The Netherlands, 1637
René Descartes publishes La Géométrie as an appendix to his previous work Discourse on the Method. The central impact of this work in relation to games is the foundation of the Cartesian coordinate system. The Cartesian coordinate system is a means of mapping out algebraic equations on a grid, thereby creating a graph of data to map out answers to equations. The grid traditionally has two axis, named in algebra terms as x and y...in other words, the coordinates for 'horizontal' and 'vertical'. Virtually every computer program that uses or creates graphics has its basis in the Cartesian coordinate system.
Massachusetts, USA, December 16th, 1951
A broadcast of Edward Murrow's See It Now shows a televised meeting between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Jay Forrester and the US Navy's Chief of Naval Research Admiral Calvin Bolster testing the Whirlwind I computer, the first computer made to include a graphical display. This televised event came eight months after the release of the computer. The test involves a dry run of the flight simulator program, in this case simply graphing the trajectory of a Viking rocket roughly as successful as the Viking 7* from launch to landing, graphing both its determined arc through the air and the time it would take to run out of fuel. Both parts of the simulation are done within thirty seconds.
The Viking rockets were a Navy project attempting to make the US stand on its own in terms of rocket capabilities and to create a vessel for scientific research missions. At the time the show aired the Viking 7 launched on August 7th and the Navy were preparing the second-generation Viking missles, which is what this test would've impacted.
Massachusetts, USA, Summer of 1953
Up until this point, The Whirlwind Project had been running its memory on electrostatic storage using an array of cathode ray tubes. This presented a unique problem in that the computer would throw memory errors every couple of hours, making any computations it did before that period suspect and potentially bad data. This changed after Jay Forrester acquired his patent for magnetic-core memory (there were multiple people making patents for similar breakthroughs in core memory technology, in particular American physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, and Jay has repeatedly denied being influenced by Wang and Woo's work). There were 18 memory planes installed in the Whirlwind, all hand-braided and assembled by Hilda G. Carpenter, and each seperate one used over 4000 toroids to work as bits to store information. Not only did this technology cut the number of memory errors from an hourly to a monthly problem, it would pave the way for all other advancements in digital computing to follow.