Original literature on adversary argument I want to know about the early invention/use of the adversary argument (see the lecture note by Jeff Erickson) which is a technique for establishing lower bounds of problems. 

I cannot find the original papers which invented/advocated adversary argument or the first problems whose lower bounds are obtained by adversary argument. (In particular, I am quite surprised that there are no wiki pages on adversary argument.)

Do you know some original literature on adversary argument?
The oldest literature can be traced back to Andrew Yao's min-max principle, which inturns has its elder root from von Neumann's.

History of game theory is not continuous in time. At least, there was some rise and then fall in the intensity of mathematicians' attention to this theory.