Serving Video Games: Tennis for Two

Before William Higinbotham’s fateful creation of early video game Tennis for Two, history records that, technically speaking, the very first interactive electronic game displaying graphics on a screen is the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947. Consisting of analog components and patented by Goldsmith Jr., the game requires players to adjust knobs to move a point of light on a CRT screen made to resemble a radar display. Overlaid on top of the screen is a drawn graphic of an airplane or ship, over which the player must move the dot and then press a fire button to “destroy” the target within a certain amount of time.

CRT Amusement Device resembles the method of game play presentation used in the later original home video game console Odyssey by Magnovox, with it having a physical image (with Goldsmith, Jr.’s effort, that of an airplane or ship) pasted onto the screen for most of its graphical elements. But the game hardly contains the generative and interactive aspects to be found in video games that come later, and it is not produced for public consumption. Later comes Naughts and Crosses, aka OXO, written by PhD student A.S. Douglas at Cambridge University in 1952. The Tic-Tac-Toe game is displayed on the sparse 35×16 pixel CRT screen connected to the rather massive EDSAC mainframe computer unique to the university. It is also just a simple pencil-and-paper exercise translated to a display monitor. One must advance another six years to find Tennis for Two, something that approaches what we would recognize and refer to today as a video game.

William Higinbotham and the Palaeolithic “PONG” Game Tennis for Two

While it is as far from the commercial videogame systems like Atari PONG that come later as a walk in the park is to a walk on the moon, a physicist trying to make the public tour of his lab a little more exciting to bored visitors designs a game he calls Tennis for Two, what some consider a precursor videogame system, in 1958. Working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a U.S. nuclear research lab located on the site of the old Camp Upton Army base in Upton, Long Island, William Alfred Higinbotham notices that people attending the annual autumn Visitor’s Day, held to show the public how safe the work going on there is, are bored with the displays of simple photographs and static equipment. The exhibits are made purposefully obtuse to avoid revealing the country’s nuclear secrets.

“Willie”, as he is invariably known around the lab, was born in Bridgeport, Conn. in 1911, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Graduating in 1932 from Williams College as a physics major, he continued with graduate studies at Cornell University. From there he joined the Radiation Laboratory staff at MIT as an electronics specialist. 1941 saw Higinbotham ensconced with a team of scientists working on a top secret project known as radio detecting and ranging (RADAR), which resulted in U.S. warplanes equipped with the first such airborne system. In 1962, denizens of the fabled Building 20 at MIT, a “temporary” structure built in 1943 to house the “Rad Lab” of which Higinbotham was a part, would help create another precursor video game system, titled Spacewar!

In December of 1943, Higinbotham was assigned to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, working alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer where he helped build timing circuits, essentially the trigger for the Manhattan Project, and was witness to the first detonation of the atomic bomb. This terrifying event had an immediate impact on Higinbotham, and would continue to shape his views throughout his life. He becomes a strident opponent of the use of nuclear weapons and their proliferation, as well as advocating strict civilian oversight of atomic power via the Atomic Energy Commission, which he helps to create. Joining BNL when it opened in 1947, by 1958 Higinbotham is a 47 year-old, bespectacled, chain-smoking, virtuoso accordion playing, fun-loving character and self-confessed pinball player who wants to develop a dynamic open house exhibit that will entertain people as they learn.

The Original Video Game?

Reading a description in a manual, Higinbotham discovers that an analog computer at the facility, the Donner Analog Computer Model 30, can be used to draw bouncing balls. His idea is to modify the desktop-sized computer in the lab to display a moving ball on an oscilloscope, the direction of which users can control, creating a game resembling tennis. As head of Brookhaven’s Instrumentation Division, and being used to building such complicated electronic devices as radiation counters, Higinbotham takes about two hours to create a rough design for the game. Along with Technical Specialist Robert V. Dvorak who actually assembles the device, in three weeks Higinbotham’s team finishes the game system they name Tennis for Two, and it debuts with other exhibits in the Brookhaven gymnasium at the next visitor’s day on October 18, 1958.

