"Darling, you better stop all processes on that cathode-ray tube amusement device and come down for dinner." "But MOM! It's a real-time transcontinental cooperative simulation! I can't just stop it!"
"If, when walking down the halls of MIT, you should happen to hear strange cries of 'No! No! Turn! Fire! ARRGGGHHH!!', do not be alarmed. Another Western is not being filmed - MIT students and others are merely participating in a new sport, Spacewar." - One of the first media descriptions of gamers, 1962
Imagine being married to this guy... "Hey honey, remember our first date?" *"To do that, we have to go back to the beginning, starting with defining what a date is, and what it isn't."*
"Stu, can you pick up the groceries?" "To do that, we have to go back to the beginning, starting with defining what fresh produce is, and what it isn't."
Surely you would have to define what the meaning of time is before you can work out a date. As before the georgian calendar you had many others which did them vastly differently.
This channel is the definition of the saying “Quality over Quantity” When I say that I am referring to their upload schedule. slow, but worth it so much.
Funny you say that, I was just starting to wonder how far I'd gotten in the episode and turns out I wasn't past the halfway mark... This could really do with a lot of tightening up and editing to shorten it.
@@Naeddyr I have to disagree. The details are important and the whole video has a plot, or it rather aims on a goal. Sure, it coud be told shorter,but it wouldn't be ahoy....
This is a documentary, with evidence and research presented the whole way through, not an unsourced Facebook post or a RU-vid top ten list or some other crap. If that’s what you want, there’s tons of places to find them.
@@apotheosis21 oh yes. And I always ask myself, where the heck all the information, Charts, graphs and evidence comes from. The research effort is immense. Then all that condensed in one video with different perspectives and alternate thoughts.
@Ninety5tag My only issue with it being an hour long is that I know that if I start watching this I won't be able to stop until the video is finished....
This came up at a "pub quiz" during fresher's week at my uni halls a couple years ago... My table wanted to guess Pong, but I knew that wasn't right, so I strongly suggested we guess something like Computer Space instead (not the oldest, but closer and it's all that came to mind). The answer they wanted was Pong. I was not a popular man that evening.
@@thotusmaximus971 oh dude trust me as soon as they read out that answer I literally leapt to my own defense. Before the poor girl could finish annunciating the "G" and before I even fully registered what was happening, a "NO IT ISN'T" erupted from my lips as I stood up at my table with such velocity as to spill two of the drinks on it. They wouldn't have it. Bastards.
@@ChrisStoneinator aw that sucks, I mean, stating/claiming something probably isn't enough evidence xD refer to the real answer clearly and if asked for sources just give them the video lol idk :/ Kinda sucks tho, but hey, you did what you could, it's all fine in the end
@@ChrisStoneinator Of course they wouldn’t, because when they have written an answer, hot dammit, then that’s final, no ifs or buts. Sigh, not only are videogames still a very frowned upon market, especially among adults, but this clearly shows how ignorant non gamers are about the medium. You did what you could mate, but we lost as a community that day.
That creeping realisation that the beautiful “cold-war military briefing” look isn’t After Effects but is instead countless pieces of actual footage of him placing and removing negative transparencies on a projector. And they’re all smoothly blended meaning he sweetened every cut individually. To quote Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park: “You did it. You crazy son of a bitch, you did it.”
The son of a bitch did it! Still a lot of after effects involved here! I’m trying to figure out ways it could be done. One way could be making trackable shots of placing a sheet on the projector. And then track the surface and displacement of the sheet creating a plate for for textures. That way you need around 20 shots to create the illusion of constant variations combining this with serval key real slides to put in the edit really sells the effect. But for now I’m to deep in the suspension of disbelief to know for sure. As someone who does vfx and motion graphics everyday that really impressive for me! Tip of the hat to this amazing creator!
I will never tire of your approach to "quality vs quantity" You demand so much of my time but in hindsight, you have taken so little and every second has been worthwhile.
