Tennis for Two: Before the era of electronic pong, with the yellow dots, there were no electronic games. Or were they there?
More than fifty years ago, thousands of visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Brookhaven National Laboratory) to play “Tennis for Two”, an electronic tennis game that is arguably the forerunner of the modern video game.
Tennis for Two was first released on October 18, 1958, at one of the Workshop's visitor days. Two people could play tennis with the electronic game at the same time, using separate controllers connected to an analog computer. The game was projected onto an oscilloscope that had the role screens.
The game's creator, William Higinbotham, was a nuclear physicist awarded by the Federation of American Scientists.
Guests who enjoyed Tennis for Two saw the side view of a tennis court on the oscilloscope screen two-dimensionally. The ball, a brightly lit, moving dot, left a trail as it bounced on the alternating sides of the court. The players had controls with buttons and rotating keys to control the angle of an invisible swing of the tennis racket.
Of course Higinbotham could not have dreamed that his game would be the forerunner of an entire industry that, in less than fifty years, accounted for sales of $9,5 billion (in 2006 and 2007 alone USA, according to a report published by the Electronic Software Association).
How the game worked:
The "brain" of Tennis for Two was a small analogue computer. The manual of an analogue computer of the time described how to create different curves using resistors, capacitors and relays. Among the examples given in the book were the trajectories of a bullet, a rocket and a bouncing bullet. While reading the instruction book, the bounce ball reminded me of Higinbotham a Tennis Game (PDF) and so the idea for Tennis for Two was born.
Higinbotham used four computer amplifiers to generate the ball movement while the other six amplifiers "understood" when the ball hit the ground or net and changed controls on the face of the ball.
A recreation of Willy Higinbotham's “Tennis for Two” in the eGame Revolution exhibition featured in The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. (Photo from bnl.gov)
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