The history of videogames is also the history of televisions. Not the shows, the stars, or the ready meals, but the equipment – the box in your living room. This connection is the most intimate yet unexamined one in our medium. The ‘video’ in ‘videogames’ isn’t just an affectation or a distinction: it refers to video technology, the recording and display system developed for cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions.
The earliest computer games didn’t use televisions, but they did use devices similar to televisions. Willy Higinbotham’s 1958 game Tennis For Two, often called the first videogame, was displayed on an oscilloscope connected to an analogue computer. Four years later, MIT engineers created Spacewar, a game that would inspire Asteroids and other space shooters. It ran on a refrigerator-sized PDP-1 minicomputer (‘mini’ relative to mainframes, that is) and rendered its ships and starfields on a display halfway between Higinbotham’s oscilloscope and a modern TV. Like Missile Command and other early coin-op games, Spacewar used a raster-scan CRT display, one that deploys its electron gun to etch vector shapes into the screen’s phosphor rather than to scan across the surface in rows as a raster-display CRT home television does.