A decade before Atari released Pong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) produced a different computer game. As Smithsonian Magazine reports, that game was called Spacewar!, and it was created in 1962. Spacewar! was developed by a group of MIT students, led by Steve Russell, on MIT’s newly-acquired PDP-1 computer. The game involved two spaceships engaged in an interstellar battle. (If that sounds familiar, that’s because Spacewar! inspired Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space.) Spacewar! quickly became a sensation at MIT, then at other computer-equipped universities and labs across the country.
Per the Strong National Museum of Play, Spacewar! was likely the first game to use a digital computer to simulate moving images on a screen. If that’s your definition of “video game,” then it’s safe to say that Spacewar! was the first video game. However, if you extend that definition to include analog computers — computers that display images using beams from cathode-ray tubes, as opposed to rendering images as a series of pixels — then Spacewar! was certainly not the first. That honor probably belongs to Tennis for Two.
Tennis for Two was developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory — a lab for energy research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. That may come as a surprise; Brookhaven is a pretty formal institution, and doesn’t sound like the kind of place that you’d expect to play a key role in jumpstarting the video game industry.
