Tennis for Two

Legacy

This game is sometimes mentioned to be the first video game created. There are older video games, but this might have been the first with moving images as part of game play, rather than static screens that update only after player input.

Patent and legal issues.

The developer, William Higinbotham, didn't seek a patent on his original video game. In retrospect, Higinbotham agreed he should have applied for a patent. But if he had, the patent would have belonged to the federal government, and no riches would have come his way, anyway. According to Higinbotham, the reason he did not apply was that at the time, the game did not seem to be any more novel than the bouncing ball circuit in the instruction book. Years after Higinbotham built Tennis for Two, the game received notoriety in the legal system. In the mid-1970s, Higinbotham's game was "discovered" and brought into legal battle against the first video game patent, held by Magnavox. While Higinbotham’s set-up would seem to predict electronic ping-pong games such as those featured on the Odyssey and in Atari’s Pong, the courts eventually rule against it as a viable videogame system and every company later hoping to enter the market ends up paying some sort of settlement to Magnavox.