It has been several days since I completed Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, and still I find it impossible to compose my thoughts. The experience has shaken me to my core... nay, it has destroyed it. What was I before Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device? Do I even care? I am not so desperate a masochist that I would contemplate my previous existence any farther. I have left that grim, ignorant darkness. My life before this game was one of waste and sloth... desolate of purpose. Boldly, Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device subverted my every expectation and has remade me in its image. Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is not merely a game, it is mockery. It is a cruel and merciless indictment of all our hubris. Mortal hands will never again achieve the rapturous bliss that is Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, and to chase it would end only in calamitous despair. 9.5/10.

From my blog, Arcade Idea

When Philo T. Farnsworth first demonstrated his all-electronic CRT television to anyone outside of the laboratory where it was invented, he said "here's something the bankers can understand" and turned it on to produce an image of a dollar bill. When Thomas T. Goldsmith was trying to come up with a way for the user to directly interface with the CRT for trifling amusement rather than a practical use-case, he made a game where you shoot down planes. These are eerie portents of the future — no, scratch that, full-on curses invoked that the respective mediums have not yet recovered from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBgvS2OuFwI
Stan Kenton Orchestra (composer Bob Graettinger) - Thermopylae [1947]

Television and video games are, to my mind, siblings. They're cursed and compromised mediums, and art within it has to come to terms with the attendant formal inertia. They were born in the same wave of technological innovation. A console is functionally an extra TV channel. Artworks in both mediums often pointedly aspire to cinema, a tendency long-present but especially pronounced in the 21st century. This is in obvious compensation to the stench of disposable disrepute that dogs them. Both mediums are restlessly oriented towards the future, perhaps owing to their history of technological advance, and thus have a largely tenuous, fraught relationship with its own past, where nostalgia has had to balance against shame over how primitive, corny earlier works. So even as it tries to excite the audience about the next thing, it's constantly repeating itself in ways both small and large. Both have murky, obscure, protracted technical origins in laboratories decades before being ready for consumers, and then they ascend to being a dominant — arguably the dominant — mass medium of their time.

World War 2 put a serious damper on the entrance of television into mass popularity, but at the same time, the US government pumped a lot of money into the research and development of television technology for military purposes. The whole American television industry, which had never yet lived up to its own decades of hype and been able to profit by manufacturing and selling a real product to consumers in any substantial quantity, pivoted instead to the lucrative prospect of war grants. We all know about radar, but there were also dreams of infrared night-vision & sniper lasers, and of TV-guided precision missiles. This latter endeavor directly led to the creation of the image orthicon, which would become the very linchpin that made commercial television practical from 1945 to 1968, the "Immy" for which the Emmys are still named.

So when Goldsmith in the DuMont laboratory 2 years out from the war was trying to think of a fictional context for his Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device [1947], it cannot really be considered surprising that his mind leapt to a combination between radar and the TV-guided missile. In CRT Amusement Device, the player adjusts a lobbing arc drawn across a radar-style circular screen from the bottom-left up and to the right, and they also get to brighten the beam at any point of their choosing within that arc. All interface is via dials. A transparent overlay is physically placed on the screen: images of planes that are targets for the player to hit. To make this task a challenge, there's a timer, entirely separate from the rest of the equipment. Despite being so simple, this immediately raises a number of questions. Firstly, is this a video game?

That's a tricky question, because here in 2022, we're still not totally sure what video games are. The progenitors of television knew their goal exactly and set out to make it happen. It's a bit strong to say that video games were conversely invented by accident, but it was a slow process of conceptual evolution that never really stopped. Roughly speaking, the world saw Pong [1972], came up with a phrase for "things like Pong", and then that phrase gradually stretched to include everything on this blog and much more. That's exactly what's interesting about these early, pre-commercial years: people are working out what video games are and what they're for for the first time with no preconceptions, and little-to-no knowledge of any predecessors in the field whatsoever. CRT Amusement Device, in my book, is definitely conceptually in-line with Pong: not only does it look and play a bit like Tennis For Two [1958] (also from DuMont's lab,) it manages with its "overlay" technology to bear an even stronger resemblance to the Magnavox Odyssey [1971] that inspired Pong, enough to eventually surface as a trump card against the legal claim on originating and rent-gathering on the Television Game concept.

There's a documentary on YouTube called "The First Video Game" that I sincerely recommend as an inventory and exploration of extremely early video games. However, I must respectfully disagree with its prescriptive approach, in particular its final criteria:

"A video game must:
1) Exist in a practical implementation
2) Generate some kind of video signal
3) Have interaction that alters this signal
4) Be principally intended for entertainment
5) Be playable solely through the video display(s)"

quibble with points 1, 2, 4, and 5, which means I reach different conclusions.

