What Was The First Computer Game?

It's a beast lol

I owned the first cartridge based system.....the Fairchild game system. My dad worked for the company and brought one home. Hard to believe that was 35 years ago. I consider myself lucky that I grew up in the Silicon Valley as a kid. Most of my friends parents worked for companies like Apple and Atari and I was able to play a lot of cool stuff before it was out of beta stage. I think I am gonna play some PS3 after all this reminiscing!

nice, i didn't know what was the first computer game.

That is Chunky!

Cool i didn't know that you could circut bend oscilloscopes.

The distinction you imply is worth acknowledement, "Cool." There's general history, and there's personal history. And they aren't necessarily the same.

I lost my virginity to a Pong-type game displayed on a television, but generated by a discrete console. That was just teasing, though. My real initiation came via text-based "adventure games."

First, I played "Zork" on a dumb terminal. Just prelude. My first real immersion came on an Apple II, by way of a text-based game titled … yes! "Pirate Adventure," written by Scott Adams in, I think, BASIC — either interpreted or compiled. I forget. I do remember that one got to the island by typing "Say Yo Ho."

Nice journey down memory lane. Nice opportunity to tip one's hat to cool pioneers!

Pong on Atari will always be the first computer game to me.

INDEED IT WAS...

FYI...

The video game industry birth time line...

1 8 8 9
Fusajiro Yamauchi creates the Manufuku company, specializing in card games. In 1951, the company’s name was changed to the Nintendo Playing Card Company. In Japanese, the word “Nintendo” means, “Leave Luck to Heaven”, or “Work hard, but in the end, it is in Heaven’s hands”. ● H. Hollerith develops an electro-mechanical counting machine based on the perforated card system.

1 9 4 7
Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka launch the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company. In 1952, Morita and Ibuka painstakingly put together $25,000 and buy the right to use Bell Lab’s patent on the transistor. They create the first portable transistor radio set operating on batteries. The name of their company is too complex for the American market. They change it to Sony (from the Latin word “sonus” meaning “sound”).

1 9 5 1
Ralph Baer, an engineer from Loral, is asked to develop “the best TV set in the world.” To give it extra competitive advantage, he offers to create a
new form of content: an interactive game. Management turns down the idea.

1 9 5 4
A Korean war veteran, David Rosen, notices how popular coin-op machines are in military barracks. He creates Services Games and exports pin-ball machines to American bases in Japan. In 1960 he decides to create machines under his own brand name: Sega (SErvices GAmes) is born!

1 9 5 8
Jack Kilby, f rom Texas Instruments, Dallas, Texas, invents the integrated circuit. ● Scientist Willy Higginbotham comes up with the first interactive game ever. It operates on his lab’s oscilloscope.

1 9 6 0
Ted Nelson develops the idea for hypertext and incorporate it in a project design to connect all human knowledge. The Xanadu project is born.

1 9 6 1
MIT student Steve Russell creates Spacewar, the first distributed computer game.
Play with it at: http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar/

1 9 6 6
Richard Greenblatt’s chess program wins several tournaments at beginner’s level. ● Ralph Baer develops a hockey game. ● Sega launches its first arcade game in Japan. It is a submarine simulator called Periscope.

1 9 6 7
Texas Instruments puts the first solid-state handheld calculator on the market. ● Games based on the Star Trek storyline appear on a number of mainframe computers.

1 9 6 8
RAM memory is first introduced in the data processing industry.

1 9 6 9
The US Defense Department launches its Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). It will become the Internet. ● Life, a game created by John Conway, is played on quite a few university mainframes.

1 9 7 1
Game manufacturer Nutting delivers the first 1,500 copies of their arcade machine. The design is quite futuristic.The public finds Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space too difficult to play. The game is a flop. ● Bally / Midway refuses to put Pong, Nolan Bushnell ’s game, on the market. Bushnell decides to create Atari Inc. ● Intel creates its first 4-bit microprocessor, the 4004.

1 9 7 2
Pong undergoes its first real-life test in a bar room close to where the inventor lives. It breaks the house! ● Paul Allen and Bill Gates buy an Intel 8008 chip for $360. They build a computer to control road traffic. They create their first company, Traf-O-Data. ● The first home TV game system, the Magnavox Odyssey is released ● Bally/Midway finally publishes the game called Winner Pong. The first wave of video game madness begins.

Hey, at least he used the metaphor of lobbing tennis balls rather than grenades!