![]() As Higinbotham writes in his notes on the game, “the instruction booklet that came with this analogue computer described how to generate various curves on the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays.” The analog computing that made the game possible is central to an archaeology of Tennis for Two because the game’s graphical display and expression are functions of its hardware platform. It was created using a Donner Model 30 analog computer and an oscilloscope as the graphical display. Unlike these often better-known ball-and-paddle games, Tennis for Two was completely analog. These better-known videogames came decades after Higinbotham’s creation, when early arcade platforms that blended analog and digital computing sat alongside mechanical coin-ops in arcades (and gradually entered people’s homes). Its creator, William Higinbotham, sought no patent for the game, ultimately leading to his involvement in a patent dispute with Magnavox Odyssey’s Tennis and Atari’s PONG, among others. Photographs of Tennis for Two, care of The Gamer’s QuarterĬreated in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratories, Tennis for Two is considered one of the first early videogames. ![]() ![]() For the balance of this post, I’ll discuss William Higinbotham’s 1958 game, Tennis for Two, as a case study for a cultural history kit, and conclude by sketching out some future directions. ![]() This approach is informed by Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort’s platform studies and builds on scholarship by Anna Anthropy, Anne Balsamo, Alexander Galloway, Kristen Haring, Steve Jones, Matthew Kirschenbaum, George Thiruvathukal, and Play the Past , among many others. One goal of such a kit is to provide an embodied scholarly experience that makes an argument about the location of an early game within larger social, cultural, and political histories of technology and media. Studying early videogames from a historical perspective therefore invites an experiential, hands-on knowledge of the component material properties of game platforms and their role in shaping the game(s) produced-how, for instance, the particulars of early algorithms, electronics, and hardware influenced the articulations of play with computing.Ī Maker Lab kit on early games is meant to address the materialist and tinker-centric experience that a history of videogames demands, blending physical computing components, 3D models, schematics, fabricated mechanisms, and dynamic media with text-based scholarship. This raises the fundamental question of the researcher’s competence to examine historical objects” (13). As Carl Thierrien notes in Mark Wolf’s recent collection, Before the Crash: Early Video Game History: “Even with firsthand experience, one can misinterpret the actual algorithmic complexity of a game. Many of the techniques used to run these games on early arcade and home machines are being revived today by the indie game movement, although tracing a direct line from current indie games back to early videogames risks rendering game techniques purely aesthetic. ![]() The games I’ve been examining were created before the rise of major game consoles and companies in the mid-1980s, and the graphics, sound, and gameplay mechanics of these early games are often deeply enmeshed in the technological constraints of the platform(s) on which they ran. I’ve recently been conducting research for the “Kits for Cultural History” project, focusing on an archaeology of early videogames. ![]()
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