I love how this is better than quite a margin of documentaries, done only by a guy (or multiple, don't know if he has people editing stuff for him) that do it in a much more creative and interesting way, that keeps you watching for it's entirety and wanting more.
@@screamsinrussian5773 I've always related it to marketing for Timesplitters 2 but after a few minutes rumiging through google I can't find the thing I imagine. Timesplitters 2 was released 2 years before the Prodigy song though. Maybe a weird marketting tie- in?
@@Mgrow I thought of TS-2 when I read it. But then again, I have never heard of Pordigy other than their song Smack My Bitch Up and Firestarter. I thought they disappeared after those came out. I really hope they make a TS-4.There are rumours it's coming out on the PS5. I bet it will be in 2025...that be 20 years after TS-3.
I wonder how much time he made to produce this video.. Seems to have a lot of research.. And he did all in slides put one by one by hand.. another piece of detail.. Not to mention the background music he arrange in the video that brings enthusiasm and suspense at the same time. All ahoy videos are awesome..
*Ahoy:* To land at a satisfactory answer to our original question we must first answer another: *Me:* What _is_ a video game? *Ahoy:* What _is_ a video game? *Me:* Hoo boy this'll gonna be one hell of a ride.
Without properly defining the terms being discussed, constructive analysis cannot take place. Simple dialogue can be reduced to futile quarrelling if both parties unknowingly use different definitions of a same word.
@@azrael6280 It wasn't so much that. They focussed on call quality, battery life and so on. Completely missing the emerging importance of the mobile internet and touch screens. Symbian OS did not have a touch screen interface. The Sony Ericsson P900 and P990 did have such an interface called UIQ. Nokia should have bought UIQ and integrated it into Symbian.
Calling pong the first game is like calling the Ford model T the first car, it was the first popular and easily accessible car, but like atari with pong, it was not even fords first car, let alone the first motor vehicle on wheels...
My dad had told me about the history of video games. He told me about the Brown Box... or Magnavox Odyssey. Originally I thought Pong was the first game too, but that was back in 2014. When I learned about the Magnavox that alone had amazed me. I delved into this extreme retro (in some cases just oldie games!) phenomenon. There I learned about Space War. Then other things like the Nintendo Color TV and many old early consoles, Microvision and etc. I kept researching this until I found Tennis for Two, and OXO. Finally, I found a website that listed the 'entire' history of games. Dating earliest to 1940; the Cathode Ray Amusement Device. Googling this device I found this video, which opened up so many earlier devices that could have been possibly used for some prototype version of gaming. It just amazes me how much people don't know about this stuff! When there are still many who say Pong is the absolute first game.
It was a magazine for Commodore computers, so the title was a play on the word Commodore, as a commander of a fleet of ships. I had a Vic-20, C-64, and later Amiga, so we had piles of these and other magazines around. The days of free software, if you were willing to type it in by hand from the back of a magazine. I think there's an archive online somewhere (Archive.org).
He is making a very simple question overly complex. Tennis for Two is the first video game. If you start counting tic tac toe, you have to include this: /watch?v=senG1HmruAo This was developed int he 1930s. It features a screen with light generated jet planes and clouds that move in the background. If light-bulbs are a video screen, so is this. This is MUCH closer to a video game than light-bulbs and a real world game like tic-tac-toe. Minus the actual screen not being a CRT, this is far more video game like than ANY of the early 1950s games. It "feels" like a video game in a way that tic-tac-toe does not.,
@@tarstarkusz I know you were trying to disprove the video's point here, but I think you may have ironically just expanded upon it. This could very well considered the first videogame.
@@HueghMungus D'you know what? I will. He bloody well deserves it, he makes great content for a platform that, infamously, is uninterested in supporting creators of his kin, but someone should. So I'll go support his Patreon.
@@RichConnerGMN In fact I did. At $5/month. For the record, I was drunk at the time, but I'm not taking it back. I will apologize to my poor college student wallet later.
