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 made an important contribution to the history of video games by inventing "Tennis for Two," which was the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display.

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 continued his studies at Cornell University. He worked on radar systems 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 starting mechanism and tools to measure the device's parts. He also created the radar display for the experimental B-28 bomber. After working on nuclear weapons, he helped start the group that prevents the spread of nuclear weapons, Federation of American Scientists, and was its first leader and head administrator. From 1974 until he died in 1994, he was the technical editor of the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, published by the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.

In 1947, he started working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked until he retired in 1984. In 1958, as head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven, he made a computer game named Tennis for Two for the laboratory's annual event. The game showed a tennis match on a special screen called an oscilloscope and is considered one of the earliest video games. He finished the game in a few weeks, and it was a popular feature at the event. Because it was so popular, he made a new version for the 1959 event; this version let players change the gravity to play on Jupiter or the Moon. He never got a patent for Tennis for Two, but he got more than 20 other patents in his lifetime.

Legacy

In the 1980s, critics and historians started to understand the importance of Tennis for Two 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. He called Higinbotham the "Grandfather of Video Games." At the same time, Frank Lovece interviewed Higinbotham for an article 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. It is managed by Kristen Nyitray, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, and Raiford Guins, Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Studies. The Collection focuses on "documenting the material culture of screen-based game media." It specifically collects and preserves items that show the history and work of William A. Higinbotham, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Higinbotham invented the first interactive analog computer game, Tennis for Two, in 1958. As part of preserving this history, the Collection is making a documentary about the game and its reconstruction by Peter Takacs, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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