The first creation of what the inventors Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle Ray Mann called a “cathode ray tube amusement device” in 1947 and was the very beginning of computer games history.  In 1952 A.S Douglas created a graphical version of tic tac toe for his PHD at Cambridge university although this game was not intended to be played as a game as such, but for the study of human and computer interaction. The creation of the first video game ever was in 1958 by William Higinbotham, the game was called tennis for two and seems to be the first game invented for entertainment as it was used in the Brookhaven National Laboratory, I believe this to be the first game ever because of the fact there were two controllers which means there was a competitive nature however the game wasn’t distributable and was dismantled in 1959 therefore it wasn’t really aimed at a mass market but just for a show of technology. American Universities were where most of the early games were run using the mainframe computers they had and because of the scarceness of computer hardware at the time this meant that there were few games and most of them were never remembered as very few people actually got to play them.

It was at MIT that a group of students including steve russel created a game called “spacewar!” in 1961  which consisted of two players controlling a spaceship which can shoot missiles and the game was also distributed via new DEC computers at the time but also through the internet which was a lot more undeveloped than it is now. Spacewar! has been called the first influential computer game, it seems that universities had a lot of influence in the first games as they had access to the technology needed to create them.

In 1966 a man named Ralph baer created the first game to be displayed on a television set called “chase” whilst working at sanders associates, a military electronics company.

The first ever coin operated games machine was created in 1971 and was situated in the student union of Stanford university, the game it housed was called galaxy game and was similar to space war, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney also created an actual arcade version of spacewar calling it computer space, a company called Nutting associates bought the game and produced 1500 computer space game machines releasing them in late 71, however because the game was fairly complex for your average person to understand straight away it proved to be unsuccessful however it still stands as the first mass produced video game that was available commercially. Soon after this Bushnell and Dabney founded their own company called Atari as they were not happy with amount of earnings they received from licensing their game computer space to another company.

In 72 Atari released pong which is probably one of the most recognisable games ever, it rather crudely resembled table tennis with one or two players assuming control of a paddle and hitting a ball between the two with the aim of hitting it past the opposition. The first home video game console was also released in 72, it was called the Magnavox odyssey and sold in excess of 100,000 units in the first year, Magnavox also used frank sinatra to promote the product.

Because of the arcade and home console market being overrun with pong clones and unsuccessful consoles many companies were selling their systems and left only Atari and Magnavox in the home games console market, this “crash” in the market saw both companies lose lots of money between 77 and 78 however with the release of space invaders in 78 and Atari’s sales quadrupled for their Atari 2600 system in which the game came on, because of its success space invaders may have single handedly saves the home video games market.