The first video game? Depending on who you ask it could be Pong, Spacewar! or Tennis for Two but the debate about the oldest game game may now be over.
A series of small sculpted stones have been found in a bronze age burial site in Turkey and the experts are saying that they could have come from one of the first board games ever made. The game itself is said to be over 5000 years old.
Usually games like these are discovered in pieces, and connecting the dots becomes somewhat of a game itself, but this is a unique finding in that an almost complete set of pieces were found in the one spot.
“It’s a unique finding, a rather complete set of a chess like game,” said Haluk Sağlamtimur of Ege University in İzmir. “We are puzzling over its strategy.”
Apparently it’s a chess like game centred around the number ‘4’.
This find all but confirms that board games were invented in the Fertile Crescent regent. I hope they work out the rules — I want to play this thing. But it must be next to impossible. For some reason I have an image in my head — archaeologists, thousands of years from now, stumbling across a random collection of Magic: The Gathering cards, trying to work out what the hell is going on!
Oldest Gaming Tokens Found in Turkey [Discovery]
Comments
3 responses to “Is This The World’s Oldest Game?”
uber-retro
There doesn’t seem to be 4 of every piece.
The rest must be DLC
i wonder if they rage flipped back then like we do today in monopoly…
Jumanji?