The first patented video game wasn't Pong, but a 1947 missile

A device born long before personal computers

Long before Pong or Pac-Man invaded arcades, two American engineers had already imagined a device capable of simulating a missile shot on a screen. In 1947, nearly three decades before the appearance of the first mass-market personal computers, Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann designed a device that would become, according to official records, the very first known patent associated with what would later be called a video game.

This device, named the "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device," relied entirely on analog technology, a far cry from the electronic circuits and processors that would define the video game industry several decades later. It operated using cathode ray tubes and vacuum tubes, components then commonly used in the military radar equipment of the era. It's worth sitting with that image for a moment: a missile-tracking display repurposed into a parlor amusement, decades before anyone thought to call such a thing a "game console."

An invention inherited directly from the Second World War

The context in which this device was created is no accident. Thomas Goldsmith, who held a doctorate in physics, had previously worked on technologies related to radar screens used during the Second World War, a technical experience that would directly inspire the design of his entertainment device just a few years later.

There's something fascinating about this direct lineage between cutting-edge military technology and what would become, decades later, one of the most lucrative cultural industries in the world. This transition from military radar to mass-market entertainment shows just how often technological innovations find uses their original designers never anticipated in the slightest.

A cathode screen to represent the trajectory

The principle behind the device imagined by Goldsmith and Mann relied on displaying a bright dot representing a missile on a cathode screen, whose trajectory could be adjusted by the player using physical control knobs, with the goal of hitting targets drawn on transparent overlays placed directly over the screen.

This clever approach worked around the obvious technological limitations of the era, when no true computer processor yet existed to dynamically generate graphics on screen. The designers therefore had to show remarkable creativity to simulate an interactive game using purely analog components, essentially faking the appearance of dynamic graphics through mechanical and optical tricks rather than any form of digital computation.

Physical targets rather than digital graphics

Unlike modern video games, where every visual element is digitally generated by a graphics processor, this 1947 device used physical transparent plastic overlays, placed directly on the screen's surface to represent the targets to hit, a solution as simple as it was clever given the constraints of the time.

This technical choice, though rudimentary by today's standards, already showed an intuitive grasp of the fundamental principles that would later define the video game industry: giving a human player interactive control over a system simulating a precise objective to achieve.

An application filed amid technological ferment

The patent tied to this device was officially filed in 1947, at a time when the American electronics industry was experiencing considerable ferment, driven by the accelerated technological advances stemming from the military needs of the recently concluded Second World War. This ferment fueled the emergence of numerous innovations in fields as varied as telecommunications, consumer electronics, and entertainment equipment.

The formal filing of this patent with the relevant American authorities remains today the strongest documentary evidence establishing the precedence of this concept of interactive electronic entertainment, well before the appearance of the actual video game consoles that would mark the following decades. Patent examiners of the period had no established category for anything resembling a game controlled electronically by a human operator, which made the filing itself something of a bureaucratic novelty.

A patent granted after several years of waiting

The formal patent was not officially granted until 1948, following a relatively standard review process for the time, thereby confirming the legal recognition of this invention as an original technical device innovative enough to merit formal intellectual protection from the relevant American authorities.

One can easily imagine that the officials responsible for reviewing this patent in 1947 had no idea they were unknowingly validating one of the earliest documented ancestors of an industry destined to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue less than a century later.

Technical and industrial constraints too heavy to overcome

Despite the ingenuity of its design, this missile simulator never went beyond the experimental prototype stage. The manufacturing costs tied to using cathode ray tubes and vacuum tubes remained too high to consider large-scale industrial production aimed at the general public of the era, in a postwar economic context still marked by numerous material restrictions.

Moreover, the absence of any clearly identified market for this type of electronic entertainment likely discouraged potential manufacturers from investing in the commercial development of this technology, at a time when the very concept of an interactive electronic game remained entirely foreign to mainstream popular culture and its everyday consumption habits. Investors of that era were far more interested in radio, television, and household appliances than in a curiosity built from surplus radar components.

