The First Gaming Console - Magnavox Odyssey

Some Background:

The Military’s Top Secret Brown Box Project: 
In 1966 Ralph Baer, Chief Engineer for Equipment Design at the defense contractor Sanders Associates, began work creating a technology where a simple game could be played on a television monitor. One year later this became a reality when Baer and his team created a simple game consisting of two dots chasing each other around the screen.

The government continued funding the now top secret Brown Box project as a military training tool. Baer’s team continued their innovations improving the tech and also creating the very first video game peripheral - a light gun that would work with the TV system.

Brown Box to The Odyssey:

The plan to use the Brown Box for military training didn’t quite work out. Six years later the top secret status was dropped and Sanders Associates licensed the tech to electronics company Magnavox. The Brown Box was renamed, slightly redesigned and released as the very first gaming console system for the home market - the Magnavox Odyssey – and An Industry was Born.

In 2006 President George W. Bush presented Ralph Baer with the National Medal of Technology award for inventing the home video game console. It was on the February 13, 2006, Baer was given a National Medal of Technology, in honor of his "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games"

Perhaps the reason, for Ralph Baer to be called the Father of Video Games.

As it reads in the manual, “With Odyssey you participate in television, you’re not just a spectator!”

History of Electronic Gaming ( ...... 1940's)

Well it all Started around 60 years back (1940's).

In the 1940's, while specializing in the developments of cathode ray tube readings of electronic signal outputs (used in the development of televisions and monitors) physicists Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann came up with the idea of creating a simple electronic game inspired by World War II radar displays. By connecting a cathode ray tube to an oscilloscope and devising knobs that controlled the angle and trajectory of the light traces displayed on the oscilloscope, they were able to invent a missile game that, when using screen overlays, created the effect of firing missiles at various targets.

By 1947, Goldsmith and Mann submitted a patent for the device, calling it the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, and were awarded the patent the following year, making it the first ever patent for an electronic game.

Unfortunately, due to the equipment costs and various circumstances, the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device was never released to the marketplace. Only handmade prototypes were ever created.

Components of the Device: 
Cathode-Ray Tube: Used to Create and adjust the electronic signal. 
Oscilloscope: To Display the electronic signal via rays of light on a monitor. 
Screen Overlays: The graphics of the game, printed on a clear overlay that attach to the oscilloscope screen. Screen overlays were later used for the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. 
Controller knobs: Was used to Adjust the angle and movement of the light beams on the Oscilloscope.

The Worlds First Video Game! Yup ...   

Although the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device is indeed the first patented electronic game and is displayed on a monitor, many do not consider it an actual video game. The device is purely mechanical and does not use any programming or computer generated graphics, and no computer or memory device is used at all in the creation or execution of the game.

Five years later, Alexander Sandy Douglas developed artificial intelligence (AI) for a computer game called Noughts and Crosses, and six years after that Willy Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two, the first publically displayed computer game. Both of these games use an oscilloscope display and are in the mix to take credit as the first video game, but neither would exist without the discoveries and technology created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.

Trivia:

• Aside from the patent and some prototype schematics, there is no known working model of the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device in existence.
• Co-Inventor Thomas T. Goldsmith went on to become one of the pioneers of television, starting out as the Vice-President; Director of Research for DuMont, the world's first commercial television network. 

Gaming has advanced a lot in the past years, Come back to read more on the same . . . . . .