A history of computer games part one: 1950s - 1970s

Video games conquer the world. It's not a secret. The list of platforms one can use to play games expands rapidly; games can be found on every mobile phone, tablet device and even on TV’s teletext. Hardcore fans queue for hours outside the stores, just to be sure they get their hands on newly released games and individuals like me spend enormous amount of money and effort to get into game industry. But when has it started? What was the first computer game ever?

Well... It's a matter of an argument as people have different opinions on what can be called an actual computer game. However, the year 1952 was certainly a significant milestone in history of computer gaming. In this year A.S. Douglas wrote his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge on Human-Computer interaction and in order to demonstrate his thesis he created OXO which was a graphical version of tic-tac-toe in which one played against the computer.

The next important date is year 1958. At that time William Higinbotham, an American physicist, used Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope to create game called Tennis for Two. As the name indicates it was multi-player game in which each player’s aim was - like in real life - play ball over the net, using - unlike in real life - box-shaped ancestor of gamepad. As opposed to OXO, Tennis for Two was exposed to wider audience by being an open house exhibit at Brookhaven national laboratory. Still, its audience was relatively small in comparison to the audience of the next, distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout the Internet game - Spacewar!. It was created by group of MIT students led by Steve Russell.
Imagine two spaceships firing photon torpedoes on each other while fighting with sun gravity... sounds epic, isn't it? In the reality it looked something like that:

Nonetheless, I'm sure that in 1962 it was epic. After all that was first sci-fi computer game ever! Apart from being great invention itself, it inspired other computer programmers to make next step toward creating computer games we know today. One of them was Nolan Bushnell.

In 1971 Nolan Bushnell in collaboration with Ted Dabney created their own version of Spacewar! - Computer Space which was the first arcade game in history. Although commercial flop of 1,500 coin-operated Computer Space machines, Bushnell did not stop to believe in computer games potential. He thought that the reason of the failure was the overcomplicated control system, so one year later he founded Atari, Inc. and released another, much simpler, arcade game - PONG. It turned out to be a huge success, as over 19,000 machines were sold and many imitations were created making video games more and more popular.

The last big innovations of 70', which are worth to mention, were home video game consoles. The first one was Odyssey created by Ralph Baer and his associates and released by Magnavox. 100,000 copies were sold just in one year which indicated bright future of virtual gaming.

Obviously these are only a few inventions that initiated game history, but in my opinion they are the most significant.

Links:
http://www.designboom.com/eng/education/pong2.html
http://www.pong-story.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games