When was the first video game made?

Early experiments date back to the late 1940s and 1950s, but Tennis for Two, shown on an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory in October 1958, is widely cited as the first game made purely for entertainment. In 1962, students at MIT created Spacewar!, which ran on a PDP-1 computer and spread to university labs. The first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, went on sale in 1972. That same year Atari released the arcade game Pong, which became the first big commercial hit and kick-started the video game industry. Today gaming is a business worth well over 180 billion dollars a year.