William Alfred Higinbotham was born on October 22, 1910, and died on November 10, 1994. He was an American physicist who worked on the team that created the first nuclear bomb. Later in his life, he helped lead efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. In 1958, he designed a game called Tennis for Two, which was the first interactive analog computer game. It was also one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display to show images on a screen.

Early life

Higinbotham was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and grew up in Caledonia, New York. His father worked as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. He earned his undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1932 and studied at Cornell University. He worked on the radar system at MIT from 1941 to 1943.

Career

During World War II, he worked at Los Alamos Laboratory and led the lab's electronics group in the later years of the war. His team developed electronics for the first atomic bomb, including the bomb's ignition system and measuring tools for the device. He also created the radar display for the experimental B-28 bomber. After his work with nuclear weapons, he helped start the Federation of American Scientists, a group focused on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. He served as its first chairman and executive secretary. From 1974 until his death in 1994, he worked as the technical editor of the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, a publication by the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.

In 1947, he began working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he remained until his retirement in 1984. In 1958, as head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven, he created a computer game called Tennis for Two for the lab's annual event. The game used an oscilloscope to display a tennis simulator and is considered one of the first video games. He completed the game in a few weeks, and it became a popular attraction at the event. For the 1959 event, he made an improved version that allowed players to change gravity settings to simulate playing tennis on Jupiter and the Moon. He did not patent Tennis for Two, but he held over 20 other patents during his career.

The instruction book that came with the computer explained how to plot movement paths and bouncing shapes for research. I thought, "This would make a good game." [Working with colleague Dave Potter], it took me four hours to design one, and a technician a few weeks to build it. … Everyone lined up to play [at the open house]. The other exhibits were not interactive, obviously. … The game seemed like a natural idea. Even if I had wanted to patent it, the game would have belonged to the government.

Legacy

In the 1980s, critics and historians started to realize how important Tennis for Two was in the history of video games. In 1983, David Ahl, who had played the game at a Brookhaven exhibition as a teenager, wrote an article for Creative Computing. In this article, he called Higinbotham the "Grandfather of Video Games." At the same time, Frank Lovece interviewed Higinbotham for a story about the history of video games in the June 1983 issue of Video Review.

In 2011, Stony Brook University created the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection. This collection is managed by Kristen Nyitray, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, and Raiford Guins, an Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Studies. The collection focuses on "documenting the physical items and documents related to screen-based game media." Specifically, it aims to "collect and preserve texts, small items, and artifacts that show the history and work of William A. Higinbotham, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who invented the first interactive analog computer game, Tennis for Two, in 1958." As part of this effort, the collection is making a documentary about the history of Tennis for Two and its reconstruction by Peter Takacs, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Higinbotham was not interested in being remembered for video games. Instead, he wanted to be known for his work in nuclear nonproliferation. After his death, his son, William B. Higinbotham, told Brookhaven National Laboratory, "It is important that you include information about his nuclear nonproliferation work. That was what he wanted to be remembered for." Because of this work, the Federation of American Scientists named their headquarters Higinbotham Hall in 1994.