Early history of video games
That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set. The inventor, Ralph H. Baer, had initially had the idea in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. Unable to do so with the technological constraints at the time, he began work on a device that would attach to a television set and display games in 1966, and the "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was licensed to Magnavox to adapt and produce. They announced the console in May 1972, and it went on sale that September. The console and its games featured numerous innovations beyond being the first video game device for home consumers: it was the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal; it was also the first video gaming device to be displayed in a television commercial. It sold for US$100 and shipped with several games, including "Table tennis", which Bushnell had seen a demo of and which "Pong" had been based on. The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of "Pong". "Pong" and the Odyssey kicked off a new era of video gaming, with numerous other competitors starting up in the video game industry as it grew in popularity.
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.