I remember playing Space War at university in the early 70's! It was certainly a challenging game, and the first time I'd seen anything like it. After a few career diversions I was lucky enough to end up spending half my working life developing games. Things have changed a lot over those 50-ish years... 🙂
My first games job was at DMA Design, and my first games credit was in GTA 1 🙂 I spent a few great years there, and after they were bought by Rockstar I moved around various other companies. Fun times but it's a very demanding business, and I eventually switched to a job in embedded/real-time systems development.
Oh the knowledge and wisdom you must have.. might be thinking I'm kidding but you have so much experience you are the kind of person I'd kill to have conversations with
@@buenogoodlive I still think its Pong. He has the right factors but his explanation and understanding of them are limited. Pong has the intent to be a commercial, entertainment, interactive video game for public use. All the others were some sort of science experiment, mathematical thesis or engineering acomplishment. The only one which you could verse to go against Pong is Spacewar! But then you need to go into level engineering and what the video game is telling you to do and input. For instance a lot of these "games" are not even two-button. However, it's the intent factor that I have a gripe with. I don't think any of them had the intent of making entertainment for the public (except of cause the conflict with spacewar! as I mentioned) than Pong did and they (the company) continue to do.
@@WoodyTrombone His interactivity requirement also disqualifies most quick time event games, since they're pretty much like watching a movie on your computer that's set to sleep every 5 minutes. Except the quick time event is there to keep *you* from falling asleep.
Everyone is going on about the detail and quality of this video (as well they should, because it's amazing), but I want to throw out some extra appreciation for the overhead-projector style presentation. I don't know why or how, but it seems to suit this subject material extremely well.
@@aurimasvasiliauskas6920 It looks like he printed out the information onto paper, filmed himself putting down and picking up each piece of paper with an overhead camera, made the video monochromatic and inverted it then cleaned it up and added text in editing. I could be wrong but that's my best guess.
@@aurimasvasiliauskas6920 Given some of the slides overlapped, we can see that the black areas are transparent and the white areas are opaque. This tells us the material is printed on transparent media, most likely acetate sheets for OHP use. It is likely these were printed with black ink using a laser printer, as is typical for OHP acetate sheets, meaning that the picture we see is inverted, as we can also see from some of the news article images. The sharpness of the image and the completely white appearance of Stuart's hand also indicate the contrast has likely been increased in post processing, but not to a huge extent, as we see grey 'shadows' where two sheets are overlaid and around the edges of the sheet, particularly as they are placed down. The physical apparatus used includes a light box, either one for tracing drawings (as often used by artists and animators) or the light box of an OHP, with a fresnel lens focusing light into a cone; it is difficult to tell which is the case from the video, as the lighting appears very uniform, but this may be due to increased contrast. A camera is placed above this, probably where the lens and mirror are on an OHP. The exposure on the camera is locked as we don't see any flaring (which would manifest as darkening) when the sheets are swapped. This all leads to a very refined and impressive effect, and works really well with the numerous old articles in the video. I want to say thank you to Stuart for such an excellent video, both in research and presentation.
Have you guys not tought about AfterEffects? For me, I'm more interested how did he draw those plans of the machines, but they were probably effected on. Even so, good video.
I know, right? Also kind of fits the technology of the times he's talking about, 'cos like, the Magnavox Odyssey had no graphics--you had to put a transparency of the "board" over your TV. Yeah, that was a hair later, but it still kinda works...
The amount of effort that must've went into making all of those retro-styled slides and basically sliding them by hand... like, holy shit, this is the work of a god
It is in fact done by hand. Source: Patreon Edit: To elaborate, he set up a camera in his garage, made the OHP slides, pointed the cam at the projection, had at it, and inverted the footage, IIRC. Game footage etc., of course, is edited in. If you see this, sorry for spilling some secrets, Stu, but I felt like explaining to make the point of how much work went into this clear.
