Bertie the Brain was one of the first games created during the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The computer, which was four meters (13 feet) tall, allowed visitors to play tic-tac-toe against a computer program that acted like a thinking machine. Players used a keypad with a three-by-three grid to make their moves, and the game was shown on a grid of lights above the machine. The machine had different levels of difficulty. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was taken apart at the end of the exhibition and mostly forgotten.
Kates created the game to show off his additron tube, a small version of a vacuum tube. However, transistors became more common in computers soon after. Patent problems stopped the additron tube from being used in other computers besides Bertie. Bertie the Brain is considered a possible first video game because it may have been the first digital computer-based game to display the game visually. It was made only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game with an electronic display. However, Bertie used light bulbs instead of a screen with real-time moving images, which means some definitions of a video game do not include it.
History
Bertie the Brain was a video game version of tic-tac-toe created by Dr. Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. Before this, Kates worked at Rogers Majestic, where he designed and built radar tubes during World War II. After the war, he studied computer technology at the University of Toronto while still working at Rogers Majestic. There, he helped build the University of Toronto Electronic Computer (UTEC), one of the first working computers in the world. He also invented a small vacuum tube called the additron tube, which he registered with the Radio Electronics Television Manufacturers' Association on March 20, 1951, as type 6047.
After applying for a patent for the additron tube, Rogers Majestic asked Kates to create a device to show the tube’s value to buyers. Kates designed a special computer using the additron tube and built it with help from engineers at Rogers Majestic. The computer was large, standing four meters (13 feet) tall, and could only play tic-tac-toe. It was placed in the Engineering Building at the Canadian National Exhibition from August 25 to September 9, 1950.
The computer, named "Bertie the Brain" with the subtitle "The Electronic Wonder by Rogers Majestic," was popular during the two-week exhibition. Many visitors lined up to play the game. Kates often stayed near the machine to change its difficulty level for players of different ages. Comedian Danny Kaye was photographed defeating the machine after several attempts for Life magazine.
Gameplay
Bertie the Brain was a tic-tac-toe game where players chose their moves by pressing one of nine lit buttons on a raised panel. Each move was shown on a vertical grid of nine large squares on the machine, with an X- or O-shaped light appearing in the matching square. After the player’s move, the computer responded quickly by making its own move. Two signs to the right of the playfield displayed either "Electronic Brain" with an X or "Human Brain" with an O to show whose turn it was. These signs also lit up with the word "Win" when a player completed a row, column, or diagonal. Bertie the Brain had multiple difficulty settings, and at the highest level, the computer was designed to never lose.
Legacy
After the exhibition, Bertie was taken apart and mostly forgotten as a new idea. Kates said he was working on many projects at the same time and did not have enough energy to keep Bertie safe, even though it was important. Even though Bertie was the first computer game ever built, with only theoretical chess programs before it, and was mentioned in an article that was never published in Life magazine, the game was mostly forgotten, even by books about video game history. Bertie's main goal, to help promote the additron tube, was not achieved because it was the only completed use of the technology. By the time Rogers Majestic asked Kates to create a working model for the Exhibition, Kates had already spent a year developing the tubes, making several changes, and the University of Toronto team felt the progress was too slow to use the tubes in the UTEC.
Although other companies showed interest in using the tubes, problems with getting patents stopped Kates, Rogers Majestic, and the University of Toronto from patenting the tubes outside Canada until 1955. The patent application was not approved in the United States until March 1957, six years after it was filed. By then, research and use of vacuum tubes was decreasing because transistors, which were better, were becoming more common. This made it impossible to revisit Bertie or similar machines. Kates had a successful career in Canadian engineering but did not return to working on vacuum tubes or computer games.
Bertie was created only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game. While non-visual games had been made for research computers, such as Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz's Turochamp chess program for the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester, and an electro-mechanical game with lightbulb displays, the Nimatron, shown in 1940, Bertie may have been the first digital computer-based game to show any kind of visual display. Bertie is sometimes considered under certain definitions as a possible first video game. While definitions differ, the earlier cathode-ray tube amusement device was purely an analog electrical game. Bertie did not have an electronic screen but did use a computer. Another special-purpose computer-based game, Nimrod, was built in 1951. The software-based tic-tac-toe game OXO and a draughts program by Christopher Strachey in 1952 were the first computer games to display visuals on an electronic screen instead of light bulbs.