How Form 2220 Historical 2023-2024

Hey there, so in the coming weeks, we're going to be trying out some new episode formats, including this one which we're calling secret histories. Don't worry, the regular episodes aren't going anywhere, but please let us know what you think and I hope you like it. Video games about war are obviously very popular, and war is becoming more like a video game. I mean, look at this controller for a remote weapon system, look familiar? Well, what if I told you that the United States military played a huge role in the invention of video games? This all started back in the 50s when there was this looming paranoia about the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. I mean, it was the beginning of the Cold War and the world was a much less fun place to live. In their nuclear sirens going off everywhere, there were even cartoons about being killed by nuclear bombs. Worse, there weren't any fun video games to play. The only computers were these huge mainframes that cost a million dollars and only existed at elite research facilities. They were mostly used for crunching numbers for the US military, like say, I don't know, calculating the trajectory of a ballistic missile. So it's weird then that out of this dead serious environment, video games were born. "Tennis for Two," the very first American video game outside of "OXO," which doesn't really count because it's basically tic-tac-toe, was developed on military equipment. It was invented by William Higinbotham, a prim and proper 48-year-old physicist who had previously worked on the development of the atomic bomb and later became a leading non-proliferation advocate. While assigned to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a base for Pioneer nuclear weapons, he noticed that visitors to the lab were often kind of bored....