William Higinbotham

Year: 
1910
Month: 
October
Day: 
25
Category: 
Person

William (Willy) A. Higinbotham, an American physicist, is credited with creating one of the first computer games, Tennis for Two. Like Pong, it is a portrait of a game of tennis or ping-pong, but featured very different game mechanics that have no resemblance to the later game. As the Head of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he created it on an oscilloscope in 1958, to entertain visitors during visitor days at the national laboratory.