The First Video Game?

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How Did He Do It?

A section of the blueprint for the original tennis game designed in 1958 by Higinbotham.

The “brain” of Tennis for Two was a small analog computer. The computer's instruction book described how to generate various curves on the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays. Among the examples given in the book were the trajectories of a bullet, missile, and bouncing ball, all of which were subject to gravity and wind resistance. While reading the instruction book, the bouncing ball reminded Higinbotham of a tennis game and the idea of Tennis for Two was born.

Higinbotham used four of the computer’s operational amplifiers to generate the ball’s motion while the computer’s remaining six amplifiers sensed when the ball hit the ground or net and switched controls to the person in whose court the ball was located. In order to generate the court, net, and ball on screen, it was necessary to time-share these functions.

“The real innovation in this game is the use of those ‘new-fangled’ germanium transistors that were just becoming commercially available in the late 1950s,” said Peter Takacs of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation Division, who is currently working to rebuild a playable Tennis for Two. “Higinbotham used the transistors to build a fast-switching circuit that would take the three outputs from the computer and display them alternately on the oscilloscope screen at a ‘blazing’ fast speed of 36 Hertz. At that display rate, the eye sees the ball, the net, and the court as one image, rather than as three separate images.”

In 1958, when Tennis for Two was first introduced, the oscilloscope display was only five inches in diameter. In 1959, the game was improved. A larger screen between 10 and 17 inches in diameter was used and players could select variations of tennis on the moon, with low gravity, or on Jupiter, with high gravity.

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One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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