Editing Tennis for Two (section)

==Legacy==
After being dismantled, ''Tennis for Two'' was largely forgotten. It remained virtually unknown until the late 1970s and early 1980s when Higinbotham was called on to testify in court cases for defendants sued by [[Magnavox]] over the video game patents of [[Ralph H. Baer]].<ref name="tennis"/> Having discovered the game, the lawyers for the defense unsuccessfully attempted to have the game declared [[prior art]] to invalidate Baer's patents on television video games, resulting in attention being given to the nearly 20-year-old game as possibly the first video game. It received further attention as the subject of articles in ''[[Creative Computing]]'' and ''Video Replay'' in 1982 and 1983 highlighting its possible status as the first video game; the editor of ''Creative Computing'', [[David H. Ahl]], had played ''Tennis for Two'' at Brookhaven in 1958, and dubbed Higinbotham the "Grandfather of Video Games".<ref name="tennis"/><ref name=videoreview /><ref name="CChistory"/> Higinbotham himself felt that the game was an obvious extension of the Donner Model 30's bouncing ball program and therefore not worthy of patenting or a large part of his legacy; he preferred to be remembered for his post-World War II [[nuclear proliferation|nuclear non-proliferation]] work.<ref name=videoreview /><ref name="Smartbomb"/>

[[File:Tennis For Two re-created in 1997.png|thumb|1997 recreation of the original ''Tennis for Two'' setup]]
In 1997, a team at Brookhaven recreated the game for Brookhaven's 50th anniversary. The reconstruction took about three months, partially because the parts were not readily available. This recreation was also displayed at the 2008 celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the original game.<ref name="anatomy" /><ref name="extravaganza"/> The replica implemented an analog computer using solid-state operational amplifier devices instead of vacuum tubes as the original Donner Model 30 did. In 2010, it was replaced with a restored Donner Model 3400 analog computer.<ref name="Donner" /> In 2011, [[Stony Brook University]] founded the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection, dedicated to "documenting the material culture of screen-based game media", and "collecting and preserving the texts, ephemera, and artifacts that document the history and work of early game innovator and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist William A. Higinbotham, who in 1958 invented the first interactive analog computer game, Tennis for Two."<ref name="SBU1"/><ref name="SBU2"/>{{#tag:ref|[[Stony Brook University]]'s statement that ''Tennis for Two'' was "the first interactive analog computer game" is likely correct depending on the definition of "game" used, but only due to the "analog computer" constraint; several games, including the 1950 ''[[Bertie the Brain]]'' and 1952 ''[[OXO (video game)|OXO]]'', were previously developed for vacuum tube-based digital computers. One prior game run on an analog computer was ''Hutspiel'', a 1955 war simulation game by the [[Operations Research Office]], but the Goodyear Electronic Differential Analyzer computer had no display, and it is unclear if the computer ran the game or was only used to run requested calculations.<ref name="HUTSPIEL"/>|group="Note"}}

''Tennis for Two'' is considered under some definitions to be the first video game.<ref name="tennis"/> Other candidates include the 1947 [[cathode-ray tube amusement device]], the earliest known [[interactivity|interactive]] [[electronic game]], though it did not run on a computing device; the 1950 ''[[Bertie the Brain]]'', the earliest known game to run on a computer, though it used light bulbs for a display; and ''[[OXO (video game)|OXO]]'' and a [[draughts]] game by [[Christopher Strachey]] in 1952, the earliest digital computer games to display [[video game graphics|visuals]] on an electronic screen. ''Tennis for Two'', though it contained no technological developments to separate it from earlier games, has the distinction of being the earliest known computer game with visuals created purely for entertainment purposes.<ref name="Priest"/><ref name="EVG"/><ref name="TVGD"/><ref name="TCU"/> Prior games were created primarily for academic research purposes or to demonstrate the computing power of the underlying machine, with the exception of the non-computer based cathode-ray tube amusement device. This, therefore, makes ''Tennis for Two'' the first video game under some definitions from a philosophical viewpoint rather than a technical one and a distinctive moment in the [[early history of video games]].<ref name="Priest"/><ref name="EVG"/>
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