Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

Well, that’s how the story usually goes.4 But beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world’s first videogame was created four years earlier, at a U.S. government nuclear research facility, the Brookhaven National Laboratory. William A. Higinbotham, an engineer who had designed timing devices for the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb and helped in the first developments of radar, worked at Brookhaven in charge of instrumentation design. He was trying to dream up an entertaining exhibit for visiting members of the public, and he hacked together a rudimentary two-player tennis game. An analogue computer showed the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips on an oscilloscope, controlled by a button and a knob. It was a smash hit with the visitors for two years.

But owing to this lone pioneer’s modesty—he didn’t think he had created anything earth-shatteringly novel—the game never left the confines of the facility. “I considered the whole idea so obvious that it never occurred to me to think about a patent,” Higinbotham said wryly, years later. Luckily for the future of games,

_________________

4 Both J. C. Herz (in Joystick Nation) and Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder (L’Univers des jeux vidÉo) give this erroneous starting point. A thorough history is provided by Leonard Herman’s excellent Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames, to which I am indebted in this section.

36