Tennis for Two // 01/16/2016

It was Pong before Pong was Pong. Sort of.

Game: Tennis for Two

Release Date: October 18th, 1958

Made by: William Higinbotham
Console: Donner Model 30 Analog Computer

Bias Disclaimer: I played tennis once. It was exhausting.

Created simply as a way to entertain visitors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Tennis for Two stole the show as the only piece of interactive equipment among the numerous exhibits in the room. It was then promptly dismantled and forgotten for the next twenty years.

I wasn’t exaggerating in my last blog post when I said that most games that were created before the age of Pong were not well known and were certainly not considered some great discovery of a completely new medium. While Tennis for Two was a huge hit with visitors on that fateful October day, no one even considered the possibilities that the invention posed at the time for video games and its creator William Higinbotham didn't help in that regard either as he only wanted to be known for his work in nuclear nonproliferation. In fact, he considered the game to be more of an afterthought than anything even after he was hailed as one of the grandfathers of video games. None of this however diminishes the importance of Tennis for Two which still took that necessary step into the next level for video games as an entertainment medium.

Just like with OXO, the significance of the game doesn’t come from its gameplay. Tennis for Two was essentially the first game that we know of created solely for the purpose of entertainment. It was made only to be a game, not as a research project that would test how far technology could go or as eye candy to show off a particularly powerful computer for the time. This is more in tune with how we view video games today as means of fun rather than as just an interactive program.

This is the face of a man who would rather be known for nuclear bombs than video games

The gameplay is not surprisingly based off of tennis. Perhaps either due to the lack of graphical constructs that the visuals require to be effective or the ease in which a player can understand the core concept of the game, there has always been an upheaval of games geared towards smacking a ball around and trying not to miss, especially in the early days of gaming (think Pong) and I guess in real life too for that matter. In this particular tennis simulator, you tap the left mouse button to ‘hit’ the ball and then use the mouse to direct its trajectory in an attempt to mimic the simple button and analog stick controls of the Donner Model 30 computer. There are no boundaries except for the lines of the net and court meaning that if you hit the ball off the screen, it keeps going and you have to keep clicking frantically to get it back like you're trying to save it from the void. There's no score keeping either so it’s up to you to impose your own rules should you choose to make this more of a traditional game. There are no player avatars, something that seems obvious to include today even if was just to ground the visuals a bit more into the real world but I guess aren’t wholly necessary for the game to work. Without them though it feels like you’re playing on a possessed tennis court as you watch the ball seemingly move on its own accord. You can also, in what is probably the most amusing part of the game continuously click the mouse to keep ‘hitting’ the ball even before it's come back to the court, rendering the carefully calculated physics of the game completely irrelevant. Personally, I like making the ball do loop de loops in the air but I am also easily entertained so don't judge. It's still an impressive and accurate physics simulator however which is not wholly unexpected since the creator was a legitimate physicist who worked on the first nuclear bomb.

Pictured here: The candle light vigil I've placed to appease the tennis ghosts

Verdict: I actually think you can skip this one too. The entertainment value of a tennis game with no rules or score keeping lasts about 5 seconds after you’ve figured out all the ways you can break the laws of gravity. Coincidentally, 5 seconds is also about the time it takes for you to uninstall the game so it's really up to you if you want to exert the effort to download it in the first place. If you are still interested in playing the game, I do think it's more prudent than OXO to actually download the simulator because the gameplay is original enough that you don't feel as if you could've achieved the same effect by drawing a tennis court on paper like in OXO's gameplay or god forbid, by playing actual tennis. In the end it's more of a physics simulator than a game anyways, but I guess that’s what you get when you let a nuclear physicist design your entertainment for the night.

Links: The simulator does work this time so you can head to this site here to download it if you are so inclined. It’s very easy to install and includes a mode that let's you play against a computer should you feel the need to play against an actual ghost since you know you would rather hang out with the dead than be alone like me.

Next time, we’ll play the true Pong before Pong was Pong. Hint: it’s still not Pong.