Build Your Own Tennis for Two

I don't usually pick up Boingboing links, because I figure everyone in the known universe already knows about them, but this one is too cool.

Whenever anyone says something like "Bushnell's Pong started it all," someone else inevitably says "but what about Ralph Baer?", and someone inevitably tops that with a reference to Willy Higginbotham's Tennis for Two. (Except for me; I go for John Jeffery's A Journey Through Europe, but then I view digital games as merely an extention of an artistic form that has a deeper history.)

In truth, Higginbotham's game was a one-off, an outlier, an historical curiosity, and not particularly important to the evolution of the field except that it does has undeniable precedence. Still, how cool is it to find instructions on how to build your own with nothing more than an oscilloscope and a handful of of electronic components?

(And while you're at it, go play Spacewar! -- yes, Steve Russell's original PDP-1 code, running as written, inside a Java PDP-1 emulator -- quite a cute hat-trick.)