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.
Pac-Man
The game is regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time: its title character was the first original gaming mascot, the game established the maze chase game genre, it demonstrated the potential of characters in video games, it increased the appeal of video games with female audiences, and it was gaming's first broad licensing success. It was the first video game with power-ups, and the individual ghosts have deterministic artificial intelligence which reacts to player actions. It is often cited as the first game with cutscenes, in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and Blinky chasing each other, though "Space Invaders Part II" employed a similar style of between-level intermissions in 1979.