The First Video Game
Ahoy4 HN recommenders · 2020–2026
2.9M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-10-04
An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.
HN recommends it as the thorough, well-researched answer to the first video game question.
1:25:348 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming
1:16:17In Search Of A Flat Earth
Folding Ideas
22:21Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!
suckerpinch
19:06This Is Phil Fish
Innuendo Studios
1:01:07The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)
media.ccc.de
31:37How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica
53:51The Engoodening of No Man's Sky
Internet Historian
16:18Computer program that learns to play classic NES games
suckerpinch
5 comments from Hacker News
This indirectly reminds me of this youtube video: [VIDEO] It's a long one, but it tries to answer when the first video game was made. Most of it, though, is trying to figure out what it means to be a video game in the first place. Sometimes really the trouble with the question is the lack of precision in the definitions involved.
Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field: [VIDEO]
Video games are like compilers, or computers themselves - there isn't really a first one. Far enough back, there are things which are clearly not video games; recently enough, there are things which clearly are video games, and in between, there is a parade of things which are not clearly video games or not. Here's an hour-long, meticulously sourced, rather thoughtful video on the question: [VIDEO] (which naturally concludes that video games are a British invention!)
> The first video game was called Spacewar Spacewar! was not the first video game ever. Before it in 1958 came Tennis for Two and even before that, in 1952 Christopher Strachey made Draughts. [1] What Spacewar! can be considered, as per wiki [2] is one of the first recognized video games that enjoyed wider distribution behind a single exhibition system. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]
Ahoy did a comprehensive video about it: < [VIDEO] >, and a video is a more appropriate medium for discussing and demonstrating video games.