Brown's Bit By Bit

Since I am diving deep into video games and their history with the assigned reading, I have decided to take a little trip down memory lane myself and play some vintage games. Now I don't actually have an Atari to play Pong or other Atari games so I just broke out my copy of Atari Anthology on the XBox. Yes. The O.G. console. The original XBox One. I don't have gameplay footage to show you, because I don't have a capture card but I can safely say that my experience playing Pong was probably pretty close to this. For the time it was absolutely revolutionary and I have nothing but respect for Pong. But thank god video games have advanced far past this. This is barely even a game. It is so basic and boring that it puts the B in both terms.  The biggest victory is when you get to stop playing. I didn't stop with Pong though. I mean how could I? I had to experience what the rest of the Atari had to offer. So I played a couple more classics like Centipede, Missi

One of the many things that stood out to me while reading Andrew Ervin's extremely fascinating and entertaining book Bit By Bit about the history of video games and how they have impacted society and the world around us, was the connection that video games had to WWII and particular an infamous secret military project. The Manhattan Project was not only the name of a little known 80's movie featuring John Lithgow and Christopher Collet about a teenager who builds an atomic bomb but a real-life military project that occurred in WWII. It was the very research and tests that produced the very first working nuclear weapons. And one of the numerous scientists and physicists that lent a hand on this project was the man who would ultimately go on to create what is considered by many to be the first ever video game. Tennis for Two.  The man who eventually built such a momentous invention was Willy Higginbotham. Higginbotham essentially dropped the video game bomb on all o