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.
History of video games
The first games known to incorporate a monitor were two research projects completed in 1952, a checkers program by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1 and a tic-tac-toe program called "OXO" by Alexander Douglas on the EDSAC. Both of these programs used a relatively static display to track the current state of the game board. The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time was a billiards game programmed by William Brown and Ted Lewis specifically for a demonstration of the MIDSAC computer at the University of Michigan in 1954.
Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than to demonstrate the power of some technology, train personnel, or aid in research was "Tennis for Two", designed by William Higinbotham and built by Robert Dvorak at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. Designed to entertain the general public at Brookhaven's annual series of open houses, the game was deployed on an analog computer with graphics displayed on an oscilloscope and was dismantled in 1959. Higinbotham never considered adapting the successful game into a commercial product, which would have been impractical with the technology of the time. Ultimately, the widespread adoption of computers to play games would have to wait for the machines to spread from serious academics to their students on U.S. college campuses.