timeline of video games and consoles

Nimatron
A purpose-built computer that allows one to play the game Nim. It was first presented in April 1940 at the 1939 New York World's Fair purely as a form of entertainment. Designed in the winter of 1939 by Edward Condon for the sole purpose of entertaining, it is a digital computer composed of electromechanical relays which allows the lighting of four lines of seven bulbs. Each player can turn off one or more of them in any line, then the machine takes a turn, and so on. The last to extinguish a light is the winner. The reception of the machine during the fair was positive and was a success with nearly 100,000 games of Nim played. It is considered the first fully constructed computer game and the first computer dedicated to the game of Nim, but its impact on digital computers and computer games is negligible. John Makepeace Bennett nevertheless was inspired to design the Nimrod, a similar machine considered as one of the precursors of the video game, in 1951.

Cathode-ray tube amusement device.
The device simulates an artillery shell arcing towards targets on a cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen, which is controlled by the player by adjusting knobs to change the trajectory of a CRT beam spot on the display in order to reach plastic targets overlaid on the screen.

Bertie the Brain.
Bertie the Brain was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter (13 foot) tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity. Kates built the game to showcase his invention, the "additron tube" - a full binary adder vacuum tube. It was never put into production.

Nimrod.
Built in the United Kingdom by Ferranti for the 1951 Festival of Britain, was an early computer custom-built to play Nim, inspired by the earlier Nimatron. The twelve-by-nine-by-five-foot computer, designed by John Makepeace Bennett and built by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams, allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of Nim against an artificial intelligence. The player pressed buttons on a raised panel corresponding with lights on the machine to select their moves, and the Nimrod moved afterward, with its calculations represented by more lights. The Nimrod was intended to demonstrate Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than to entertain, though Festival attendees were more interested in playing the game than the logic behind it. After its initial exhibition in May, the Nimrod was shown for three weeks in October 1951 at the Berlin Industrial Show before being dismantled.

Oxo programmed on the EDSAC computer by A.S. Douglas.

Draughts program originally written on EDSAC by Christopher Strachey and ported to Ferranti Mark 1.

Tennis for Two allowed two players to compete in a tennis simulation displayed on an oscilloscope.

Spacewar! developed by Steve Russell and others on a DEC PDP-1 Minicomputer. The first known video game to be played in multiple locations.

Marienbad. An adaptation of the game Nim created by Witold Podgórski for the Odra 1003 computer. The game had players opposing the computer in alternating rounds of removing matches from a set, with the last player to take a match the loser. As the computer always played the optimal moves, it was essentially unbeatable.

The Sumerian Game - a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. The first game to be designed by a woman, Mabel Addis.

Baseball simulation written by John Kemeny.

BASIC Bingo written by Larry Bethurum.

Basketball Simulation written by Charles R. Bacheller.

Hamurabi. A text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language. The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. Inspired by the earlier Sumerian Game. BASIC version released in "101 BASIC Games".

Space Travel is an early video game developed by Ken Thompson that simulates travel in the Solar System.

Lunar Lander (original text based game)

Galaxy Game was the first attempt at a commercial video game console.

Computer Space was the first arcade video game and the first commercially available video game.

Star Trek by Mike Mayfield.

Magnavox Odyssey designed by Ralph H. Baer allowed the owner to play 28 different games, 13 of which were included on the console and the remainder distributed on 11 different game 'cards'. It also had peripherals - two controllers and a light gun. The console produced no sound and did not track scores which had to be done manually by the players.

Pong designed and manufactured by Atari.

Hunt the Wumpus by Gregory Yob.

Lunar Lander (Graphical version)

One of the first BASIC game program compilation books, "101 BASIC Computer Games", was released.

PLATO based multiplayer games.

"The Dungeon" or pedit5 (PLATO).

"Game of Dungeons" or dnd (PLATO).

Moria first-person perspective written (PLATO).

Colossal Cave Adventure (Adventure) by Will Crowther.

Empire by Walter Bright.

Oubliette (PLATO multiplayer) first person perspective.

Moria copyrighted. A pioneering game, allowing parties of up to ten players to travel as a group and message each other, dynamically generating dungeons (instead of pre-computing them), and featuring a wireframe first-person perspective display.

BASIC Computer Games published. This was a reprint of the original "101 BASIC Computer Games" published in 1973. The first computer book to sell over 1M copies.

Avatar first-person perspective (PLATO).