„In 1979, in this laboratory at the Swiss Federal School of Technologies in Lausanne (EPFL), Professor Nicoud and one of his assistants have fun with an electronic game.“ Swiss TV TSR (now RTS) was documenting this exciting moment and asking: „So, isn’t it a bit futile to play electronic games in an academic laboratory?”

„Certainly not!” was the reply by Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and his assistant Marc Forster from the EPFL. They patiently explain the value of creating such programs. Professor Nicoud explains that Marc Forster has programmed the game with holes in a paper strip that now stores all the information from which they can run the application. He needed two days to do this. Creating games is a good way to motivate students to learn programming, explains Nicoud.

This video (here, a screenshot) shows Marc Forster on the left and Jean-Daniel Nicoud on the right. It is an excerpt taken from the RTS program Dimensions (21.03.1979), in which director Pierre Barde explores the uses of television in various fields other than program broadcasting. After Jeu de gogo Nicoud and Forster show the programmed song Frère Jacques and the animated words “Dauphin genial!” along with a blue dolphin.

The game Jeu de gogo is a remake of the game Blockade (Gremlin, 1976). The Smaky version of 1979 (date estimated) is a game for two players. Each player maneuvers the end of a growing line (similar to the Snake game on Nokia mobile phones). The player must keep the line from colliding with the other line, along with their own line built by moving and the walls. You can strategically try to “cut off” the other player.

The original game Blockade was developed in 1976 by Lane Hauck and Ago Kiss and published as an arcade game by Gremlin Industries. It was cloned many times. A notable version is the arcade version of Tron (1982), where you race a bike and build walls with your fast movement. Many years later, in 1998, Nokia remade the game “Snake” and made it popular again as a phone application.