PC GAMING: A HISTORY
It’s fair to say that when Connecticut-born physicist William Higinbotham started messing about with the trajectory-plotting features of the Donner Model 30 analog computer – a chunky block of metal covered in dials, designed for calculating the flight paths of ballistic missiles – he probably didn’t think he was birthing a medium that would eventually come to rival the film and music industries in terms of scale and worth. And yet, in 1958, at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, that’s exactly what he did.
His initial prototype took only a few hours to design and less than a month to implement, using an oscilloscope display to render a simple “ball” and lines, along with a pair of custom-made controllers, each with a single button and dial. Two players took turns hitting the animated dot back and forth, using the dial to control the angle of each return shot.
Higinbotham – formerly a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb, later a staunch advocate of nuclear nonproliferation – said that he thought his little game would “liven up the place,” and he was absolutely right. At Brookhaven’s annual public exhibition, hundreds of tech enthusiasts and high-schoolers lined up to play Tennis for Two. The display was so successful that an improved version was put on show the following year, allowing players to simulate playing tennis in the low-gravity environments of the Moon and Jupiter. The machine was dismantled following the 1959 exhibition, its components required for less esoteric purposes.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. More than 60 years on, high-schoolers still like pushing buttons to win at virtual sports, but the systems that power those digital matches have evolved beyond anything Higinbotham could have imagined. Last year, AO Tennis 2 was released, showcasing a fully modernised and breathtakingly detailed tennis experience, right down to the yellow fuzz on the ball and the sweat on Nadal’s brow.
The games and computer hardware industries have come a long way in those 60 years, slowly making their way from government-funded labs into our homes and pockets. So, just as Higinbotham charted the trajectory of his tiny “tennis ball,” we’re going to chart
