Baseball is a baseball sports game that was created on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1971 by student Don Daglow. The game (actually spelled BASBAL due to the 6-character file name length restrictions) continued to be enhanced periodically through 1976. The program is documented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. It was the first interactive Baseball simulation game, allowing players to manage the game as it unfolded.
At the start of each inning the batter's and pitcher's names were listed, and the player in the field could enter a number to choose whether to pitch to the batter, walk him intentionally, warm up a reliever or change the pitcher. In a later version the options for a pitchout and for a visit to the mound were added. The player controlling the batter could choose to put in a pinch hitter. If runners were on base the player could direct them to try to steal. Once the players had entered the desired orders, the game would print out the result of the at-bat, update t
The first Basketball video game. You play against the computer in a text-based game of Basketball, with the ability to select both defensive setup and offensive plays each turn.
A game of pool (billiards) developed by William George Brown and Ted Lewis in 1954 on the MIDSAC computer, intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC.
"The game displayed a 2-inch rendition of the pool cue for the players to line up their shots and ran a simulation of the colliding and ricocheting balls in real-time, implementing a full game of a cue ball and 15 frame balls for two players. Graphics were drawn in real-time on a monochrome 13" point plotting X-Y display, the screen being updated by the program 40 times a second (that is, in a normal in-game situations with 2 to 4 balls moving at once). However, for time constraints, the table and its pockets weren’t drawn by the computer graphics, but were rather drawn manually onto the display using a grease pencil."
- Norbert Landsteiner for masswerk.at