1958
In an effort to keep visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York from being bored, physicist Willy Higinbotham invents an interactive table-tennis-like game that is displayed on an oscilloscope. He improves on his invention a year later by displaying it on a 15-inch monitor. Believing that he hasn't invented anything, Higinbotham doesn't patent the device.
1961
 |  Spacewar. |
1962
Nolan Bushnell enrolls in engineering school at the University of Utah, where he is first exposed to Russell's Spacewar.
1965
Nolan Bushnell gets a summer job at a Salt Lake City carnival, where he is in charge of the arcade. Bushnell envisions an arcade filled with computer games but realizes it's only a dream, since computers are much too expensive to make the idea feasible.
1966
Ralph Baer rekindles his idea for a secondary use for television sets. He begins researching interactive television games. The defense contractor he works for, Sanders Associates, is interested and gives him the latitude needed to develop it.
1967
Baer and his team succeed in creating an interactive game that can be played on a television screen. They develop a chase game and follow it up with a video tennis game. They also modify a toy gun so it can distinguish spots of light on the screen.
1968
Baer's interactive TV game is patented.
1970
Magnavox licenses Baer's TV game from Sanders Associates.
With the help of Ted Dabney, Bushnell turns his daughter Britta's bedroom into a workshop so they can build an arcade version of Spacewar. They succeed in putting together a hardwired dedicated machine that can hook up to a television set to play a video version of Spacewar. Bushnell calls his game Computer Space.
Arcade-game manufacturer Nutting Associates purchases Computer Space and hires Bushnell to oversee the building of it.
| « Previous Page | Next: Show Me The Games Begin » |
