Replay: The History of Video Games Read Free Page A

Kristallnacht, the moment when the Nazis’ oppression turned violent and Germany’s Jews began to be rounded up and sent to die in concentration camps. “My father saw what was coming and got all the paperwork together for us to go to New York,” he said. “We went to the American consulate and sat in his office. I spoke pretty good English. I guess being able to have that conversation with the consulate might have made all the difference because the quota for being let into the US was very small. If we hadn’t got into the quota then it would have been…[motions slicing of the neck].”
    In the US, Baer studied television and radio technology and eventually ended up working at military contractors Loral Electronics, where in 1951 he and some colleagues were asked to build a TV set from scratch. “We used test equipment to check our progress and one of the pieces of equipment we used put horizontal lines, vertical lines, cross-hatch patterns, and colour lines on the screen,” he said. “You could move them around to some extent and use them to adjust the television set. Moving these patterns around was kind of neat and the idea came to me that maybe we wanted to build something into a television set. I don’t know that I thought about it as a game, more something to fool with and to give you something to do with a television set other than watch stupid network programmes.” Baer’s idea proved fleeting and he quickly ca it aside. But a seed had been sown.
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    By the start of 1958, the video game was still an elusive concept. Computer scientists still saw games as foil for their research and the engineers who saw potential for TV to be a two-way experience between screen and viewer had failed to develop their ideas further. Bennett’s reporter-scaring Nimrod was still the nearest thing to a video game anyone outside the engineering workshops or university computer lab had seen. But 1958 would see the concept of the video game come one step closer thanks to William Higinbotham.
    Higinbotham had worked on the Manhattan Project, building the timing switches that made the bomb explode at the correct moment. Like many of the scientists who created the bomb, he harboured mixed feelings about what he had done and would spend much of his post-war life campaigning against nuclear proliferation. After the war, he became head of the instrumentation division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory – a US government research facility based on Long Island, New York. Every year Brookhaven would open its doors to the public to show off its work. These visitor days tended to contain static exhibits that did little to excite the public and so, with the 1958 open day looming, Higinbotham decided to make a more engaging attraction.
    He came up with the idea for a fun, interactive exhibit: a tennis game played on the screen of an oscilloscope that he built using transistor circuitry with the help of Brookhaven engineer Robert Dvorak. The game, Tennis for Two , recreated a side-on view of a tennis court with a net in the middle and thin ghostly lines that represented the players’ racquets. The large box-shaped controllers created for the game allowed players to move their racquets using a dial and whack the ball by pressing a button. Brookhaven’s visitors loved it. “The high schoolers liked it best, you couldn’t pull them away from it,” recalled Higinbotham more than 20 years later. In fact Tennis for Two was so popular that it returned for a second appearance at Brookhaven’s 1959 open day. But neither Higinbotham nor anybody else at Brookhaven thought much of the game and after its 1959 encore it was dismantled so its parts could be used in other projects. With that Higinbotham went back to his efforts to stop nuclear proliferation, eventually forming a division at Brookhaven to advise the US Atomic Energy Agency on how to handle radioactive material.
    The 1950s had been a decade of false starts for the video game.