First videogame to utilise multiple play screens

Most early videogames kept their play simple with the action limited to the area of a single play screen, like Pong or Breakout. The first game to make use of a playing area that stretched across multiple screens was John Dunn’s 1979 Superman videogame for the Atari 2600. However, the designer behind this multi screen innovation was Dunn’s Atari colleague Warren Robinett, who had developed it as part of Adventure, his pet project at the time. In order to prove his concept, Robinett developed a demonstration version of the game. Executives at Time Warner, which owned both Atari and Superman, were keen to see a game that tied into the 1978 Superman feature film, but as Robinett was resistant to working on the project, the task of incorporating the multiple screen idea from Robinett’s demo into a fully-fledged Superman game fell to Dunn instead.