An invention that stayed in the shadows for decades

It was only much later, with the true rise of the video game industry in the 1970s, that technology historians rediscovered this forgotten patent, realizing that it actually constituted one of the very first documented milestones of an industry destined for spectacular growth in the following decades, eventually becoming a major pillar of global entertainment.

This belated rediscovery illustrates a frequent reality in the history of technology: certain pioneering innovations remain completely invisible to the general public for years, even decades, before finally being recognized as founding milestones of an entire industry by specialized researchers combing through old patent filings looking for exactly this kind of overlooked precedent.

Tennis for Two and Spacewar, major later milestones

After this pioneering 1947 device, it would take several more years before other widely recognized historical milestones appeared in the history of video games, notably Tennis for Two, created in 1958 by physicist William Higinbotham, and Spacewar!, developed in 1962 by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These later creations, though often presented in popular memory as the true pioneers of video gaming, must actually be placed within a broader timeline that includes this little-known 1947 device, a precedence now well documented by historians specializing in this field. Both of those later projects also benefited from genuine digital or semi-digital computing hardware that simply did not exist when Goldsmith and Mann built their own device out of wartime surplus parts.

Ideas ahead of their time

It is worth qualifying this historical lineage, though: the device built by Goldsmith and Mann relied on no true programmable computer circuit, unlike the later creations that would truly found the modern electronic video game industry in the strict technical sense used by specialists in the field. The historical link between this 1947 device and modern video games therefore remains primarily conceptual, based on the fundamental idea of interactive entertainment controlled by a human player, rather than on any direct technological continuity between the two eras concerned. One could almost say Goldsmith and Mann invented the idea before the technology was ready to catch up with it.

This story illustrates perfectly a recurring phenomenon in the history of technology: certain ideas emerge well before the technical, industrial, or cultural conditions are in place to allow their true commercial and popular flourishing among a wide audience. The concept of interactive electronic entertainment, formulated as early as 1947 by Goldsmith and Mann, would not find its true commercial takeoff until several decades later, once computing technology had advanced enough to make this original vision technically and economically viable at scale, first through arcade cabinets and later through home consoles that neither engineer could have envisioned in their own laboratory.

A lesson in humility for the official history of industries

This anecdote also invites a certain caution toward the simplified narratives often found in the popular history of technology industries, where a handful of iconic names end up completely eclipsing earlier contributions that were nonetheless just as significant on a conceptual and historical level. Recognizing the existence of this 1947 patent usefully complicates the usual narrative of the birth of video games, reminding us that today's major cultural industries often have roots in experiments far older and more obscure than generally assumed. Several institutions specializing in the preservation of technological heritage have since undertaken to precisely document this little-known history, helping restore Goldsmith and Mann to their rightful place in the broader story of global video game history.

An invention that never left the prototype stage

The device imagined by Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann in 1947 never left the experimental prototype stage, but it remains recognized today as one of the very first documented milestones of what would become, decades later, the global video game industry.

This little-known story reminds us that today's great cultural and technological industries often have origins far older than the general public typically imagines, carried forward by inventors who remained largely in the shadows of official history despite having quietly anticipated an entire century of interactive entertainment.

A conceptual legacy still relevant today

More than seven decades after this patent filing, at a time when the video game industry now generates revenue far exceeding that of film and music combined, it remains worth remembering this rudimentary device, built from vacuum tubes and transparent plastic overlays, assembled by two engineers who never once imagined the scale of the industry their small experiment had quietly foreshadowed.

This anecdote continues to enrich our collective understanding of how great contemporary technology industries truly come into being, often from modest ideas formulated well before the conditions were in place for their full commercial flourishing. Every controller held today by a player anywhere in the world traces an unbroken conceptual line back to two engineers and a borrowed radar tube in a laboratory whose exact address, fittingly enough, nobody today can quite recall.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

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I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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