the origin of species -- 5/10/25

09 May 2025

the origin of species -- 5/10/25

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Today's selection-- from Trigger Happy by Steven Poole . Tracking down the creation of video games.

“It all started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one night in 1962. The first Soviet Sputnik spacecraft had been launched five years previously, and John E Kennedy had just promised that America would get to the moon within the decade. Six months earlier, Digital Equipment Corporation had delivered a hulking new mainframe computer, a model PDP-1, to MIT's electrical engineering lab—an innovative, massively expensive tool for serious scientific research. And by happy chance, there was a revolutionary achievement with that machine: the invention of the world's first videogame.

“Well, that's how the story usually goes. But beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world's first videogame was created four years earlier, at a U.S. government nuclear research facility, the Brookhaven National Laboratory. William A. Higinbotham, an engineer who had designed timing devices for the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb and helped in the first developments of radar, worked at Brookhaven in charge of instrumentation design. He was trying to dream up an entertaining exhibit for visiting members of the public, and he hacked together a rudimentary two-player tennis game. An analogue computer showed the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips on an oscilloscope, controlled by a button and a knob. It was a smash hit with the visitors for two years.

“But owing to this lone pioneer's modesty — he didn't think he had created anything earth-shatteringly novel — the game never left the confines of the facility. ‘I considered the whole idea so obvious that it never occurred to me to think about a patent,' Higinbotham said wryly, years later. Luckily for the future of games, in fact, because the owner of any patent on oscilloscope tennis would have been the United States government. And so — as if, eons ago in the primordial soup, one helix of a DNA molecule had winked into existence without the other, and therefore didn't catch on— the videogame spark fizzled and went out. If that oscilloscope could have spoken, it might have said: ‘There is one who comes after me.’

“And so there was. Three years later a big package arrived at MIT. Until this point, computers had mostly been tedious, mute hulks that usually had to be programmed with ticker-tape or punchcards, and were strictly for esoteric mathematical applications. But the newfangled circular, dedicated VDU screen and keyboard of the PDP-1 tempted programmer Steve Russell and his friends to indulge in a little creative slacking. They began to fiddle around with the interface, writing little bits of code that caused the display to respond in real time to physical input. A virtual typewriter and calculator. A model of the night sky. And then ... Spacewar.

Spacewar! (1962), an early mainframe computer game, pictured running on a PDP-1 computer

“The name's melodrama, of course, grew out of the geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still play on the Internet, was serene, austere, a thing of alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux against an electronic starfield, firing lazy torpedoes at each other in the silence of space, avoiding all the while the lethal gravitational pull of a central sun.

“A leap of faith had been made. What these coffee-guzzling student pioneers realized was that new technology made possible a new sort of experience. The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves, rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to tell its user the result of a calculation via a dull string of numbers. Russell and his friends designed — or redesigned independently, to give Willy Higinbotham his due — the first symbolic visual interface. That, along with the work done by Xerox Pare in the 1970s, is why you use word processors and other software based around ‘windows’ and ‘icons’ rather than text. (Playing videogames, though, is generally acknowledged to be more fun than using Microsoft products, at least until its X-Box console arrives in 2001.)

Spacewar sprang so fully formed into the microcosmos that it took a very long time for other games to catch up. Its structure offered many of the virtues that are still essential features of videogames: simple rules with innumerable combinational possibilities; the competitive urge to destroy your opponent's spaceship; the pleasure of mastery over a well-defined, consistent system; the challenge of reacting instantly to craft governed by inertial physics; and the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns of light. The game is remarkably similar to Asteroids, an arcade machine that appeared some seventeen years later.

“Having briefly considered trying to sell this curio, Russell and his team decided that no one would want to buy it, so they gave away the source code to anyone who was interested. Within a few years it was everywhere, a benign virus, an unstoppable meme, eating up time all over the world on government, military and scientific mainframes. And if you can't beat them, join them: in the end, Digital Equipment Corporation used the game as a centerpiece for commercial demonstrations of their computer. In the same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music, videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg on the digital plains."