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By Luis Gustavo. See how we research and review our content.
The game many historians point to as an early video game ran on an analog computer wired to a five-inch oscilloscope, and it was built for a laboratory open house, not for a store shelf. Nobody involved thought they were starting an industry.
From that October 1958 exhibit to speedrunning marathons that have raised tens of millions of dollars for charity, gaming history is full of quiet experiments, lucky accidents and a few stories that get repeated with the wrong details. Here are 5 facts, with the details checked.
1. The first recognized video game had a pretty simple goal
“Tennis for Two,” built in 1958 by a physicist using an oscilloscope, is considered by many historians to be one of the first video games ever made — decades before home consoles hit the commercial market.
The physicist was William Higinbotham of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and the game was shown at the lab’s public visitors’ day on October 18, 1958. A technician, Robert Dvorak, spent a few weeks building it. A side view of a court appeared as a bouncing dot on the screen, while two players each held a controller with one knob for the angle of the shot and one button to hit the ball. Visitors queued to try it. Higinbotham later said he never found it especially exciting, and it was dismantled after a 1959 upgrade that added gravity settings for the Moon and Jupiter. Whether it counts as the very first depends on how you define a video game.
2. The programming term “bug” comes from an actual insect
In 1947, a team working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth literally stuck in a relay — a real event that made “debugging” a favorite joke among programmers, though not the origin of the word.
The incident is real, but the origin claim is not. The moth was taped into the machine’s log beside the wry note “First actual case of bug being found,” and the page is now kept by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. But engineers were already calling small faults “bugs” long before: Thomas Edison used the word that way in 1878, and “debugging” appears in aircraft engineering in the mid-1940s, including a 1944 letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer. Grace Hopper’s team popularized the joke; they did not invent the word.
3. Some of the best-selling games in history cost almost nothing to make
Several of the most profitable indie titles ever released were built by small teams, or even a single person, with budgets far smaller than big-studio blockbusters — proof that a strong idea can outperform a huge budget.
Two well-documented cases show the pattern. Stardew Valley was made largely by one developer, Eric Barone, who handled the code, pixel art and music himself over roughly five years before its February 2016 release; it has since passed 50 million copies sold. Minecraft began in May 2009 as a personal project by Markus “Notch” Persson, and Microsoft agreed in 2014 to buy its studio, Mojang, for US$2.5 billion. Reported lifetime sales are above 400 million copies, which makes it the best-selling game of all time by most counts.
4. Speedrunning world records are verified like a sport
The speedrunning community has strict rules, video verification, and even live charity events broadcast to raise money, treating the category almost like an official competitive sport.
Leaderboard moderators review submissions, runners usually provide footage, and each game has defined categories: “any%” means finishing as fast as possible by any allowed means, while “glitchless” bans exploiting bugs. Tool-assisted runs, made frame by frame with emulators, are kept separate from runs played in real time. The charity side is just as organized. Games Done Quick began on January 1, 2010, at the MAGFest convention, and its January and summer marathons have raised more than $59.8 million in total as of January 2026. Its largest single event so far, in January 2022, brought in about $3.44 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
5. Some easter eggs took years to be discovered
Certain games hide messages, references, or secret levels that the community only found years — sometimes decades — after the original release, even with millions of players.
The term itself comes from a 1980 Atari 2600 game, Adventure. Programmer Warren Robinett hid a room displaying “Created by Warren Robinett” behind an invisible one-pixel dot, at a time when Atari did not credit its developers. A 15-year-old in Salt Lake City, Adam Clayton, found it and wrote to the company. Replacing the game’s chip would have cost an estimated US$10,000, so Atari left it in and began calling such secrets “Easter eggs.”
The Doom II teleporter that waited 24 years for a player
Doom II came out in 1994, and one corner of its level 15, the Industrial Zone, looked broken for decades. The map contains a teleporter that does nothing when the player walks onto it, and it was the last unsolved secret in the game. In 2018, a player known as Zero Master solved it without cheat codes, and Doom designer John Romero confirmed the result publicly on August 31.
The trick is almost comic: the player cannot step onto the pad, but a monster, in this case a Pain Elemental, can shove them onto it. Players had missed it for 24 years because the solution depends on a monster’s help. Secrets like this are one reason old games keep drawing new attention long after their sales have faded.
Other reads that fit this theme: world cup 2026 and facts about soccer.
For more on how technology changes, see 3D printing and artificial intelligence.
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A moth in a relay in 1947, a dot-sized doorway on an Atari cartridge, a Pain Elemental shoving a player onto a teleporter: the best stories in gaming usually start with something that was never meant to be noticed.