Early history of video games
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 reached mainstream popularity in 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.
Bertie the Brain
"Bertie" was created only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game, and while non-visual games had been developed for research computers such as Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz's chess program for the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester, "Bertie" was the first computer-based game to feature a visual display of any sort. "Bertie" is considered under some definitions in contention for the title of the first video game. While definitions vary, the prior cathode-ray tube amusement device was a purely analog electrical game, and while "Bertie" did not feature an electronic screen it did run on a computer. Another special-purpose computer-based game, "Nimrod", was built in 1951, while the software-based tic-tac-toe game "OXO" and a draughts program by Christopher Strachey were in 1952 the first computer games to display visuals on an electronic screen rather than light bulbs.