@@DatBisa I knew this looked too good to be a special effect. I guess it makes sense: if you want to make something look real make it real. Gotta applaud Stuart for his dedication
50:03 I think we blew past the importance of Strachey's love letter algorithm. Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto cites it as a 1952 program. It randomly generated satirical love poems, which you could loosely interpret as interactive by needing a user to initiate the random generation in the first place. While not strictly a video game, an argument can easily be made for the love poem algorithm being the first piece of interactive fiction. So it's possible that the first video game and the first interactive fiction stood side by side, created one after the other, from the same source. That they were sister mediums all this time. And that's kind of poetic.
Ok hold on I dunno if I'm willing to count "requires user input to initiate program function" as any more interactive than the example of starting a film on a DVD. "loosely" is doing a lot of work here
Dude just watch any other documentaries from this channel and believe me you won't regret. Hence this is the first video in 7 months, when I saw the notification I quickly grabbed some juice and chips and sat comfortably in my chair to enjoy.
When you mentioned that OXO's controls were poor, my first thought was, "this wouldn't be the first video game with poor controls." But then I realized that, yes, it might well be.
can i just say you're a friggin incredible musician? i had no clue you produced all the music in your videos until i came to your bandcamp. incredible stuff.
When he mentioned DVD menus as being part of interactivity, I got a massive nostalgia rush remembering the Shrek and Madagascar interactive menus with the unique original character animations and voice lines.
_This Disney DVD is enhanced with Disney's FastPlay. Your movie and a selection of bonus features will begin automatically. To bypass Fast Play, select the Main Menu button at any time. Fast Play will begin in a moment…_
I have some vague memory of a VeggieTales DVD with Larry The Cucumber helping you find the meaning of different idioms, like "Noah's boy on a raft" meaning a ham sandwich
@@gnarlin4964 the patent system is meant to be there to protect small individuals, inventors, artists, etc from being bullied and overrun by huge corporations. Some scummy companies abuse the patent system sure but that isn't a reason to abolish the thing entirely, because if that happened then artists and inventors and scientists and engineers are then being pressured into not even bothering to create new and wonderful things, as what would be the point if they immediately lose it and any potential to earn money from it? Plus you know who was a patent clerk? Albert Einstein. He was a smart lad, and the patent system is also smart. If its not perfect and can be abused, change the patent system, make it better, change the rules to block scummy companies from abusing it. Don't abolish it. The attitude of "oh this thing isn't 100% perfect so fuck it let's just get rid of it" seems so unnecessary and wasteful of an attitude. It's lazy. Instead of trying to improve things you want to just throw the baby out with the bathwater because you can't be arsed to try and make the thing better. The copyright system is there for the same reasons, to protect small individual artists when they create a new work of art whether it be books, games, paintings, music or whatever. And similarly that systemcan and has been abused by big corporations (looking at you, Disney). But that's not a reason to get rid of it entirely, it's a reason to improve it. Look what happens when you get rid of these protections for artists. China. You get China. A huge cyberpunk dystopian hell scape where art is controlled and censored and potential beautiful things don't get created because it's impossible to protect your intellectual property from being stolen by anybody else. Do you want that? Really?
Fond memories. In the 1970s when I was about 10, I was visiting a friend whose family was well off, and they had Pong hooked up to their TV. It looked cool, but simplistic, and I thought it was a lot of money for such a boring game.
I think we all to some degree project an almost caveman-like “wonder and awe” (read: easily amused and simple) attitude onto people in the past seeing a now-common technology; which is why I love your comment, and the fact that even then people looked at pong and thought it was kinda boring/lame
Ahoy: “Under any reasonable definition, I think that qualifies as a video game. It might even be the first.” Me: “Wait, what do you mean ‘might’?” *looks at timestamp* “Holy shit.”
I don't think it's by hand. The hand that pulls the cards look like a simple hand-like shape. Rather than printing a full set of cards and finding a clean method of recording, I think he just put an obscene amount of time into the edit.
