Early history of video games
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 in 1971 with the display of the coin-operated arcade game "Galaxy Game" and the release of the first arcade video 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.
Space Race (video game)
"Space Race" was the first arcade racing video game, as well as the first game with a goal of crossing the screen while avoiding obstacles, though a few racing games had been released in 1972 for the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console. Later games in that genre are the arcade game "Frogger" and the Atari 2600 "Freeway", both from 1981. A similarly-titled, expanded version of "Space Race" was published by ANALOG Software in 1981 for the Atari 8-bit family of computers as "Race in Space".