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Who invented video games? TJ, age 7, Worcester, Massachusetts
Some people just love to play. Give them a ball, or a pen, or a pile of leaves and they’ll find a way to play with it. In fact, enough people love to play that just about any time someone invents something new, people find a way to play with it.
Christopher Strachey didn’t invent modern computers. He didn’t even see one until 1951, several years after others had first created the first ones. But he had been friendly with Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of modern computers, when he was in college in England.
The Mark I is considered the first computer because it could store programs written for it.
Anders Sandberg/Flickr, CC BY
So when Strachey heard about the new Mark I computer installed at the University of Manchester in the U.K., he was able to ask Turing for a copy of the programming manual. He studied the manual, then got the chance to write a program for the computer. People were so impressed with his work that he soon had access to the computer whenever he had time off from his job as a teacher.
Strachey spent his school breaks working on a checkers-playing program, which was remarkably complicated for the time. It showed the board on a screen – a cathode-ray tube. Players wrote their moves on a teletype, a typewriter electronically connected to the computer, which both printed the moves on paper and sent them to the computer. The machine would “look ahead” at the different possible moves and countermoves, both to choose what it should do next and to make fun of players for particularly bad moves.
The first video game was a digital version of checkers.
Wikimedia Commons
I call this game “M.U.C. Draughts” in my book “How Pac-Man Eats,” because Strachey never gave it a name. M.U.C. stands for Manchester University Computer and draughts is the British name for checkers. I think it’s the first video game. But there are lots of playful people out there, so someone else might have come first. Around the same time that Strachey was creating M.U.C. Draughts, A.S. (Sandy) Douglas created a game of tic-tac-toe, which was also displayed on a cathode-ray tube, for the University of Cambridge EDSAC computer. In the future we may find that other playful people made other video games for early computers.
People still play video game versions of board games and card games, but they’re usually not the first thing you think of when someone says “video games.” Generally people think about the video display showing a simulated space, with one or more features the player can control in that space – maybe gliding across the sky in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or…