early history of video games part of a series on thehistory of video games general early history of video games early mainframe games golden age of arcade video games video game crash of 1983 consoles 1st generation 19721980 2nd generation 19761992 3rd generation 19832003 4th generation 19872004 5th generation 19932005 6th generation 19982013 7th generation 20052017 8th generation 2012 genres history of eastern roleplaying video games history of western roleplaying video games history of online games history of massively multiplayer online games lists list of video games in development timeline of arcade video game history vte the history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today covering a long period of invention and changes video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 1980s when arcade video games gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public since then video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world the early history of video games therefore covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947 the first true video games in the early 1950s and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s pong and the beginning of the first generation of video game consoles with the magnavox odyssey both in 1972 during this time there were a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of video game used following the 1947 invention of the cathoderay tube amusement device the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to use an electronic display the first true video games were created in the early 1950s initially created as technology demonstrations such as the bertie the brain and nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951 video games also became the purview of academic research a series of games generally simulating realworld board games were created at various research institutions to explore programming humancomputer interaction and computer algorithms these include oxo and christopher stracheys draughts program in 1952 the first softwarebased games to incorporate a crt display and several chess and checkers programs possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958s tennis for two featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope as computing technology improved over time computers became smaller and faster and the ability to work on them was opened up to university employees and undergraduate students by the end of the 1950s these new programmers began to create games for nonacademic purposes leading up to the 1962 release of spacewar as one of the earliest known digital computer games to be available outside a single research institute throughout the rest of the 1960s digital computer games were created by increasingly numerous programmers and sometimes sold commercially in catalogs as the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created a wider variety of games began to be developed video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry with the display of the coinoperated arcade game galaxy game and the release of the first widely available arcade game computer space and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game pong and the first home video game console the magnavox odyssey which launched the first generation of video game consoles defining the video game circuitry schematic from the patent for the cathoderay tube amusement device the term video game has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment technically for a product to be a video game there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube crt that creates a rasterized image on a screen today however the term video game has completely shed its purely technical definition and encompasses a wider range of technology while still rather illdefined the term video game now generally encompasses any game played on hardware built with electronic logic circuits that incorporates an element of interactivity and outputs the results of the players actions to a display the ancestors to these games include the cathoderay tube amusement device the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to incorporate a cathode ray tube screen initial games a drawing of the nimrod computer the earliest known publicly demonstrated electronic game was created in 1950 bertie the brain was an arcade game of tictactoe built by josef kates for the 1950 canadian national exhibition nearly a year later on may 5 1951 the nimrod computercreated by engineering firm and nascent computer developer ferrantiwas presented at the festival of britain and then showcased for three weeks in october at the berlin industrial show before being dismantled christopher stracheys 1952 draughts program on a ferranti mark 1 around this time nonvisual games were being developed at various research computer laboratories for example christopher strachey developed a simulation of the game draughts or checkers for the pilot ace that he unsuccessfully attempted to run for the first time in july 1951 at the british national physical laboratory and completed in 1952 this is the first known computer game to be created for a generalpurpose computer rather than a machine specifically made for the game like bertie interactive visual games the electronic delay storage automatic calculator in 1948 which ran oxo in 1952 alexander s douglas created oxo a software program for the electronic delay storage automatic calculator edsac computer which simulates a game of tictactoe the edsac was one of the first storedprogram computers with memory that could be read from or written to and filled an entire room it included three 3516 dot matrix cathode ray tubes to graphically display the state of the computers memory the first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time rather than only when the player made a move was a pool game programmed by william brown and ted lewis specifically for a demonstration of the university of michigandeveloped midsac computer at the university of michigan in 1954 the game developed over six months by the pair featured a pool stick controlled by a joystick and a knob and a full rack of 15 balls on a table seen in an overhead view the setup for tennis for two as exhibited in 1959 while further games like checkers and chess were developed on research computers the next milestone in video games came in 1958 with tennis for two perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than as a technology demonstration or a research tool the program simulated a game of tennis created by american physicist william higinbotham for visitors at the brookhaven national laboratory to be more entertaining for visitors on their public day than the usual static exhibits about nuclear power the game ran on a donner model 30 analog computer and displayed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope over the next few years during 195761 various computer games continued to be created in the context of