What was the first video game?
Early history of video games
The ancestors to these games include the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to incorporate a cathode ray tube screen.[5] The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope, with a set of knobs and switches. The device uses purely analog electronics and does not use any digital computer or memory device or execute a program.[6] It was patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947.[7] While the idea behind the game was potentially to use a television set as the display and thus sell the invention to consumers, as Goldsmith and Mann worked at television designer DuMont Laboratories, the patent, the first for an electronic game, was never used and the device never manufactured beyond the original handmade prototypes.[6][8][9] This, along with the lack of electronic logic circuits, keeps the device from being considered the first video game. Around the same time as the device was invented, the earliest known written computer game was developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948, a chess simulation called Turochamp, though it was never actually implemented on a computer as the code was too complicated to run on the machines of the time. Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a real chess game against an opponent, but was never able to run the program on a computer.[9]