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.
History of video games
The first games known to incorporate a monitor were two research projects completed in 1952, a checkers program by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1 and a tic-tac-toe program called "OXO" by Alexander Douglas on the EDSAC. Both of these programs used a relatively static display to track the current state of the game board. The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time was a billiards game programmed by William Brown and Ted Lewis specifically for a demonstration of the MIDSAC computer at the University of Michigan in 1954.
Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than to demonstrate the power of some technology, train personnel, or aid in research was "Tennis for Two", designed by William Higinbotham and built by Robert Dvorak at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. Designed to entertain the general public at Brookhaven's annual series of open houses, the game was deployed on an analog computer with graphics displayed on an oscilloscope and was dismantled in 1959. Higinbotham never considered adapting the successful game into a commercial product, which would have been impractical with the technology of the time. Ultimately, the widespread adoption of computers to play games would have to wait for the machines to spread from serious academics to their students on U.S. college campuses.