Tristan Donovan, a U.K. writer who has contributed to Edge and The Guardian*, has just released a new book called Replay: The History of Video Games.*
While other history books have covered the topic, Donovan’s 500-page tome is the most exhaustive and wide-ranging history I’ve read. It’s especially notable for its extensive treatment of the history of European game development, which has been noticeably absent from other books.
Wired.com is delighted to share a few excerpts from this book with you over the next several days. First up: A look at Nimrod, an installation at the 1951 Festival of Britain that was the first computer designed exclusively to play a game.
Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games
In 1951 the UK’s Labour government launched the Festival of Britain, a sprawling year-long national event that it hoped would instill a sense of hope in a population reeling from the aftermath of the Second World War. Herbert Morrison, the deputy prime minister who oversaw the festival’s creation, said the celebrations would be “a tonic for the nation.” Keen to be involved in the celebrations, the British computer company Ferranti promised the government it would contribute to the festival’s Exhibition of Science in South Kensington, London. But by late 1950, with the festival just weeks away, Ferranti still lacked an exhibit. John Bennett, an Australian employee of the firm, came to the rescue.
Bennett proposed creating a computer that could play Nim. In this simple parlour game players are presented with several piles of matches. Each player then takes it in turns to remove one or more of the matches from any one of the piles. The player who removes the last match wins.
Bennett got the idea of a Nim-playing computer from the Nimatron, an electro-mechanical machine exhibited at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York City.
Despite suggesting Ferranti create a game-playing computer, Bennett’s aim was not to entertain but to show off the ability of computers to do maths. And since Nim is based on mathematical principles it seemed a good example.
Indeed, the guide book produced to accompany the Nimrod, as the computer exhibit was named, was at pains to explain that it was maths, not fun, that was the machine’s purpose: “It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems.”