The formulative years of video games consist of basic games that made use of interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example was in 1947, where the idea for a "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device" was conceived by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. The two filed for a patent on January 25, 1947, which was issued on December 14, 1948 as U.S. Patent 2455992.^[3] Inspired by radar displays, it consisted of an analog device that allowed a user to control a vector drawn dot on the screen to simulate a missile being fired at targets represented by drawings fixed to the screen.^[4] Other examples included the NIMROD computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain, Alexander S. Douglas's OXO for the EDSAC in 1952, William Higinbotham's interactive game called Tennis for Two in 1958, and MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen's Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961. Each game used different means of displaying the game: NIMROD used a panel of lights to play the game of Nim,^[5] OXO used a graphical display to play tic-tac-toe,^[6] Tennis for Two used an oscilloscope to display a side view of a tennis court,^[4] and Spacewar! used the DEC PDP-1's vector display to have two spaceships battle each other.^[7]

In 1971, Computer Space was released and was the first commercially sold, coin-operated video game. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, it used a standard television and game generated video signal for display (the game was featured in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green). It was followed in 1972 by the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. Modeled after a late 1960s prototype console developed by Ralph H. Baer called the "Brown Box", it also used a standard television and game generated video signal.^[4][8] These systems were followed by two versions of Atari's Pong; an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975.^[9] The commercial success of the arcade and home console versions of Pong spawned numerous Pong-clones and caused other companies to develop their own systems, spawning the video game industry.^[10]