All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Read Free

camouflage gear of Metal Gear’s ultra-macho Solid Snake. Green is perfect for games.
    In videos presented online, Tennis for Two seemed to have a bright green tinge, but perhaps because of the streaming sunlight in the new Brookhaven building, the bouncing ball now had a rich jade hue, the color of a shining emerald. Each time the ball made its way to my side of the scope, I pressed the plastic button on the old-fashioned controller and the magnets in relays clicked loudly. I was able to angle the shots by twisting a plastic knob that aimed the blip on the screen.
    Just before a few members of the press arrived, Higinbotham Junior, slightly wary but affable, stood before the game with Charlie Dvorak, the son of the lab technician who had actually made the machine full of circuits, capacitors, relays, and a mishmash of wires. Both were around fifty years old, and both had a look of pride and occasional glee as they played Tennis for Two. As they volleyed the dot, it left handsome trails on the screen and the relays clicked and clacked. Dvorak asked, “Can you imagine if your father patented this with my father? Things would be a lot different. We’d be on easy street. We’d be millionaires living in Montana somewhere.”
    Higinbotham Junior was dressed in a striped gray flannel suit with a striped tie. He, too, had worked at Brookhaven in various positions for more than eleven years. But he was somewhat of a rebel, who never went to college. In the economic downturn of 2001, Brookhaven let him go. He now worked at a Staples store on Long Island. Still playing, and without looking at Dvorak, he was pragmatic. “Nah. The government would have owned the patent. Even ifhe had the patent, my father would still be at Brookhaven. He would still be working here. Money wouldn’t have changed his life’s goal and that was working here and with the Federation of Scientists.”
    At lunch, Higinbotham Junior passed over a multipage document listing his father’s achievements. Nowhere on it was the game. Sitting back in his seat, he said, “My dad liked the game a lot. But in a way he cheated. He saw in the oscilloscope instructions that you could manipulate the dot on the screen. In his mind it became a tennis ball. It took just a few hours to go from point A to point B, to an interactive game.” Then he said it again. “The thing is, he didn’t want to be remembered just for the game.”
    Whatever he wanted his legacy to be, it didn’t stop Dr. Higinbotham from engineering version 2.0 of the game on a larger, seventeen-inch screen, one that added play on the moon and on Jupiter, including a fairly precise modeling of the gravitational pull of those celestial bodies.

    With its expensive germanium transistors, the game was state of the art in 1958, a time when technology was speeding forward rapidly in many industries. The world itself was infected by space fever. Sputnik went 60 million miles as it orbited Earth; the world was entranced. The Cold War had frozen relations with the USSR, and Nikita Khrushchev became its cunning, fist-pounding premier. Americans were mired in a heavy fear and paranoia about a coming nuclear war. On January 13, 9,235 scientists, led by the father of molecular biology, Linus Pauling, took out ads in newspapers, begging the United States to put a permanent halt to its nuclear testing. One of those scientists was Dr. William Higinbotham, the head of the Instrumentation Division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.Higinbotham had worked on the Manhattan Project, and like many scientists who worked on the project, he was plagued by guilt when the bomb was used on Hiroshima.
    To understand why Higinbotham made the game, you have to look into his personality. On May 18, 1958, just months before he created Tennis for Two,
Parade
magazine profiled Higinbotham in a three-page article entitled “A Scientist You Should Know … Wonderful Willie from Brookhaven.” Like many
Parade
profiles, the story