In 1958, Willy Higginbotham, an engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (the USA), used an oscilloscope (an instrument for visually representing electrical current) to create what is considered the first electronic game. In this game – which he called Tennis for Two – players used knobs to control rectangular paddles as they batted a ball back and forth over a vertical line representing a net. Higginbotham never attempted to market or patent his game.
Steven Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the first computer game – Spacewar! – in 1962. In Spacewar! two players dueled using tiny spaceships that flew around a screen representing accurate star maps. Like Higginbotham, Russell did not patent or market his game. He used it for testing computers during installations.
While attending the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell got to know about Spacewar! In 1968, Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley and experimented with reproducing Russell’s game without using a computer, which at the time were too large and expensive for a commercial game. Eventually, he created a version of Spacewar! for using in arcade machine. He persuaded a company called Nutting Associates to manufacture the game, and in 1971, the company began marketing the first video arcade game: Computer Space.