Infact the first computer game was made in 1958 by Willy Higinbotham who was a physicist. Willy made a working model, containing no transistors, but with vacuum tubes (though transistors were then available). His "Tennis" game-type was played at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for almost two years, and his game was more sophisticated than the Bushnell's ATARI Pong.
MIT student in 1961, creates "Spacewar"(the second video game), is the first interactive computer game on a Digital PDP-1 computer. The game is to control two tiny spaceships, one called the "WEDGE" and the other called the "NEEDLE" ,they battles around a tiny dot in the middle of the screen that represent the Sun. The game featured an accurate portrait of physics in outer space. Another student even corrected the star fields in the background to the scale !!
"Ralph Baer".
Working for a military contractor called Sanders Associates, in New Hampshire
in 1966, he had an idea for a new use for
televisions. He decided to create a console that would enable people to play
electronic games on their television sets.
Baer's first game was about putting out fires. The game involved a red box representing a house that was on fire. Players controlled the game with a lever that represented a water pump. If they pumped the lever fast enough, the box turned blue, meaning the fire was extinguished.
In 1967, Baer added a fun-loving engineer named Bill Rusch to his team. Rusch, came up with a better concept. In his game, players used "paddles" to catch and toss a dot across the screen. Rusch eventually modified the paddles so that they rejected the ball. Instead of playing catch, Rusch's game now played tennis.
Eventually, in 1971, Baer sold his game machine to Magnavox. Magnavox accepted Baer's technology but ignored his vision. Baer wanted to create a simple device that could retail for under $20; Magnavox programmed 12 games into the system, dressed it up with playing cards and plastic overlays that players could put on their television screens, and charged $100. They called the system the Odyssey.
The first prototypes of the Odyssey were finished in early 1972. In May, Magnavox started demonstrating them around the country at private showings.
Toward the end of the month, the Odyssey was shown at a trade show in Burlingame, Calif., just outside of San Francisco. One of the people who attented at the show was a young engineer named Nolan Bushnell, he saw the Odyssey and the games that it could played, and ONE of those game cought Bushnell's eyes...