-- To point 2: Games like The Oregon Trail [1971] were originally developed for teletype machines with a printed display, did not change their very nature by transferring to monitor display, and there have been experimental audio-only games as well. The presence of the word video in "video game" is historical accident, not a determinant. "Computer games" or "digital games" would probably be more accurate, although one objection to CRT Amusement Device not covered in this list is that it's not running on a digital computer but an electronic series of wave generators and variable resistors, without even so much as a transistor, semiconductor, or memory. This is a fair point, but I don't think the underlying technicalities of construction makes a lot of difference to the end experience.
-- To point 5: Many games rely on external knowledge or input beyond the bounds of its visual display. Any game that requires mapping, or for you to read the manual, or, as in the case of the Magnavox Odyssey and CRT Amusement Device, for the player to impose external constraints on their own technologically-unlimited behavior. I think this item is principally intended to exclude electro-mechanical games like pinball machines and shooting galleries, which is fair because they rely on real-world unsimulated physics, even though the story of those games, their creators, and their social position so seamlessy leads into the story of arcade video games in the 1970s.
-- To point 4: There are video games not principally intended for entertainment.
-- Most interestingly, to point 1: What counts as a "practical implementation" in a medium that is largely digital? Sources are unclear if any CRT Amusement Device prototype ever physically existed or not, but either way that object doesn't exist now. What we're left with is the patent documentation, which are instructions sufficient to build our own replica if inclined. As covered in the post on Hamurabi [1968/1973], the "type-in" game was a common distribution method throughout the 70s where you would print the source code to the game on paper for the end-user to manually re-inscribe on their own machines like a monk. Indeed, any video game that isn't a hardwired unit really is fundamentally distributed as instructions for building itself.

This is the whole problem with defining things that are out there in the world, they're so easy to problematize with annoying exceptions and objections drawn from the ranks of things we would common-sensically include in the category. I could and maybe might quibble with point 3 some more, like when I get to the "kinetic novel," which are perhaps culturally video games despite being non-interactive. For now though, let's accept that a video game must respond to input from the player.

When I wrote about the Magnavox Odyssey two whole years ago, I compared it to shining a flashlight on a board game. A recent article by Doc Burford, on the art of how to be making your players give a fuck [2022], reminded me of this. Early on, it makes a point that a flashlight is interactive electronics: You press a button and the light turns on or off. So point 3 alone is clearly insufficient for thinking about video games. Marshall McLuhan made a similar point about lightbulbs in general in Understanding Media [1964], that they were a medium without content and with an effect. But you can assemble the lightbulbs into letters or make them flash in morse code, and now you have a whole semantic grammar as well as those original effects, and that's how McLuhan approaches into television. They sharply diverge from there. McLuhan tells us about that the medium is the message, above whatever its semantic content happens to be. Bruford tells us that without content, we don't really have a medium at all. A television with no content isn't television, it's a white noise generating appliance. (Arguably, much or all of the content on television does not move beyond this status.) Likewise, an interaction with a computer or other electronic device does not become a potential art medium until the player gives a fuck in their minds about the lights being on or off, usually by how that interweaves with other lights and your choice of on or off in a legible pattern. He specifically exempts Tetris [1984] from this, but surely for all its abstraction, Tetris is a language and you give a fuck how it's arranged.

CRT Amusement Device is barely more than a flashlight itself, or more accurately, an oscilloscope. Drawing an arc on the screen isn't a game. Drawing an arc on the screen that gets brighter at a particular point in the arc isn't a game. It's maybe a toy, or a tool if you can find a good use for an arc on the screen. It's the imagination that makes it a game. Games didn't have much in the way of storytelling before 1980, but they almost always had a premise. The timer just gives it friction. The earliest computer game I know of is actually Nimatron [1940], a Nim-playing computer. But I'm not interested in video games that just replicate older forms of games here, I'm specifically interested in games like this, games that explore original concepts for computer space. And this is the earliest attempt at that that I know of.

In the patent documentation itself, the player is simply hitting targets, and airplanes are just a sole example of what those targets might be. This is in contrast to the Magnavox Odyssey's passionate desperation to make its lights represent as many different things as they could think of, in many different play-styles. While the gameplay of CRT Amusement Device could be easily reskinned to not be airplanes, it wasn't, and it's not flexible like that. It's always target practice. It's always a World War 2 fantasy of radar and the guided missile, even if you pretended it was the spray from a hose, or needles into Bloons [2007].

Shooting targets has always had an insistent central prominence in video games, regardless of actual popularity and commercial success. It's got a gravitational pull. When the video games industry was called up before the United States congress for its own "vast wasteland" moment, it wasn't for low quality, it was for the worry that they were training the youth to be violent like at war but at home. Video games were born of war. Trajectories, competition, elimination, drilling over and over again to improve performance and self-discipline. That's not every video game, but it's never far away.

The cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen, and is used to display images.[1] It modulates, accelerates, and deflects electron beam(s) onto the screen to create the images. The images may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures (television, computer monitor), radar targets, or other phenomena. CRTs have also been used as memory devices, in which case the visible light emitted from the fluorescent material (if any) is not intended to have significant meaning to a visual observer (though the visible pattern on the tube face may cryptically represent the stored data).

In television sets and computer monitors, the entire front area of the tube is scanned repetitively and systematically in a fixed pattern called a raster. In color devices, an image is produced by controlling the intensity of each of the three electron beams, one for each additive primary color (red, green, and blue) with a video signal as a reference.[2] In all modern CRT monitors and televisions, the beams are bent by magnetic deflection, a varying magnetic field generated by coils and driven by electronic circuits around the neck of the tube, although electrostatic deflection is commonly used in oscilloscopes, a type of electronic test instrument.[2]


A 14-inch cathode-ray tube showing its deflection coils and electron guns

Typical 1950s United States monochrome television set

A CRT television filmed in slow motion. The line of light is being drawn from left to right in a raster pattern

A flat CRT assembly inside a 1984 Sinclair FTV1 pocket TV

Electron gun
A CRT is constructed from a glass envelope which is large, deep (i.e., long from front screen face to rear end), fairly heavy, and relatively fragile. The interior of a CRT is evacuated to approximately 0.01 pascals (9.9×10−8 atm)[3] to 133 nanopascals (1.31×10−12 atm),[4] evacuation being necessary to facilitate the free flight of electrons from the gun(s) to the tube's face. The fact that it is evacuated makes handling an intact CRT potentially dangerous due to the risk of breaking the tube and causing a violent implosion that can hurl shards of glass at great velocity. As a matter of safety, the face is typically made of thick lead glass so as to be highly shatter-resistant and to block most X-ray emissions, particularly if the CRT is used in a consumer product.

Since the late 2000s, CRTs have been largely superseded by newer "flat panel" display technologies such as LCD, plasma display, and OLED displays, which have lower manufacturing costs and power consumption, as well as significantly less weight and bulk. Flat-panel displays can also be made in very large sizes; whereas 38 to 40 in (97 to 102 cm) was about the largest size of a CRT television, flat panels are available in 85 in (220 cm) and even larger sizes.

History

Braun's original cold-cathode CRT, 1897
Cathode rays were discovered by Julius Plücker and Johann Wilhelm Hittorf.[5] Hittorf observed that some unknown rays were emitted from the cathode (negative electrode) which could cast shadows on the glowing wall of the tube, indicating the rays were traveling in straight lines. In 1890, Arthur Schuster demonstrated cathode rays could be deflected by electric fields, and William Crookes showed they could be deflected by magnetic fields. In 1897, J. J. Thomson succeeded in measuring the charge-mass-ratio of cathode rays, showing that they consisted of negatively charged particles smaller than atoms, the first "subatomic particles", which had already been named electrons by Irish physicist, George Johnstone Stoney in 1891. The earliest version of the CRT was known as the "Braun tube", invented by the German physicist Ferdinand Braun in 1897.[6] It was a cold-cathode diode, a modification of the Crookes tube with a phosphor-coated screen.

The first cathode-ray tube to use a hot cathode was developed by John Bertrand Johnson (who gave his name to the term Johnson noise) and Harry Weiner Weinhart of Western Electric, and became a commercial product in 1922.[citation needed]

In 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a CRT television that received images with a 40-line resolution.[7] By 1927, he improved the resolution to 100 lines, which was unrivaled until 1931.[8] By 1928, he was the first to transmit human faces in half-tones on a CRT display.[9] By 1935, he had invented an early all-electronic CRT television.[10]

It was named in 1929 by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin,[11] who was influenced by Takayanagi's earlier work.[9] RCA was granted a trademark for the term (for its cathode-ray tube) in 1932; it voluntarily released the term to the public domain in 1950.[12]

The first commercially made electronic television sets with cathode-ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934.[13][14]

Flat panel displays dropped in price and started significantly displacing cathode-ray tubes in the 2000s, with LCD screens exceeding CRTs in 2008.[15] The last known manufacturer of (in this case, recycled) CRTs, Videocon, ceased in 2015.[16][17]

Oscilloscope CRTs

An oscilloscope showing a Lissajous curve
In oscilloscope CRTs, electrostatic deflection is used, rather than the magnetic deflection commonly used with television and other large CRTs. The beam is deflected horizontally by applying an electric field between a pair of plates to its left and right, and vertically by applying an electric field to plates above and below. Televisions use magnetic rather than electrostatic deflection because the deflection plates obstruct the beam when the deflection angle is as large as is required for tubes that are relatively short for their size.

