The Secret First Games
Who was playing video games before anyone sold one?
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The story
Long before arcades, scientists were sneaking games onto lab equipment. A 1947 patent described a missile game drawn on a screen, Tennis for Two bounced a ball across an oscilloscope in 1958, and in 1962 students at MIT built Spacewar! on a room-sized computer just for fun.
What you'll learn
- Old screens drew pictures with a moving beam of electrons hitting glowing dots.
- The first video games were experiments by scientists and students, not products.
- Spacewar! spread from computer to computer because programmers shared it.
- Kid takeaway: playing with a tool is one of the best ways to learn it.
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