Play the Nimatron, the World’s First Video Game Invented in 1930s New York | Hacker News Reader

Play the Nimatron, the World’s First Video Game Invented in 1930s New York

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31 pointsandsoitis13 comments

It is not a video game because there's no video. But the idea is cool and a good representation of the state of art in commuting circuits at that time.

Yeah, the game was electromechanical. If that's the qualification for a video game, then pinball machines were video games too

Nuance, but the lights on the Nimatron appear to be the game display (not so with pinball) making it a little more legitimate as the first ... um ... electronic-visual game.

Ahoy did a really good deep dive into what should count as the first video game on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc

Splitting hairs on "first" is an interesting pursuit.

I prefer selecting "first" in terms of context/influence. Unless Bushnell, just to pick an oft-named starting point, was not inspired by (or even heard of?) the Nimatron then Nolan might be said to have won round one against Nimatron.

I think what's interesting is the direct lineage leading us to, say, Pac Man — not just who checks off the minimal definition of "video game". But as James Burke showed us, working backwards can take us in all manner of strange directions so it is not an easy task.

It's got several 4x7 pixel displays.

I think it's more accurate to call it an early precursor to the video game.

A pixel matrix sounds like a video display to me.

A single light is a 1x1 pixel matrix. And there is no need for electricity to be a requirement. So a single candle is a video display! Turns out we've had video games all along!

Isn't there? What would you call a bitmapped interactive display?

If this kind of thing amuses you can buy a purely mechanical implementation called either Braino or Dr. Nim for about £10. Here's a video on the subject from Matt Parker @ Standup Maths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KABcmczPdg

I was interested in the "Elektro" robot mentioned in the last newspaper article and saw that there was footage of it as part of a movie [0].

> Several minutes of color sound footage of Elektro in action can be seen at 33:55 in the movie, "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair", a fully-produced hour-long movie made by Westinghouse, which showcased the Westinghouse pavilion

The link [1] from Wikipedia was rough quality so here is a better quality link (queued up) [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektro

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T35A3g_GvSg

[2] https://youtu.be/Q6TQEoDS-fQ?t=2028

The Nimatron: first 'video game' debuted in 1939 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527000 - March 2022 (39 comments)

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