During the holidays, Europe 1 returns to the origins of inventions that have become cult.

Today video games, the modern version of which was invented in the United States by Steve Russell, a student of the prestigious MIT.

>> Every day in 

Historically yours

 presented by Stéphane Bern and Matthieu Noël, 

David Castello-Lopes looks

 back on the origins of an object or a concept.

During the Christmas holidays, Europe 1 invites you to rediscover ten inventions that have become cult.

Today, 

we look back on the birth of the video game, the very first modern version of which was invented by

Steve Russell,

an American student in the 1960s.

>> Find all the chronicles of David Castello-Lopes in replay and podcast here

The ancestor of video games, a computer as large as a bedroom

What was the first video game?

To find out, you have to go back to the 1950s. At that time, there were already computers, but they were the size of a maid's room and they were mainly used to calculate boring stuff for the army.

But, already, there were clever little engineers who were starting to think that we could have fun too.

And that's how some rudimentary games were created, notably a tic-tac-toe game where you could play against the computer in 1950. It worked great ... except that the machine that ran it was 4 meters long. from above.

So playing noughts and crosses is cool, but it might not be enough to buy a giant wardrobe. 

Spacewar, the first modern video game

And then about ten years later, a computer came out that is considered the first computer usable by somewhat normal people, not just big, super strong engineers.

And, above all, its size was acceptable since it was "only" the size of a large fridge.

It was called PDP 1, it walked with strips of perforated paper and it was installed in particular at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston, where the teachers gave permission to the students to use the computer to try things out in their spare time.

Among these students, one was named Steve Russell.

Like many engineers, he must have found that writing lines of code was more erotic than having sex with people ... so he spent his time doing code.

And with two of his friends, Steve created Spacewar in 1962, which is considered the first true video game in a modern sense, and it was played with controllers.

Incredibly aesthetic for the time

And for a game created in 1962, it's not bad at all.

It is played in two, each with a controller and it's a battle in space between two spaceships shooting at each other.

And it's crazy because, paradoxically, it's aesthetically beautiful and even realistic.

They chose a subject, the space, which was visually very suited to the means at their disposal to represent it.

It was in black and white, we can see here and there small luminous dots which stand out against a black background.

And it works because a black screen with flickering pixels, it really looks like two drops of water in space.