1947, however, is believed to be the first year when a game was designed for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). This very simple game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. A patent application was filed on January 25th, 1947 and U.S. Patent #2 455 992 issued on Dec 14th, 1948.
The game was probably designed earlier in 1946 but since we do not know this for a fact, we will rely on the filing date of 1947. The system used eight vacuum tubes (four 6Q5 triodes and four 6V6 tetrodes) and simulated a missile being fired at a target. The idea was obviously inspired by radar displays used during World War II. Several knobs allowed adjusting the curve and speed of the moving point representing the missile. Because graphics could not be drawn electronically at the time, small targets drawn on a simple overlay were placed on the CRT by the builder of this game.
Since it did not generate video signals which were then sent to a raster scan display such as an ordinary TV set or monitor, it was not a video game. However, it is believed to be the earliest system specifically designed for game play on a CRT screen.

In 1952, another person named A.S.Douglas was passing his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge (United Kindgom). At that time, the university had an EDSAC vaccuum-tube computer, which used a cathode ray tube to display the contents of one of the 32 mercury delay lines (which stored the programs and data). The display was organized as a matrix of 35 by 16 dots, hence a 35x16 pixels display. A.S. Douglas wrote his thesis on the Human-Computer interraction, and illustrated it with a graphic Tic-Tac-Toe game displayed on a cathode ray tube. This is the earliest graphical computer game known to exist. The game was played against the machine, which used special algorithms to win whenever possible. This game can be played nowadays using the EDSAC simulator, which includes a copy of the original game.

In 1958, another person called Willy Higginbotham created another computer game. The technology consisted of an analog Donner computer linked to an oscilloscope used as display. Called Tennis For Two (and also known as Tennis Programming), the game was played by two people using hand controls. Willy worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratories, and his game was exposed for two years after what it got dismantled (electronic parts were often re-used in labs, especially in the 1950s when they used to cost a lot). Click here to read an interesting article about this game. The engineers at Brookhaven rebuilt this game in 1997 for the 50th anniversary of the BNL labs. After working two months to improve the original circuits using integrated circuits, they finally got the game to work as it did in 1958. Click here to see a short video of the (rebuilt) game in action (courtesy BNL).

In 1961, three students of the MIT (Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen) experienced vector graphics on a DEC PDP-1 computer. The game started with two spaceships shooting each other. The students discovered that the debugger program generated random pixels on the screen, which they liked because they looked like stars. Because such designs had to be done in an elegant way at that time, they simulated the real constellation with moving stars and variable luminance. Talk about realism ! Once done, they found the game still easy and added the gravity star, often called sun, which attracted the spaceships. Although this game looked like a video game, it did not use a video display, so could not qualify as such. Yet, it was an extraordinary precursor of what would invade homes and bars in the 1970s. Fortunately the original Spacewar can be played on any computer with Java enabled. Simply go to this link. After reading the 'readme' page you can play the game as in 1961.

In 1966, Ralph Baer worked again on his 1951 TV game idea and designed a series of seven prototypes that played several video games. The first playable video game was a Chase Game: two squares chasing each other. The last prototype built in 1968 (also known as Brown Box) played Ball & Paddle games, Target Shooting games, and more. After several demonstrations to TV manufacturers, Magnavox signed an agreement in 1971 and the first video game system was released in May 1972: Odyssey. The history of PONG games and derivates just started, would spread all over the globe, and die in the early 1980s.

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