Video games were invented in the early 1950s with the creation of several pioneering electronic games. Key early milestones include:
- In 1952, British engineer A.S. Douglas created "OXO," a simple tic-tac-toe game on a vacuum tube computer as part of his PhD research.
- In 1958, American physicist William Higinbotham developed "Tennis for Two," an interactive tennis game displayed on an oscilloscope.
- In 1962, MIT student Steve Russell developed "Spacewar!" which allowed two players to dogfight spacecraft on a computer screen.
These early games were experimental and created mainly in research labs, not commercially sold. The first commercial video game hardware came in the early 1970s with the Magnavox Odyssey home console and arcade games like Pong (1972). Thus, video games were invented and developed as experimental computer games in the 1950s and 1960s, later becoming commercial products in the early 1970s.
