From the lab-born Tennis for Two to the console classics of Nintendo and Sega, the sport has been a constant, foundational force in gaming’s rise
With Wimbledon under way, I am going to grasp the opportunity to make a perhaps contentious claim: tennis is the most important sport in the history of video games.
Sure, nowadays the big sellers are EA Sports FC, Madden and NBA 2K, but tennis has been foundational to the industry. It was a simple bat-and-ball game, created in 1958 by scientist William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, that is widely the considered the first ever video game created purely for entertainment. Tennis for Two ran on an oscilloscope and was designed as a minor diversion for visitors attending the lab’s annual open day, but when people started playing, a queue developed that eventually extended out of the front door and around the side of the building. It was the first indication that computer games might turn out to be popular.
I’ve been unable to find out if Ralph Baer, the inventor of the first mass-produced games console, the Magnavox Odyssey, ever played Tennis for Two. However, when he was developing the idea of a TV that could play games, while working at the defence contractor Sanders Associates in the late 1960s, the rudimentary elements of what his prototype consoles could display on screen were vertical lines and square dots. When Magnavox released the product in 1972, its key games were Table Tennis and Tennis (the same as Table Tennis, except you could place a plastic overlay of a tennis court on your TV screen). These allowed two players to bat a ball to each other, adding a little “spin” by flicking the dial on the side of the primitive joypad. This was an extension of the knob on the Tennis for Two controller that let you alter the height of your return shot, but neither game really allowed much in the way of player skill.
