As seen on TV

As far as history is concerned, no real developments were made between '62 and '72, but leading up to '72, we meet a man named Baer.

Ralph Baer was an American inventor who's most notable achievement was the patent and development of the "Brown Box" in 1968, which was essentially the first home entertainment system, or "console". The box and it's patent were sold in 1972 to the company Magnovox, who used the Brown Box, with a few aesthetic changes, to produce and sell the "Odyssey" home entertainment system (the patent, on the other hand, was used by Magnovox to sue the monetary pants off of anyone who made so much as a sidewards glance towards the idea of console production)

The Odyssey was a revolutionary idea, and was one of the first attempts to commercially make video games on a large scale, the first attempt at a light gun, and one of the first signs that a computer could be made for residential use and at a reasonable size. the system had 12 games on it, all black and white and all with completely discernible sprites. but one of these games became the addictive beginning of mainstream video gaming. It was the instantly recognisable (and most commonly thought first game) Pong.

Pong (link for java version here) was a basic tennis game, where one line tried to get a square behind the other line over a dotted line. Graphics were simplistic to a tee here, trying to make the game as easy as possible to process for the Odyssey, who had a low processing power, even in those days. the game was two player, the one player version coming out much later (come on, like you'd expect the first residential computing device to support AI.)

The game became a huge success and major selling point of the Odyssey, the other games not having the same lasting appeal and the light gun was literally that. It reacted to light, and the game involved putting a sheet that came with the console over the TV, which had holes where the screen would light up, and one could win just as easily by pointing at the nearest light bulb and blasting away like a maniac. By the same token, if you had so much as another light on in the room, no matter where you shot, you'd get a hit. apart from the blind who may have found this helpful, it made the games completely useless for just about anyone else.

Pong was also the first successful arcade game released by atari, becoming incredibly popular and overshadowing the pinball machines that traditionally dominated arcades. well really, at the time they were just about the only thing in arcades of any real interest. But now, the pinball machines were what you played whilst waiting for the pong machine to be free. As previously mentioned, Magnavox with it's monolithic evil sounding name put on the sue cap and tried to take off every penny that Atari made, but settled out of court the rights to the game for 700,000 dollars. Whilst of course setting Atari back a great deal, it turned out to be a very worthy investment, allowing them to make silly amounts of money thereon after. (a version of space wars was created for arcade but wasn't successful due to people having to read a manual for controls, even then many couldn't understand them. look, i know I'm an internet generation bigot that is used to games requiring the same amount of control training as your average 3 stage rocket, but come on. 4 BUTTONS. Have some perseverance, damn it)

I would have had my dad again play this one with me but he was quoted as saying "i lost too much money over that thing". I'm certain he meant cent pieces at the arcade, but i like to think it was epic 100 dollar drunken bets over who would win.

He so would have won though.

Dismeeir.