertainment on a screen.
- In 1962, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Steve Russell prominent among them, wrote Spacewar! for the DEC PDP-1 computer. Two players controlled spaceships that fired at each other while a star’s gravity pulled on them. Copies spread among universities with access to similar machines, which made it influential among early programmers, though it never reached the general public.
None of these was sold as a product. They ran on expensive machines in universities and labs, and the audience was small. A teenager of 1967 would almost never have seen one.
Ralph Baer
Ralph Baer was a German-born engineer who worked at Sanders Associates, a defence electronics contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire. He later said that he had thought about playing games on a television set as early as the 1950s, and in 1966 he returned to the idea. His reasoning was practical: millions of homes already had a television, so a cheap device that used it as a display could reach a mass audience.
With the support of his employer and with help from colleagues, including Bill Harrison and later Bill Rusch, Baer built a series of prototypes. By 1967 a working system could display and move spots on a screen, with simple games such as a chase and a form of table tennis. The group reportedly also tried a light-gun idea around then. A further prototype, nicknamed the Brown Box because of its wood-grain covering, followed in 1968. Because the games were displayed on an ordinary home television, including the color television sets that were then becoming popular, no separate monitor was needed.
Sanders then looked for a company to produce it. After talks with several television makers, Magnavox licensed the design, and the result went on sale as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. It used plug-in cards that changed circuit connections, and came with plastic overlays that owners stuck on the screen to add colour or backgrounds. It was a modest commercial success, and Baer is often called the father of home video games.
Arcades and Pong
Meanwhile, the other path to commercial video games began in arcades. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney produced Computer Space in 1971, usually described as the first coin-operated video game. In 1972 Bushnell’s new company, Atari, released Pong, which became a major hit. The Odyssey had a table tennis game, and Atari faced legal action from Magnavox over similarities, which ended in a settlement.
In 1967, by contrast, arcades held electromechanical machines, such as pinball tables, shooting galleries and driving games built with film or mechanical parts, with no video screens.
Credit and definitions
Because “video game” has no single agreed definition, historians credit different people for different milestones. Higinbotham made an early game with a display; the MIT group made an influential computer game; Baer developed the first approach to games on home televisions and led to the first home console; Bushnell and Dabney brought a coin-operated game to market. A careful statement is that video games emerged gradually between the late 1950s and 1972, and 1967 sits in the middle as a year of prototypes and not products.