History of Nintendo
In 1972, the first commercially available video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, had a light gun accessory, the Shooting Gallery. This was the first involvement of Nintendo in video games. According to Martin Picard in the "International Journal of Computer Game Research": "in 1971, Nintendo had -- even before the marketing of the first home console in the United States -- an alliance with the American pioneer Magnavox to develop and produce optoelectronic guns for the Odyssey (released in 1972), since it was similar to what Nintendo was able to offer in the Japanese toy market in 1970s".
History of video games
The earliest known electronic computer games actually implemented were two custom built machines called "Bertie the Brain" and Nimrod, which played tic-tac-toe and the game of Nim, respectively. "Bertie the Brain", designed and built by Josef Kates at Rogers Majestic, was displayed at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1950, while Nimrod, conceived by John Bennett at Ferranti and built by Raymond Stuart-Williams, was displayed at the Festival of Britain and the Berlin Industrial Show in 1951. Neither game incorporated a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. Before these, automated games like the simple chess simulator El Ajedrecista (1914) and Nimrod's predecessor "Nimatron" (1940) had been created as electro-mechanical devices.