The First Video Game
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as the thorough, well-researched answer to the first video game question.
What it is
An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec icelancer · 2021-11 · on “The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console”
Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field: [this video]
Recommends banana_giraffe · 2020-10 · on “EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media”
This indirectly reminds me of this youtube video: [this video] It's a long one, but it tries to answer when the first video game was made. Most of it, though, is trying to figure out what it means to be a video game in the first place. Sometimes really the trouble with the question is the lack of precision in the definitions involved.
Recommends twic · 2023-02 · on “C Port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel”
Video games are like compilers, or computers themselves - there isn't really a first one. Far enough back, there are things which are clearly not video games; recently enough, there are things which clearly are video games, and in between, there is a parade of things which are not clearly video games or not. Here's an hour-long, meticulously sourced, rather thoughtful video on the question: [this video] (which naturally concludes that video games are a British invention!)
Recommends teddyh · 2026-03 · on “The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar”
Ahoy did a comprehensive video about it: < [this video] >, and a video is a more appropriate medium for discussing and demonstrating video games.
Cites M4v3R · 2025-05 · on “Inventing the Adventure Game (1984)”
> The first video game was called Spacewar Spacewar! was not the first video game ever. Before it in 1958 came Tennis for Two and even before that, in 1952 Christopher Strachey made Draughts. [1] What Spacewar! can be considered, as per wiki [2] is one of the first recognized video games that enjoyed wider distribution behind a single exhibition system. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]