Videospillets historie: fra tidlige computer spil til konsoller

Tennis for Two, an early analog computer game that used an oscilloscope for a display

Early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example is from 1947—a "Cathode ray tube Amusement Device" was filed for a patent on January 25, 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on December 14, 1948, as U.S. Patent 2455992.

Inspired by radar display tech, it consisted of an analog device that allowed a user to control a vector-drawn dot on the screen to simulate a missile being fired at targets, which were drawings fixed to the screen.

Other early examples include:

The NIMROD computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain

OXO a tic-tac-toe Computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC in 1952

Tennis for Two, an interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham in 1958

Spacewar!, written by MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen's on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961.

Each game used different means of display: NIMROD used a panel of lights to play the game of Nim, OXO used a graphical display to play tic-tac-toe Tennis for Two used an oscilloscope to display a side view of a tennis court, and Spacewar! used the DEC PDP-1's vector display to have two spaceships battle each other.