OXO
1952 · Puzzle · EDSAC
Overview
OXO is a video game developed by A S Douglas in 1952 which simulates a game of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). It was one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. Douglas programmed the game as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge.
Deep Dive
OXO is a video game developed by A S Douglas in 1952 which simulates a game of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). It was one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. Douglas programmed the game as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge.
Developer Story
Alexander Douglas was a British academic who created OXO as part of his 1952 PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge on human-computer interaction. Douglas had no intention of building a game — he needed a demonstration program to illustrate his research points about how humans interact with machines. After completing his doctorate he returned to academia and never worked in the games industry.
Did You Know?
- OXO was never publicly distributed — it ran on the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, a machine that occupied an entire room and was only accessible to university researchers.
- Douglas used a rotary telephone dial as the input device, with numbers 1-9 mapping to the nine squares of the tic-tac-toe grid.
- The game always played optimally — it was impossible to beat if you were playing second, making it more of a demonstration than a competitive game.
- OXO is sometimes listed as the first video game with a graphical display, predating Tennis for Two and Spacewar! by several years.
