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.
Nimrod (computer)
The game of Nim running on the Nimrod is a candidate for one of the first video games, as it was one of the first computer games to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only four years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display, and one year after "Bertie the Brain", a computer similar to the Nimrod which played tic-tac-toe at the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The Nimrod's use of light bulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.