academic computer and programming research particularly as computer technology improved to include smaller transistorbased computers on which programs could be created and run in real time rather than operations run in batches a few programs however while used to showcase the power of the computer they ran on were also intended as entertainment products these were generally created by undergraduate students such as at the massachusetts institute of technology where they were allowed on occasion to develop programs for the tx0 experimental computer the spread of games see also early mainframe games spacewar running on the computer history museums pdp1 by 1961 mit had acquired the dec pdp1 minicomputer the successor to the tx0 which also used a vector display system the systems comparatively small size and processing speed meant that like with the tx0 the university allowed its undergraduate students and employees to write programs for the computer which were not directly academically related whenever it was not in use in 196162 harvard and mit employees martin graetz steve russell and wayne wiitanen created the game spacewar on the pdp1 inspired by science fiction books such as the lensman series the twoplayer game has the players engaged in a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a randomly generated background starfield the development of space travel in 1969 in part led to the development of the unix operating system although the market for commercial gamesand software in generalwas small due to the cost of computers limiting their spread to research institutions and large corporations several were still created by programmers and distributed by the computer manufacturers a number of games could be found in an april 1962 ibm program catalog these included board games bbc vik the baseball demonstrator and three dimensional tictacktoe the creation of general programming languages like basic which could be run on different hardware types allowed for programs to be written for more than one specific computer in turn letting games written in them to spread to more end players in the programming community than before these games included a baseball simulation game written in basic by john kemeny in 1965 a new industry see also history of video games a new industry arcade game and first generation of video game consoles galaxy game was one of the first arcade video games at the beginning of the 1970s video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers primarily at research institutions and large companies the history of video games transitioned into a new era early in the decade however with the rise of the commercial video game industry in 1971 bill pitts and hugh tuck developed a coinoperated computer game galaxy game at stanford university using a dec pdp11 computer with vector displays that game was computer space developed by bushnell and ted dabney they had found the data general nova a us4000 computer that they thought would be powerful enough to run four games of spacewar at once the computer turned out to not actually be powerful enough for the project while investigating the concept of replacing some of the computer with purposebuilt hardware however the pair discovered that making a system explicitly for running such a game rather than general programs would be much less expensive as low as 100 pong helped usher in a new chapter of video game history around the same time as galaxy games protoype installation computer space was released it was the first coinoperated video game to be commercially sold and the first widely available video game of any kind that same year saw the release of the magnavox odyssey the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set ahl david november 1978 basic computer games 2nd ed workman publishing isbn9780894800528 demaria rusel wilson johnny l december 2003 high score the illustrated history of electronic games 2nd ed mcgraw hillosborne isbn9780072231724 donovan tristan 20100420 replay the history of video games yellow ant isbn9780956507204 goldberg marty vendel curt 20121125 atari inc business is fun syzygy press isbn9780985597405 greenlaw paul s herron lowell w rawdon richard h 1962 business simulation in industrial and university education prentice hall hey tony ppay gyuri 20141130 the computing universe a journey through a revolution cambridge university press isbn9780521150187 kent steven l 20010906 the ultimate history of video games three rivers press isbn9780761536437 kowert rachel quandt thorsten 20150827 the video game debate unravelling the physical social and psychological effects of video games routledge isbn9781138831636 levy steven 1984 hackers heroes of the computer revolution doubleday isbn9780385191951 rabin steve 20050614 introduction to game development charles river media isbn9781584503774 rutter jason bryce jo 20060509 understanding digital games sage publications isbn9781412900348 wolf mark j p 20071130 the video game explosion a history from pong to playstation and beyond greenwood publishing group isbn9780313338687 wolf mark j p 20120605 before the crash early video game history wayne state university press isbn9780814334508 wolf mark j p 20120816 encyclopedia of video games the culture technology and art of gaming greenwood publishing group isbn9780313379369 research ralph h baer papers 19431953 19661972 2006 ralph baers prototypes and documentation housed at the smithsonian lemelson center classic gaming expo 2000 baer describes the birth of videogames history of video games timeline by the computerspielemuseum berlin game simulation edsac simulator to play oxo nimrod interactive simulation for be os operating system tennis for two simulation spacewar java simulation vteearly history of video gamesanalog and lightbulb games 19471951 cathoderay tube amusement device bertie the brain nimrod interactive visual games 19521959 oxo tennis for two digital computer games 19601971 early mainframe games spacewar marienbad hamurabi space travel first arcade games 19701971 computer space galaxy game vtehistory of video gamesby system golden age of arcade video games timeline of arcade video game history video game crash of 1983 early mainframe games by yearearly history 19471972 1970s 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980s 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990s 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000s 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010s 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020s 2020 near future by console generation first 19721980 second 19761992 third 19832003 fourth 19872003 fifth 19932005 sixth 19982013 seventh 20052017 eighth 2012 by region australia bangladesh belgium brazil canada china czech republic colombia finland france germany ghana india indonesia ireland lithuania japan kenya malaysia netherlands new zealand nigeria philippines russia south africa south korea thailand turkey ukraine united kingdom united states 