Video games turn 50!

[Clintonista2]

Bob Dvorak Jr. may very well have been the first kid ever to play a video game.

It's a big and somewhat controversial claim, but given that his father, Robert Dvorak Sr., built what is considered to be the first such device in 1958, the facts seem to back him up.

In the 1950s, Dvorak Sr. was an engineer working in the instrumentation division of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Using designs supplied by his colleague, physicist William Higinbotham, Dvorak put together Tennis for Two — a simple video game that allowed players to bounce a ball over a net — for an open house at the lab.

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For the precocious seven-year-old, the game was the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

"To my father, it was just a fun thing," says Dvorak Jr., who is now 57. "To me it was great."

Fifty years ago this week, video games — as we know them today — were born. A half century later, they are a huge business that last year surpassed movies in terms of revenue generated, a phenomenon Higinbotham and Dvorak Sr. never could have foreseen.

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More... http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/10/15/tech-games.html?ref=rss