Not long after the growth of pinball, the first video game patent was issued on December 14, 1948, to Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann for what they described as a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.” The invention would not make much of a splash in the history of digital gaming, but it did feature the key component of the first video games: the cathode ray tube (CRT).

CRT-powered screens provided the images for analog television and for early computers’ displays, where the first video games appeared a few years later. Computer science students developed these games as novelties in the 1950s and 1960s. But because computers consisted of massive mainframes at the time, the games couldn’t be easily distributed.

However, more and more people owned televisions, and this development provided a platform for video games. The first home television game, called Odyssey, was developed by German immigrant and television engineer Ralph Baer. Released by Magnavox in 1972 and sold for a whopping $100, Odyssey used player controllers that moved dots of light around the screen in a twelve-game inventory of simple aiming and sports games. From 1972 until Odyssey’s replacement by a simpler model (the Odyssey 100) in 1975, Magnavox sold roughly 330,000 consoles.⁷

In the next decade, a ripped-off version of one of the Odyssey games brought the delights of video gaming into modern arcades. These establishments gather multiple coin-operated games together and can be thought of as a later version of the penny arcade. The same year that Magnavox released Odyssey, a young American computer engineer named Nolan Bushnell formed a video game development company, called Atari, with a friend. The enterprise’s first creation was Pong, a simple two-dimensional tennis-style game with two vertical paddles that bounced a white dot back and forth. The game kept score on the screen. Unlike Odyssey, Pong made blip noises when the ball hit the paddles or bounced off the sides of the court. Pong quickly became the first video game to become popular in arcades.

In 1975, Atari began successfully marketing a home version of Pong through an exclusive deal with Sears. The arrangement established the home video game market. Just two years later, Bushnell started the Chuck E. Cheese pizza-arcade restaurant chain and sold Atari to Warner Communications for an astounding $28 million. Although Atari folded in 1984, plenty of companies—including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft—followed its early lead, transforming the video game business into a full-fledged industry.