We have all heard the name Alan Turing, either in relation to artificial intelligence and the test that bears his name, or in connection with the Enigma machine, which allowed the codes that the Germans used in their messages during World War II to be deciphered. But few know Christopher Strachey, a British theoretical computer scientist, a graduate of Oxford, a pioneer in designñor programming languageseithern (back in the late 1940s) and a friend of Turing. Oh! And possibly the father of video games.
Between 1947 and 1948, the University of Manchester opened the Mark 1, initially an experimental machine that would be the world’s first electronic computer with a program stored on the same machine. When Strachey heard about this, he asked Turing for a copy of the programming manual, studied it, and rewrote the program. The experts were so impressed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin recounts, from the University of California, in his book How Pac-Man Eatswho soon had access to the computer whenever he had free time from his job as a teacher.
Strachey spent his school holidays working on a checkers game showwhich was remarkably complicated for its time. It displayed the board on a screen: a cathode ray tube. Players typed their moves on a teletype, a typewriter electronically connected to the computer, which I printed the movements on paper and sent them back to the computerThe machine “looked ahead” at the different possible moves and countermoves, both to choose what to do next and to mock players for particularly bad moves.
“I think it’s the first video game,” Wardrip-Fruin explains. “But I wasn’t the only one experimenting with this kind of entertainment.. Sandy Douglas, also a computer scientist at Cambridge, created a game of tic-tac-toe, which was also displayed on a cathode ray tube on his university’s EDSAC computer.”
The next big step toward what we know today as video games was Two-Player Tennis, although it had no name at the time. It was developed by William Higinbotham, Robert V. Dvorak, and David Potter as a demonstration for the 1958 visitor’s day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. This video game “triumvirate” used an old analog computer to create a side view of a tennis courtshowing the floor, a net and a ball that would fly over the net. But after the visiting day it was dismantled.
Finally, in 1962, came what we could consider the first modern video game: Spacewar. Developed by MIT engineers (Steve Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and Martin Graetz) it was a true revolution. So much so that Rolling Stone magazine went so far as to call for aa Spacewar Olympics in 1972. Something unique, if we take into account that very few people knew not only about video games, but even fewer had seen a computer.
Spacewar is the first game that does all the things people today expect a video game to do: It had a simulated space, with objects moving around. In this case it was outer space, with a backdrop of stars and a central Sun that was responsible for gravity. There were elements that the players controlled in that space, specifically two spaceships, and there were even effects, such as fire coming out of the ships every time the players used their thrusters to move.
Later came consoles, cartridges, online games and world championships, but it all began almost 80 years ago, when a programming fanatic wanted to have a little fun.