Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
An electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe , built by A. S. Douglas as part of his Ph.D.
on Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Cambridge, debuted in
1952. The game was programmed for an EDSAC vacuum-tube computer, which
used a CRT display.
In 1958, during the time that Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the
United States, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two, which was played
on an oscilloscope at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.
A milestone in this early form of electronic gaming occurred at the Festival of
Britain in 1951, where Ferranti debuted its computer, the Nimrod. The computer
was designed solely to play the game NIM , where the goal was to collect all, or
lose all, from three piles of tokens depending on the game mode selected. The
name of the game came from the German word nimm meaning “take.” NIM was
a game of mathematical strategy, and some have linked it to the ancient game of
Jianshizi or “picking stones,” from China. The mathematical component to the
gameplay made it ideal to adapt to the binary mathematical abilities of the early
computers. Figure 1.9 shows a diagrammatic drawing of how the Nimrod was
designed with rows of blinking lights
In addition to being designed to play the game, the Nimrod also let the viewing
public see what a computer could be capable of. A smaller version of it currently
resides at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany.
the nimrod is some-
times referred to as
a Bt game—“before
transistors.”
FiGuRe 1.9 Nimrod
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