Fun Fact: There is a Ralph Baer statue in Manchester, NH on the riverfront in the Millyard. It's neat. Cause it's sitting on a bench. So you can basically sit next to Ralph Baer.
@@SinedKMK And Poles had "Pegasus", which was a FAMICLONE supported by SEGA (Co sprawia, że za każdym razem, gdy o tym myślę, to chcę wychlać wiadro Żubrówki)
I was kinda annoyed like we know it’s the first game bro why you gotta have me watch 45 more minutes just to find out “Oh maybe its not the first game, and also, a game is a *insert lots of words here* so yeah. Like I would say it’s a game played on a screen and I’d be done
Feel like anyone else would have condensed this into 15min. To stretch it out over an hour without me losing interest is impressive. More quality than anything youd find on a major tv network.
Me: What was the first video game? Ahoy: I can tell you, but _first_ I need you to understand that I spent a lot of effort learning that answer, and that if someone else gives you any _other_ answer you can be confident that I already considered and dismissed it. Me: Okay, I'm listening.
Really love the slide negatives on this one. Totally fits the huge amount of time spent in the 40's and 50's. Yet another fantastic documentary by Ahoy!
well fallout is a world where the microprocessor was never invented and the world stayed in the 40-50's american culture until eternity. hell, even the transistor might not even exist in fallout. it's disputed whether it was invented in 2067 in fallout's universe, or was never invented at all.
there were at least two times where i was like "oh so we have an answer :)" the first time was 14 minutes in, less than a quarter. the second was 40 minutes in, only about 2/3. and i loved every second of it. this video is a gift that keeps on giving
I'm so proud of OXO, holding on just barely throughout all the tests. Three years later: My opinion has changed upon rewatching. I firmly believe that the first video game is Tennis for Two. While Draughts and OXO did come first, they were simply digital recreations of something anyone can do reasonably in real life.
I found myself attached to the ceiling with my dick stuck in the ceiling fan. I think I got a little too excited can someone send the fire department please.
Yeah, but he gives quality AND quantity. There are other channels that upload an hour of this level of content across multiple uploads, but he just makes longer videos
Sadly RU-vid hates that. "What was the first video game?" -Well researched, illustrated, took countless hours of work by an independent creator. You don't get this quality of an answer by googling it. 260K views "Why aren't there planes over the pacific ocean?" -Garbage script, straight from Wikipedia, stretched out to 9 minutes because the algorithm loves that. Created by a faceless Ukrainian corporation which published other videos the same day. 6.9 million views, front page for days
Huge props to the clearly extremely intelligent man that is Ahoy - a truly amazing video with a crazy amount of effort, is literally like a doctorate level thesis it’s insane!
Lol excellent. The device is a cubicle with a human in it who is forced to do physical comedy routines for the benefit of an attached cathode ray tube.
The first video game was "Change the Lightbulb" If you did good, the spherical diagnostic display would light up to signal the dextrous proficiency of the player's input.
damn, i did a research paper on video games in high school, and i only ever got as far back as Tennis for Two. very daunting to see that there's still a VAST majority of the video left after that game gets name dropped! i'm excited to update any future ramblings about video game history with the new info i gain from this video lol
When I saw that hour long timestamp, I just knew my cursory grasp on the origin of the video game, "Tennis for Two," was going to be more than likely blown out the water.
This is such a cool way to make a video, it made me feel like I was an important player in the 1960s government watching a report from a three letter agent in a dark room with other monsters smoking cigars
I agree. I love that Ahoy, who has absolutely mastered his previous style, is experimenting with a new design language, one that fits the theme of this video perfectly.
@@tarstarkusz it's easy to overlook the Microvision considering that the button and screen overlays make it look more like a Game & Watch in still pictures
I'm extremely glad that at no point during this video did I check how long it had left. Almost every new chapter was more interesting than the previous.
