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Tennis for Two

Pixels, Pongs, and the Persistence of Tennis Video Games.

By Tim Szetela

7:14 AM EDT on October 1, 2017

Two lines and a dot. Or two racquets and a ball. The simplicity of these three elements made tennis an ideal candidate for early computer-game developers. Even abstracted to its most basic geometry, the connection between the digital game and physical sport was clear, and the resulting gameplay, competitive and fun—helping make tennis a recurring subject of video games for six decades. I created the tennnis. org archive to document this persistent role of tennis in the history of video games and to investigate the varied games and design choices made within the genre.

Tennis For Two is thought to be the first video game. It was developed in 1958 by William Higinbotham at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.