Video gaming industry today is a fast growing and huge industry with the average of users reaching as high as 31 years. Additionally, this industry is supposedly larger than the movie industry itself.

Tracing the origins of the video game isn't an easy one. During modern times, there are many debates as to who actually created the first video game. The answer to this debate depends largely on how the term video game/s is defined. Importantly, if we trace back history, the gradual evolution of the video game has been entwined with several industries such as, scientific, computer, arcade, and consumer electronics.

The very first video game to be created on the planet traces its origins to the year 1947, where it was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube device. The game was in the form of a missile simulator which was inspired by radar displays used by Air Forces in 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.

The next instance where a game appeared on the scene was on May 5th 1951 with the presentation of the NIMROD computer 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.

Later, in 1958, William Higinbotham made an interactive game named Tennis for Two for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual visitor's day. This display, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to promote atomic power, and used an analog computer and the vector display system of an oscilloscope.

Then, in the year 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen were responsible for creating the game Spacewar! on a computer named DEC PDP-1 which also utilized a vector display system technology.

Though all of the above inventions paved the way and ensured a beginning for the video game inception, the real breakthrough came in the year 1966. This is so because, 1966 is marked as the year for correct inception point for modern TV based video games. Ralph Baer entered gaming field giving legs to an idea he had back in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television. Followed by months of hard work, in May 1967, a breakthrough came in to light, when Ralph and one of his assistants created the video game that met their objective and destiny. They created a video game that was the first to use a raster scan display and also the first to be played on a television set.

Fuelled by the works of such gaming greats as Ralph Baer, the first ever video game console made into the annals of history with the introduction of the Brown Box which was released in 1972 by Magnavox.

Summary

This article goes through the evolutionary pages of history of the now hugely famous video game industry: from the very point of inception to the very point of the modern inception of the video game and the video game console.