Video game development
The history of game making begins with the development of the first video games, although which video game is the first depends on the definition of "video game". The first games created had little entertainment value, and their development focus was separate from user experience—in fact, these games required mainframe computers to play them. "OXO", written by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952, was the first computer game to use a digital display. In 1958, a game called "Tennis for Two", which displayed its output on an oscilloscope, was made by Willy Higinbotham, a physicist working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1961, a mainframe computer game called "Spacewar!" was developed by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students led by Steve Russell.
Video gaming in the United States
The military continued to take part in video gaming in the 1960s when, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis The Defense Department created a war game known as "STAGE" (Simulation of Total Atomic Global Exchange). "STAGE" was created to be political propaganda that showcased how the U.S. would be victorious in a Thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. The idea of video games that were usable on televisions was conceived by the engineer
Ralph Baer and with the help of a team, Baer completed two successful TV games in this decade. The first interactive media computer game, "Spacewar" eventually had the future founders of Atari create an arcade game of it titled "Computer Space" that became the first video arcade game ever released.