This is considered - with official documentation - as the first electronic game device ever manufactured. It was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. The device was developed in the late 1940s and submitted for an US Patent by January 1947. The patent was granted December 1948, which also makes it the first electronic game system to ever receive a patent (US Patent 2,455,992).

As described in the patent, it consisted of an analog circuit device with an array of knobs used to control a dot that showed in the cathode ray tube display. The video game was created after how missiles appeared in WWII radars, and the object of the game was simply to control a "missile" that should hit a target. In the 1940s it was extremely difficult (for not saying impossible) to show graphics in a Cathode Ray Tube display.

The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Only the actual "missile" was showed on the display. All other graphics including the target were showed on screen overlays manually placed over the display screen. It is rumored that this gaming device was the inspiration of Atari's famous video game "Missile Command".

On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented at the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.

NIM is a two-player numerical game of strategy, which is believed to come originally from the ancient China. NIM game rules are simple: There are a certain number of "heaps" (groups of objects), and each group contains a certain number of objects (a usual starting array of NIM is 3 heaps containing 3, 4, and 5 objects each). Each player remove objects from the heaps in turns, but all removed objects must be from a single heap and the amount of removed objects is not 0. The player to take the last object of the last heap is the loser, but there is a variation of the game where the player to take the last object of the last heap is the winner.

NIMROD used a panel full of lights as a display and was designed and made with the sole purpose of playing a game called NIM, which makes it the first digital computer device to be designed exclusively for playing a game (however the main idea was to show and illustrate how a digital computer works, rather than as a way of entertainment and having fun). Because it doesn't have "raster video equipment" as a display (a TV set, monitor, etc.) it's been said that it does not qualify as a real "video game" (an electronic game, yes… a video game, no…). But once again, it really depends on your point of view when you talk about a "video game".

OXO was a computer-programmed version of "Tic-Tac-Toe", created for an EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer. It was designed by Alexander S. Douglas from the University of Cambridge, and once again it was not made for entertainment, it was part of his PhD Thesis on "Interactions between human and computer".

The rules of the game are those of a regular Tic-Tac-Toe game, player against the computer (no 2-player option was available). The device used as input was a rotary dial (like the ones in old telephones). The output was showed in a 35x16-pixel cathode-ray tube display. This game was never very popular because the EDSAC computer was only available at the University of Cambridge, so it was not possible to install it and play it in other places (until a long time later when an EDSAC emulator was created and distributed, and by that time many other great video games where available also…).

1958: Tennis for Two

This game was created by William Higinbotham, a scientist from the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was made as a way of entertainment, so laboratory visitors had something funny to do while they were waiting on "visitors day" (at last!... a video game that was created "just for the fun of it"…) . The electronic game was very well designed for its era: the ball behavior was modified by many factors like position/angle of contact, wind speed, gravity and so on; you had to avoid the net as in real tennis, and many other options. The game hardware also had two "joysticks" (two controllers with a rotational knob and a push button each) connected to an analog console, and an oscilloscope as a display.

Many people consider "Tennis for Two" the first video game ever created. But as before, other people differ from the idea as they said that "it was a computer game, not a video game" or "the output display was an oscilloscope, not a "raster" video display.

"Spacewar!" video game was created by Stephen Russell, with the help of J. Martin Graetz, Peter Samson, Alan Kotok, Wayne Witanen and Dan Edwards from MIT. During the 1960s, MIT was "the place to be" if your plan was to do computer research and development. So this half a dozen of ingenious guys took advantage of a brand-new computer was ordered and expected to arrive campus very soon (a DEC PDP-1) and started planning on what kind of hardware testing programs could be developed. When they discovered that a "Precision CRT Display" would be part of the hardware for the system, they all decided that "some kind of visual/interactive game" would be the demonstration software that would be perfect for the PDP-1. And after some discussion, it was soon decided to be a space battle game of some sort. After this decision, all other ideas started coming out very fast: like game rules, designing concepts, programming ideas, etc..

So after about 200 man/hours of design and programming, the first version of the game was at last ready to be tested. The game consisted of two spaceships (affectively named by players "pencil" and "wedge") targeting missiles at each other with a star at the center of the display (which "pulls" both spaceships because of its gravitational force). A set of control switches was used to control each spaceship (for missiles, speed, rotation, and "hyperspace"). A limited amount of fuel and missiles was available for each spaceship, and the hyperspace function was like a "panic button", in case everything else fails (it could either "save you or break you").