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.
Combat flight simulation game
Prior to the rise of modern-day video games, electro-mechanical games were produced that used rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. This technology led to the rise of arcade games, as well as the first simulation video games in the late 1960s. One such electro-mechanical game was "Jet Rocket", a flight simulator released by Sega in 1970 that featured cockpit controls that could move the player's aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles at targets that would explode when hit. In 1975, Taito released the arcade video game simulator "Interceptor", an early first-person combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter using an eight-way joystick to aim and shoot at enemy aircraft.