The latest VGC Essay looks at the birth of Pong and asks why early game developers were so obsessed with recreating table tennis on our TVs. Here’s a teaser…
Why were early game developers so fixated on bouncing a ball back and forth?
It’s hard to pinpoint the very first video game, but it most likely belongs to A.S. Douglas and OXO. This electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe was created by Douglas in 1952 to support his doctoral thesis, Interactions Between Human and Computer. But after that, the only question early gamemakers wanted to ask was, “Tennis, anyone?”