History Overview

In 1949, an engineer named Ralph Baer was told to build a television set. He wasn't supposed to build television set; he was supposed to build the best television ever. This was no problem for Baer, but he wanted to go beyond his original assignment and put some kind of game into the set. He didn't know what kind of game he should put in, but it didn't matter because his managers said no about the idea. It would take 18 years for his idea to actually happen, and by that time there would be other people making games, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed a tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a simple space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer.

The history of video games is not just about people. It's about companies and ironies. Atari was an American company with a Japanese name, and the Japanese company Sega was started by an American. Phillips owns Magnavox, the company that started it all, and a company that is over a century old, and Nintendo, used to be a card company, that also made video games popular again, is just as old. And Sony, the company that invented all types of electronics, from transistor radios to video recorders, also released a video game console that would become its top-selling product of all time?