There are many games that left a name in history, such as Tetris, Mario Bros, and Minecraft, but these video games also have their ancestors. Nimatron, which appeared in 1939, is the forerunner of computer games that were born in an era when the concept of video games did not yet exist.
The 1939 and 1940 New York Expositions were held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration. The theme is tomorrow’s world construction and peace, and with the participation of governments and local governments from around the world, Westinghouse Electric, a large American general electricity manufacturer at the time, exhibited Nimatron.
The Nimatron is a game console that is said to have been devised several months before the New York Fair by physicist Edward Condon, who served as the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1945 to 1951 and the AAAS president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1953. At the time, he was in charge of various projects at Westinghouse Electric, including microwave technology, high voltage electricity, and mass spectrometry. Then one day, I found out that most of the employees at work were playing a game called Nim during lunch. Nim is a kind of math game played by two people, taking multiple coins from each other, and the one who takes the last coin wins.
It was Nimatron, the vanguard of the 1939 New York Fair, who made this guy into a computer game. The Nimatron case was 2.4 m long and weighed 1 ton, and it is said that 116 relays and 3.2 km of copper wire were used for wiring. The actual play screen corresponds to 4 columns and 7 rows of light bulbs, and the player and nimatron alternately select and turn off one or more light bulbs, and the one who turns off the last light bulb wins.
At the Westinghouse Electric exhibition, an event was also held to receive a commemorative coin called Nimchamp for players who lost in Nimatron. The match between visitors and Nimatron reached 100,000 games, but it is said that Nimatron was too strong for victory or defeat. Although Nimatron is in a different lineage from modern video games, it is considered one of the progenitors of computer games. Related content this placecan be checked in