Phosphor persistence
Various phosphors are available depending upon the needs of the measurement or display application. The brightness, color, and persistence of the illumination depends upon the type of phosphor used on the CRT screen. Phosphors are available with persistences ranging from less than one microsecond to several seconds.[18] For visual observation of brief transient events, a long persistence phosphor may be desirable. For events which are fast and repetitive, or high frequency, a short-persistence phosphor is generally preferable.[19]

Microchannel plate
When displaying fast one-shot events, the electron beam must deflect very quickly, with few electrons impinging on the screen, leading to a faint or invisible image on the display. Oscilloscope CRTs designed for very fast signals can give a brighter display by passing the electron beam through a micro-channel plate just before it reaches the screen. Through the phenomenon of secondary emission, this plate multiplies the number of electrons reaching the phosphor screen, giving a significant improvement in writing rate (brightness) and improved sensitivity and spot size as well.[20][21]

Graticules
Most oscilloscopes have a graticule as part of the visual display, to facilitate measurements. The graticule may be permanently marked inside the face of the CRT, or it may be a transparent external plate made of glass or acrylic plastic. An internal graticule eliminates parallax error, but cannot be changed to accommodate different types of measurements.[22] Oscilloscopes commonly provide a means for the graticule to be illuminated from the side, which improves its visibility.[23]

Image storage tubes

The Tektronix Type 564: first mass-produced analog phosphor storage oscilloscope
These are found in analog phosphor storage oscilloscopes. These are distinct from digital storage oscilloscopes which rely on solid state digital memory to store the image.

Where a single brief event is monitored by an oscilloscope, such an event will be displayed by a conventional tube only while it actually occurs. The use of a long persistence phosphor may allow the image to be observed after the event, but only for a few seconds at best. This limitation can be overcome by the use of a direct view storage cathode-ray tube (storage tube). A storage tube will continue to display the event after it has occurred until such time as it is erased. A storage tube is similar to a conventional tube except that it is equipped with a metal grid coated with a dielectric layer located immediately behind the phosphor screen. An externally applied voltage to the mesh initially ensures that the whole mesh is at a constant potential. This mesh is constantly exposed to a low velocity electron beam from a 'flood gun' which operates independently of the main gun. This flood gun is not deflected like the main gun but constantly 'illuminates' the whole of the storage mesh. The initial charge on the storage mesh is such as to repel the electrons from the flood gun which are prevented from striking the phosphor screen.

When the main electron gun writes an image to the screen, the energy in the main beam is sufficient to create a 'potential relief' on the storage mesh. The areas where this relief is created no longer repel the electrons from the flood gun which now pass through the mesh and illuminate the phosphor screen. Consequently, the image that was briefly traced out by the main gun continues to be displayed after it has occurred. The image can be 'erased' by resupplying the external voltage to the mesh restoring its constant potential. The time for which the image can be displayed was limited because, in practice, the flood gun slowly neutralises the charge on the storage mesh. One way of allowing the image to be retained for longer is temporarily to turn off the flood gun. It is then possible for the image to be retained for several days. The majority of storage tubes allow for a lower voltage to be applied to the storage mesh which slowly restores the initial charge state. By varying this voltage a variable persistence is obtained. Turning off the flood gun and the voltage supply to the storage mesh allows such a tube to operate as a conventional oscilloscope tube.[24]

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device was a cornerstone in gaming like no other in its release decade.

Its masterful juggling between a gripping narrative that explores deep, psychological themes like the heart of darkness, or where does malice and war come from and the effects they can have on a nation, and a surprisingly deep gameplay that thrives in the philosophy of "easy to learn, hard to master" while also coming full circle with core mechanics that tie themselves to the central themes of the story is something that just hadn't been done up until that point.

It's easy to see how the game industry ballooned like it did thanks to this atemporal gem.

Simply a must play for anyone with even the slightest interest in this hobby.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I did not play this on original hardware, but instead on a recreated browser port at https://www.retrogamedeconstructionzone.com/2021/07/cathode-ray-tube-amusement-device.html

As one of the first video game, the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, establishes a brilliant foundation for what is to come for gaming. There are several knobs in which controls the flow of a line, and your goal is to overlap that line with an airplane. It is indeed quite amazing what technology employed in 1947 could do. The game does have its limitations, however, since the device is not a computing device. The main objective is to hit the airplane, but the game has no actual hit detection implemented, so it can only "trust" that the player had hit it. In addition, the controls felt quite sluggish and finicky with 7 different knobs and a single button. Overall, it is lacking in content, but it is a promising start to what is to come.