Higginbotham, Willy

HIGGINBOTHAM, WILLY

Inventor of first video game

Background

Willy Higginbotham was a physicist. During World War II he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory to work on radar display. He contributed to research on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped develop a radar system associated with the B-29 bomber. After the war, Higginbotham worked for the U.S. government at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where every year there was an open house. People could come in and tour the nuclear research lab and see the equipment used and displays of work in progress. Higginbotham feared that visitors to the open house were bored.

A Visitors' Game

As director of the instrumentation division of the lab, he decided to make something interesting for the public in 1958. He took spare parts from an oscilloscope and some other equipment around the lab, hooked it together, and created a game for his visitors to play. On a five-inch screen, Higginbotham electronically drew a tennis court. A bouncing dot of light represented the ball. Two controls (one on either side) included a button and a knob. When the button was pushed it caused the ball to move across the court; the knob controlled the ball's speed. The tennis game was an instant success with Brookhaven guests. While their eyes may have glazed over at descriptions of sophisticated electronic equipment and its scientific use, they were endlessly fascinated by watching a dot they could control bounce back and forth on an oscilloscope.

Remembered for a Game

Higginbotham saw no commercial application for his idea, and even if he had, he could not patent it because he worked for the government and created his game on government time. A patent lawyer for Magnavox, which had bought Sanders Associates, the company that in 1964 applied for the first video game patent found out about Higginbotham and called him to testify in one of the suits Magnavox filed against video game tyros. As a result of his testimony, Higginbotham achieved a certain celebrity, though he would have preferred that it were for his nuclear-safety engineering skills and his work in arms control.