The first video game to appear in a movie did so even before Pong

Now we all know what video games are and their possibilities. Even in the days of Tron, back in 1982, it was already possible to sense that there was much more than what could be seen on screen at that time, just before the launch of the NES. At that time, Steven Lisberger imagined a world of virtual reality where the innocence of the past mixed with the modernity of today, and even today many believe that this was the first time a video game appeared on the big screen. But far from it: this time travel goes back even before the very Pong itself.

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Food is Video Games!

To see the first real video game with a name and surname in a movie, we have to go back to 1973. Pong was one year old, but it was not the one that had the honor of appearing in Soylent Green (more commonly known as When the Destiny Catches Us). It was Computer Space, the first arcade game in history launched in 1971, which also holds another record: the first commercially available video game. Quite something.

Computer Space exceeded all expectations and opened a new path filled with dreams for thousands and thousands of new players… Although in reality, its creators, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, were much more prosaic: they just wanted a version that worked with coins from SpaceWar!, the game from 1962 that was modified across American universities by a hacking team of hundreds of programmers who thus learned their profession.

In the advertisement it said “Nutting Associates of California has done it again! Amen, brother! The only innovative concept and idea in the entire industry. Tired of driving games? Tired of the same styles and old game cabinets? Introducing the brand new Computer Space! Hurry up! Your customers deserve a break!“. And it worked, they sold 1500 arcade machines, which gave them enough money to create Atari and, with it, Pong. The rest is history.

In Soylent Green, the game appears only for 17 seconds, while one of the characters plays it at home. The intention was not to showcase the product, but to teach something rich, futuristic, strange, and novel. And they certainly succeeded: it became, probably unintentionally, a milestone in the history of cinema. Well, unless we take into account Stanley Kubrick.

I can’t play anymore, Dave

Let’s go back even further, to 1968, when Stanley Kubrick premiered his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Frank Poole, the protagonist astronaut, played chess with the computer, HAL 9000. Keep in mind that, back then, video games were text adventures or very simple black and white things exclusive to those who had a computer (that is, practically no one). However, Kubrick imagined that in the future people would use computers to play chess in color, and he invented what is now known as Poole versus HAL 9000, which, for a few seconds, made an entire generation truly feel like they were in the future.

This is not an idea exclusive to the movie: Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the novel “To relax, he could always challenge Hal in a large number of semi-mathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyomino. If Hal wanted to, he could win any of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he was programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human companions pretended not to know it.” Almost nothing.

In favor of Kubrick and Clarke, it should be noted that at that time it was already possible to play chess against a machine in a rudimentary way. Specifically, since 1957. It wasn’t new, but to the general public, it sounded fresh, futuristic, and new. By the way, the chess game that HAL and Frank were playing was actually taken from reality, in 1910, between Roesch and Schlage. Oh, and although HAL insists that he has already won before moving a single piece as the game was set, we now know that Poole actually had several chances to win. The quirks of video games and cinema.

So now you know: the first video game that appeared in a movie didn’t even exist in real life. Mainly because, by 2001, we were playing GTA III and Super Smash Bros Melee (and a computer, Deep Blue, had already defeated master Kasparov five years earlier). For whatever reason, a chess game like this didn’t impress us much.

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