Bip Bop Boop
According to David Winter from PONG-Story, Ralph H. Baer conceived of the video game in 1951 and created the first one in 1966. PONG-Story says that
[a] video game is defined as an appartus that displays games using RASTER VIDEO equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. In the 1950s and 1960s, computers were not only exceedingly expensive, but used a technology that could not allow integrating them into a video game system. Only mainframes could allow playing a few games. These games qualified as COMPUTER games, not VIDEO games.
. . .
After several demonstrations to TV manufacturers, Magnavox signed an agreement in 1971 and the first video game system got released in May 1972: Odyssey. The history of PONG games and derivates just started, would spread all over the globe, and die in the early 1980s.
National Semiconductor released the Adversary 370 system in 1976 with three Pong variants: tennis, ice hockey, and handball. This version of ice hockey was the first video game I ever played. I have the system sitting next to me as I type this and I plan to play it for the first time in six years.
On the subject of computer games, PONG-Story tells us this:
In 1952, another person named A.S.Douglas was passing his PhD degree at the University of Cambridge (United Kindgom). At that time, the university had an EDSAC vaccuum-tube computer, which used a cathode ray tube to display the contents of one of the 32 mercury delay lines (which stored the programs and data). The display was organized as a matrix of 35 by 16 dots, hence a 35x16 pixel display. A.S. Douglas wrote his thesis on the Human-Computer interraction, and illustrated it with a graphic Tic-Tac-Toe game displayed on a cathode ray tube. This is the earliest graphical computer game known to exist.
My favorite computer game will always be Dogfight, which was available on the Apple ][ in the late 1970s. I haven't played that in at least twenty years.