The player would use the stick and button on an aluminium controller to dictate the angle of the ‘ball’ – aka teeny ball of light – and attempt to smack it over the net. The game consisted of a horizontal line to represent the court and a smaller vertical line in the centre that stood in for the net. It wasn’t exactly a pretty game, as the limited, but functional, visuals were displayed on an oscilloscope screen. It was an event that forever changed that path of William’s life. The steel tower that was the target of the test was wiped from the face of the Earth by the explosive equivalent of 21,000 tons of TNT. On the 16th of July, 1945, at 5.30am, William witnessed an eye-searing blast of light resulting in an unimaginably vast ball of fire and a humungous mushroom cloud that measured some 40,000 feet across bloom into life. He was there to witness the infamous ‘Trinity Test’, the detonation of the first atomic bomb. It was a role that, by all accounts, Willy regretted. There William and his team developed the ignition mechanism for the first atomic bomb. Early in William’s career, during World War 2, he held a position at the Los Alomos National Laboratory. ‘Tennis for Two’ – or, as it’s sometimes known, Computer Tennis – was developed way back in 1958 by the American physicist William Higinbotham. And for every hard-nosed and passionate fan of Bertie the Brain as the originator of all things video game – I have it on good authority that there are at least two, possibly three, hard-nosed and passionate believers of this argument – there’s an equally ideological obsessive who would have it be known that ‘Tennis for Two’ kickstarted the age of video games. The thing is with arguments there are always two sides. In the previous feature What was the first ever video game? I took a look at the arcade cabinet-like behemoth ‘Bertie the Brain’ and the argument that this ultra-hard game of noughts and crosses was the first ever video game.
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