You will often hear three entirely different stories online about who gets credit for inventing video games. It sounds like a simple cut and dry answer, who did it first? But it’s not so simple because you have to look beyond WHAT was done and look at WHY it was done. There were SEVERAL court cases that ultimate COULD NOT determine WHO invented video games because the answer is NOT so simple.
Story 1 suggests some studentds at a University fiddling with a PDP-1 and an Oscilliscope invented video games because they made Computer Space. Except this is not true. That was a computer SIMULATION, not a game. It had no objective and there were no points, no goals,no end, no rules it was just a proof of concept tech demo at best. NOT a video game, or interactive TV game as it was originally called at the time. It was a computer displaying graphcis that the USER could control, but that’s it. Oh and less than 60 people in the WORLD even used it at the time so yeah that doesn’t count.
Story 2, Ralph Baer Invented the Odysee for Maganvox and that is the first video game. Well also still not entirely accurate. YES like Computer Space, it displayed graphics on a TV screen the USER could manipulate, that was ALL it did. It still required a clear plastic overlay to TELL the user how they COULD move the single pixel curser and again it had NO objective, no points, no rules no “gameplay” and thus was NOT the first video game. It was the first interactive TV PROGRAM, I guess, but decidedly NOT a “video game” by any definition we would use today, Sure you COULD keep score of your goals, but YOU had to do that on paper, the program didn’t do that itself.
CORRECTION” Baer DID hold SOME patents but not on inventing “video games” entirely.
Story 3, Nolen Bushnell created the first video game with Space War, a more playable and more commercial viable version of Computer Space that didn’t require the use of the expensive PDP-1 but could run on less expensive hardware. Of course this is also not entirely accurate as Space War was a tech demo that Bushnell quickly discovered was TOO complex for the user and he shelved it in favor of a simple table tennis game he called PONG because it was a virtual Ping Pong game and the sound it made when the pixel hit the paddel.
It is FAR more accurate to say that the university students laid the FOUNDATION of what COULD be a video game, Baer invented an electronic device that RESEMBLED what would become a video game and Bushnell created the first TRUE video game in Pong. It was self contained. It was programable. it had defined rules, an objective, a goal and it kept score internally in the machine. By ALL defintions of what we would today call a “video game” PONG was the TRUE first.
That doesn’t mean we dismiss the work that LED to the development of PONG. We certainly owe Ralph Baer a debt of gratitude for his invention and he deserves his FOOTNOTE in the story but we need to stop pretending like PONG wasn’t the first when it WAS, nor that Bushnell deserves credit because he was an oprtunistic capitalist because they ALL were. Sure Pong LOOKS like the Odyssee on the surface, but it is still slightly more advanced AND it is a proper “game” not JUST a moving dot on the screen.
I purposefully didn’t bring up Tennis for 2 because that was ALSO just a science experiment and ALSO NOT a full game just a computer simulation. just thought I would throw that out there because my issue with it is the same as Magnavox, you can’t PLAY an entire game without outside assistance because it just moveds the dot back and forth, there is no timer or score card or anything else. It’s literally just a tech demo, a science experiment done in a lab that only a HANDFUL of people ever even saw.
Nolan Bushnell took all the PIECES others before him laid out and put them together into the first TRUE, and PROPER video game that we could recognize today. All the other stories are half true but missing the KEY component that makes a “game” a game, you can dislike Atari all you want but at the end of the day it is PONG that STARTED the video game industry, even if not technically the first device some might call a video game. Did he INVENT the video game, debatable, but he did CREATE the video game INDUSTRY, undeniable.
