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The early history of video games dates back to 1947, with a missile simulator which uses analog circuitry.^[1]

1947

The earliest known interactive electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube^[2] in 1947. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.^[1]

On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented at the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game.^[3] NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.
TV engineer named Ralph Baer was asked by the chief engineer at Loral to build "the best television set in the world". Baer came up with an idea for playing games on the television set, but the idea was turned down.

In 1952, one of the first video games ever made, OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) by A. S. Douglas. OXO was written for the EDSAC computer. The game was a Tic-tac-toe based game, played against the computer, and although OXO never gained any real popularity, because the EDSAC was available only at Cambridge, it was still a milestone in the history of video games.
Christopher S. Strachey created a program on the Ferranti machine which, by the summer of 1952, "could play a complete game of draughts (checkers) at a reasonable speed". Arthur Samuel built on his work to make a checkers-playing program for the IBM 701, which ran at the end of the year.
November 16 - Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of The Legend of Zelda, Mario, and Donkey Kong, and others, was born during this year.

Tennis for Two was a computer game developed in 1958 on an oscilloscope which simulated a game of tennis or ping pong. It was created by William Higinbotham. It was the predecessor of Pong, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side instead of a top-down perspective. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game was controlled by an analog computer and "consisted mostly of resistors, capacitors and relays, but where fast switching was needed – when the ball was in play – transistor switches were used".

Spacewar! is released, one of the earliest known digital computer games. Conceived and written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students including Stephen Russell who programmed it, the Spacewar! game first ran in early 1962 on the PDP-1 donated to the school by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Early versions of the game contained a randomly generated background starfield.

Later, a program called Expensive Planetarium (referring to the price of the PDP-1 computer) was incorporated into the main code, replacing the randomly generated star field. The program was based on real star charts that scrolled slowly: at any one time, 45% of the night sky was visible, every star down to the fifth magnitude.

On 22 March, Ralph Baer files with the United States Patent and Trademark Office regarding a patent for "television gaming and training apparatus."^[4]
In June, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck form Computer Recreations, Inc.^[5]
Magnavox signs a license agreement with Sanders Associates regarding the Odyssey video game console.^[6]
Nakamura Manufacturing Ltd. adopts "Namco" as a brand name.^[7]

In September, Computer Recreations, Inc. installs Galaxy Game, a version of Spacewar! for PDP-11 hardware and the first coin-operated video arcade game, in Tresidder Union at Stanford University.^[5]
In November, Nutting Associates releases 1,500 cabinets of Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space — another free-standing implementation of Spacewar!, and the first commercially released video game in the arcades.^[6]
Don Rawitsch, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, students at Carleton College develop The Oregon Trail for a mainframe with teletype terminals.^[8]
Don Daglow programs the first computer baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College.^[9]
Mike Mayfield develops Star Trek on a Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 minicomputer.^[10]

History of video games

By generation	First (1972–1977) · Second (1976–1984) · Video game crash of 1983 · Third (1983–1992) · Fourth (1987–1996) · Fifth (1993–2002) · Sixth (1998–2006) · Seventh (2004–)

By decade	1990s · 2000s

By year	Years prior to 1972 · 1970 1971 1972 · 1973 · 1974 · 1975 · 1976 · 1977 · 1978 · 1979 1980 · 1981 · 1982 · 1983 · 1984 · 1985 · 1986 · 1987 · 1988 · 1989 1990 · 1991 · 1992 · 1993 · 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 2010