Compared to the music and movie industries, the video game industry is much younger. At the same time, its revenue today far exceeds the two combined, and the number of players in the world is equal to several billion. Video games have had a huge impact on our society, as well as an outstanding contribution to our cultural heritage. Now they have become an integral part of pop culture, and this is true not only among young people - but among older people video games have also found their grateful players, ready to discover new universes of virtual worlds, sharing this hobby already with their families.

It is impossible to say exactly when the very first games appeared. Even our familiar chess is about a thousand and a half years old, not to mention other, more ancient "analogous" representatives. In our case, when it comes to video games, the moment of appearance of the first video game is considered to be 1947. At that time, Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for the registration of an entertainment device with a cathode-ray tube and buttons. The rudimentary input devices allowed you to control the sight and shoot down planes, which were displayed on a small black and white screen. Despite the cutting-edge idea of turning a home television set into something more, Dumont, a company of two employees, was never able to make a commercial product out of a simple electronic circuit. And, since we began with the example of chess. All in the same year, Alan Turing writes a program for playing chess. Computers of that time occupied more than 60m² and cost half a million dollars, but they still weren't capable of running complex games. Turing was able to write an algorithm for the game but was forced to answer every move on his own, calculating the algorithm of the program himself.

From 1951 to 1961, mostly in the walls of universities in the U.S., students produced such games as Nim, Tennis for Two, Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe and Spacewar! If the first of these can hardly be attributed to the video games in the modern sense (as such a screen was not used in it), the latter is worth looking closely - because Spacewar! was able to become the game that could give rise to mass interest in video games, which has not yet succeeded anyone. In the 1960s, MIT student Steve Russell wrote a simple duel between spaceships as an experiment. The player had control over speed, direction, and the ability to attack his opponent with torpedoes. The PDP-1 computer, costing 120 thousand dollars, was already close to modern computers - any case, despite its impressive size, it already had a screen in the form of an oscilloscope display and a keyboard.

Together with members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, Russell refined the game until 1962. The input device was also optimized - the awkward keyboard was replaced with a controller that was designed specifically for Spacewar! Today you can make a game like this in a day, using, for example, the Construct 2 engine, which lets you assemble logic from blocks instead of writing code but back then the game gained unprecedented popularity - it was distributed to anyone who wanted it and the company DEC, which produced the PDP-1, used it to demonstrate their system, later attaching Spacewar! to the systems they sold.

From this point on, a series of events began to unfold, thanks to which the game industry gradually began to unleash its limitless potential. Nolan Bushnell, the future founder of Atari and practically one of the founding fathers of the game industry itself, along with colleague Ted Dabney, make their own version of this game for arcade machines - their version differs in that one player now shoots at flying saucers. Such a maneuver allows one to finally find a commercial niche and enter the mass market - Nutting Associates implemented the game under the name Computer Space, but it happened only in 1971, marking the beginning of the era of arcade game machines. With their popularity, the idea of playing games from the comfort of your own home was already beginning to fly in the air, but it wasn't until ten years after the Spacewar! release that the first-ever commercially realized device, what we used to call a console or, what was then more in vogue, a set-top box, appeared on the market.

The Magnavox Odyssey designed by Ralph Baer appeared on store shelves in 1972, but the prerequisites for its appearance were already in 1951. Baer had been an engineer at Loral at the time, and as early as 1966, when he was Chief Engineer for Equipment Design at Sanders Associates, a company that dealt with military engineering. Along with colleagues Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, in 1967, Baer introduce a device to his bosses with several games, one of which uses a plastic rifle to shoot targets. Duck Hunt, which will forever be remembered by our 90s generation, almost certainly owes a lot to Baer's design, though it would appear much later. Back then, a device called the Brown Box was almost completed, but Sanders Associates had no way to market the devices itself, attempts to sell the rights were unsuccessful, and the device was shelved indefinitely - just until Baer had the idea to start negotiating with TV manufacturers.

Another turning point for the industry that occurs in the same year as the release of Magnavox Odyssey is the founding of Atari by Nolan Bushnell. It will reach unprecedented heights, Atari's employees will have time to include Apple founder Steve Jobs, it will have time to plunge the industry into one of the worst crises, and then return with the announcement of a new console after a twenty-year break in 2017 (as of 2021 the company still has not abandoned the idea and reports, that all is well with the new Atari VCS, and the company itself is going to focus on releasing PC and console games), but that will all happen to it in the future, but for now, as of 1972, the idea of bringing Magnavox Odyssey interactive ping pong to arcade game machines, while it seems innovative to Bushnell, does not negate his own vision of how to develop game ideas. Atari collaborator Allan Alcorn expanded its functionality by making it possible to bounce the ball off the walls, adding sound effects and a score counter.

Thus appeared the famous Pong, which captured the attention of bar patrons in all the states, and later entered the world level - one arcade machine with Pong could bring up to 200 dollars a week, which at that time was considered more than an impressive sum. On the wave of success, Atari also made its home counterpart to play at home Atari Home Pong - a kind of compact version of arcade machine for home. It got to the point that Magnavox was going to sue Atari for infringement of its patents, although sales of its own Odyssey grew to 200 thousand copies not without the popularity of Pong. The companies managed to negotiate a one-time payment of $700,000 to Magnavox from Atari. To capture more distributors, Bushnell splits Atari into two supposedly independent companies, Atari and Kee Games. Notably, it was from under the wing of the second company that one of the most popular games of the time, Tank, was released in 1974, overtaking even Gran Track 10, another hit from Atari, released the same year.

On the wave of Pong's popularity, many imitators or, as it is commonly said today "clones," appeared, who paid no royalties to either Magnavox or Atari and produced their own versions of Atari Home Pong. By Christmas 1977, there were already over 60 Pong consoles and 13 million sold in the states alone. They were priced well below the originals, and in addition, other manufacturers, like Bushnell, began making their own games to get ahead in the race. Uncontrolled console production with a home version of Pong greatly overheated the market - even one of the cheapest at the time Coleco Telstar consoles with a price of fifty dollars, which managed to get as many as 14 versions, could not survive the fate of the first crisis of the gaming industry.

A year before the crisis, being squeezed from all sides by competitors, among which apart from Magnavox were Fairchild and Mattel, famous all over the world with Barbie dolls with the aim of making a portable version of the console, Atari was able to stay afloat only thanks to a deal with Warner Communications. The company was bought for 28 million dollars by the entertainment conglomerate and after the crisis of 1977, only two consoles were able to survive the storm - Magnavox Odyssey² (stylistically spelled exactly as a power of number) and Atari 2600, which can already be considered the consoles of the second generation. Just a year earlier, another event occurs that becomes a turning point for the industry - microprocessors come into it - consoles now have a cartridge-changing technology, arcade games reach new levels of performance, and the mass market finally gets access to computers. To understand why this was a turning point, one simple fact must be taken into account: the hardware of arcade machines was based on embedded TV and those circuits that were customized for specific tasks. Now even bank terminals are based on full-fledged operating systems but earlier, each arcade machine was actually built for a specific game or several built-in games, as in the case of consoles of that generation.