Honoring Humanity’s First Video Game with ‘Breakout’ on an Oscilloscope

It’s hard to imagine now, but what is generally recognized as the first video game wasn’t even played on a television or a computer monitor. Instead, the simple Pong-like game was played with an oscilloscope for a display. An oscilloscope is a piece of electronic test equipment which shows signal voltage graphed over time on a CRT display, and is something you usually find in electrical engineering labs.

As part of a public event at Brookhaven National Laboratory in October of 1958, physicist William Higinbotham used an oscilloscope to create the world’s first video game. While that game, Tennis for Two, never amounted to much more than an interesting part of history, that doesn’t mean games can’t still be played on oscilloscopes.

s-ol, over on itch.io, has created an oscilloscope-based game similar to Breakout that you can play yourself! If you’ve got a real analog oscilloscope, you can play Plonat Atek on that. Or, if you don’t have that kind of hardware but still want to try it, you can play it on the included oscilloscope emulator.

The game itself was programmed in PureData, which is essentially a visual programming language for creating audio. That audio is then sent as a signal to the oscilloscope, and used to create the graphs which make up the game’s graphics. The game is downloadable for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is name your own price. So, go grab yourself a copy and give it a try!