Online etiquette

History

Beginnings of sports games

In 1958, William Higinbotham created a game called Tennis for Two, a two-player tennis game played on an oscilloscope. The players would select the angle at which to put their racket, and pressed a button to return it. Although this game was incredibly simple, it demonstrated how an action game (rather than previous puzzles) could be played on a computer.
Computer games prior to the late 1970s were primarily played on university mainframe computers under timesharing systems that supported multiple computer terminals on school campuses. The two dominant systems in this era were Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 and Control Data Corporation's PLATO. Both could only display text, and not graphics,originally printed on teletypemachines and line printers, but later printed on single-color CRT screens.
In the 1970s, arcade video games began to appear, many of them centred around the sports genre, after it was popularized in 1972 by the commercial success of Atari's Pong, an early table tennisgame that had similar gameplay to Tennis for Two. The first racing game, Taito's Astro Race, was released in 1973, followed by Taito'sSpeed Race and Atari's Gran Trak 10 in 1974, with the subgenre later gaining further popularity after Atari's Night Driver introduced a three-dimensional perspective in 1976. Early hockey games were also released in 1973: Taito's Pro Hockey (which had similar gameplay toPong)^[5] and Sega's Hockey TV.^[6] The following year, Taito released an early contact sport game, Basketball, based on basketball.
In 1975, UPL released an early four-player multiple-sports game, Video Action, which featured tennis, hockey, and an early example ofsoccer football, each of which was a different variant of the Pong style popular at the time.^[8] In 1976, Sega released an early motorbike racinggame, Fonz, and an early combat sport game, Heavyweight Champ, based on boxing and now considered the first fighting game.