In the rudimentary side-view tennis game, the ball bounces off a long horizontal line at the bottom of the oscilloscope, and there is a small vertical line in the centre to represent the net. Two boxes each with a dial and a button are the controllers…the dials affect the angle of the ball trajectory and the buttons “hit” the ball back at the selected angle to the other side of the screen. If the player doesn’t curve the ball right it crashes into the net and slowly bounces to a stop in a remarkable model of physics. Wind speed is also taken into account, and net height and court length are both adjustable. A toggle switch is available to make the ball reappear on either side of the screen ready to be sent into play again. No score is tabulated, and it is displayed in glorious phosphor monochrome on a puny 5″ oscilloscope screen, but Tennis for Two is still a big hit with everyone who visits the display. Higinbotham, along with David Potter, a fellow colleague at BNL who helps tweak the original design of Tennis for Two, watch hundreds of people crowd around waiting in line for hours to play the game. Their joy at watching their work become, by far, the most popular exhibit in the open house is tempered somewhat with disappointment… as the static exhibits of fellow scientists sit ignored by visitors.

Recreation of Tennis for Two, Brookhaven National Labs, 2008

No Patent Sought for the William Higinbotham Video Game

Tennis for Two reappears for the next year’s open-house in 1959, and modifications include a larger 17″ monitor to display the action, a button to increase the “force” of a serve, and changeable gravity effects to show what it would be like to play tennis on another planet. After this final appearance, the system is then dismantled and its components put to other uses. Tennis for Two would later be recreated, using Higinbotham’s original design schematics. Built at BNL by researchers Scott Coburn, Gene Von Achen and Peter Takacs and presented in 2008, the project is done to celebrate the original video game’s 50th anniversary.

Higinbotham doesn’t seek a patent on his original video game Tennis for Two, although watching the crowds line up to play the game gives him and his team an inkling of its wider potential. The U.S. government also has no interest in pursuing video games. The ramifications are apparent, however, as Higinbotham’s testimony is called upon years later during legal attempts to break the Magnavox video game patent obtained through the development of Ralph Baer’s brown box video game prototype and developed into their Odyssey home game console. While Higinbotham’s set-up would seem to predict electronic ping-pong games such as those featured on the Odyssey and in Atari’s PONG, the courts eventually rule against it as a viable videogame system and every company later hoping to enter the market ends up paying some sort of settlement to Magnavox. Eventually passing into the hands of Lockheed Corporation, Baer’s video game patent would finally expire in 1990.

PONG vs. Odyssey: In the Court of Tennis for Two

The exact nature of Tennis for Two has been called into question by some; Brookhaven National Labs and David Ahl both uphold the importance of Higinbotham’s accomplishments. Ahl recalls playing the game during his tour of Brookhaven in his teens as a Grumman scholarship winner, during one of the open houses. Ahl goes on to found Creative Computing, an early, influential magazine on the personal computer industry. On the other side is Ralph Baer, filer of the first home videogame patent for what would become the Odyssey by Magnavox, the first home videogame console. During many years of litigation defending his patent, Baer learns of Higinbotham’s original video game Tennis for Two, and he describes it as a simple, oscilloscope-based ballistics demonstration. It has also been stated by David Potter that a high school student attending the demonstration of the game seemed particularly interested in its design. So much so that he later requested the schematics, schematics that Higinbotham then provided. Later it is learned by the pair that this young man went on to become president of one of the first companies producing TV games in the PONG era. The name of this precocious entrepreneur, and how his involvement might have been overlooked during the Magnavox litigation, is lost to history. Still, Tennis for Two‘s early milepost on the road to video game development cannot be overlooked. Within 14 years we’d get the first popular arcade video game Pong, by the company that would become Atari. 23 years after Tennis for Two Mario would jump into popular consciousness in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong. And 36 years past Tennis for Two we’d get Sony’s original PlayStation. And on and on it goes. Hopefully.

Retiring from BNL in 1984, William Higinbotham, first chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and owner of 20 patents concerning electronic circuits… as well as the inventor of the precursor video game Tennis for Two…  passes away in Gainesville, GA. from emphysema on November 10, 1994, at the age of 84.