Tennis for Two was an electronic game developed in 1958 on an analog computer

If you live in NY, you can play this at a currently ongoing exhibit about the history of computing in New York at the NY Historical Society.

(Review: I would say the exhibit was decent, though not great - might not be much new for people already familiar with computing history, and it's very clearly sponsored by IBM, though you could argue that this is not unfair for a history of NY-area computing. There's also a fun little exhibit on comic book heroes at the museum, plus I'd never been there before, maybe all added together it's worth a ticket.)

I played Tennis for Two yesterday at the New York Historical Society museum, nyhistory.org, where it's part of the Silicon City exhibition, http://nyhistory.org/exhibition/silicon-city-computer-histor...

I've always been confused by this game. How do players know when to strike the ball when they can't see their paddle on the screen?

If this takes your fancy you may want to interest yourself in modular audio synthesis, whether analog or the DSP emulation (an easier and cheaper way to get into it). There's a whole bunch of oscilloscope-friendly patches for Clavia's Nord Modular software that implement primitive videogames, including a working version of Asteroids.

Here is the original schematic:

http://scienceblogs.com/brookhaven/2011/01/24/so-you-wanna-r...

There is a clone using a microcontroller, but I won't link to that abomination.

This video looks like it might be of the original game, rather than a re-creation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2mdU_i8k.

Is there a video somewhere? The only one I found required the RealPlayer plugin :). (Shudder.)