​Introduction | Table of Contents | Early Gaming | Pong | Consoles | Portables | Computers | Online | Arcade | Immersion Technology
Retro Pirate's Big List of Gaming Platforms
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DID YOU KNOW:
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, an earlier design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until the 1940s that the first general-purpose computers were actually built, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine.
Intro
According to Wikipedia, the technical definition of 'video game' is that "there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube (CRT) that creates a rasterized image on a screen." This would define, say, a VIC20, or a Super Nintendo, but it leaves out many others: modern systems on high definition LCD or LED screens, pretty much all handhelds, wearable devices like Google Glass or the Oculus Rift, and much more.
Some might also say a video gaming system must have computer chips, or memory to store a program. Many of the earliest computers didn't have any of these, but neither did the Magnavox Odyssey (1972), considered by pretty much everyone to be the very first home video gaming system.
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I think the term 'video game' needs a new definition: an electronic device that one or more people interact with, which is capable of visually displaying the results of that interaction, and must have at least basic gaming elements (win/lose, hit/miss). By this definition then, the first video game wasn't Pong (as many have suggested), or Spacewar! (as many others have been telling us), or even Tennis for Two (as most video game historians have assumed). By this definition, the very first video game may well have seen the light of day back in 1947.
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Though some of the entries here, in the Early Gaming category, don't fit neatly into even the broadest definition of video game, like printing to paper instead of a display or not having direct input from the user, all of them have in some way contributed significantly to the development of video games as we know them today.
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