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.
Alan Kotok
Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen conceived the computer game "Spacewar!" while working at Harvard University in 1961. Inspired by Marvin Minsky's "Three Position Display" (which they dubbed the "Minskytron"), they had the first version running, with help from their MIT classmates Dan Edwards, Kotok, Stephen D. Piner, Samson and Saunders, by early 1962. Coded by Russell, "Spacewar!" was one of the earliest interactive computer games and is sometimes called the first video game.