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.
Magnavox Odyssey
In May 1972, Nutting Associates chief engineer Nolan Bushnell, designer of the first commercial arcade video game, "Computer Space", saw a demonstration of the Odyssey at a dealership. Inspired, when he quit Nutting to start his own company, Atari, he assigned Allan Alcorn to create a cheap ping pong arcade game as a training exercise, though he did not tell Alcorn that it was for training nor that the idea was based on the Odyssey "Table Tennis" game. Alcorn soon developed "Pong", which Bushnell recognized as a potential hit, and it became the company's first game. "Pong" was very successful, and in turn helped drive sales of the Odyssey; Baer once noted that customers bought the console because of "Table Tennis", in turn because of "Pong", and joked that they may as well have stopped designing games after that game card. In 1974, however, Magnavox sued Atari along with several competitors including Nutting, Allied Leisure, Bally Midway, and Williams Electronics for infringing on Baer's patents for video games played on a television screen. Baer has stated that the lawsuits were not filed right away because Magnavox and Sanders needed to wait until they could expect to be awarded more money than it would cost to pursue the suits. The root of the conflict was a pair of patents by Baer—one which described how the Odyssey showed player-controlled objects, or dots, on a video monitor and described a number of games that could be played with the system, and an earlier one that went into detail about how the Odyssey used that system to have two dots collide with each other and have one bounce off, specifically using a game of ping pong as an example.