What Are the Origins of Video Games?

With the Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii consoles for playing games on your TV, and the new and impressive changes being made to computer games and computer hardware, we lose track of video game origins.  The first video game, computer game, and video game console were the first of the games and consoles we view as commonplace today.  Here is a brief set of "firsts" for the video gaming world:

The first video game:  The first true recorded video game was a game called Tennis for Two (which later evolved into Pong).  It was a tennis-style sports game created in 1958 by William Higinbotham, and actually used a monochrome oscilloscope as it's display!  Higinbotham designed the game with two control boxes with knobs so each player could control their in-game paddles located on the sides of the oscilloscope.  The control also included a button to serve the ball.  The true technical marvel used in Tennis For Two utilized a simple analog computer to display the "tennis ball" as a blip of light on the oscilloscope's screen, and to calculate the ball's trajectory.
The first computer game: Three men named Steve Russel, Alan Kotok, and Peter Sampson, all students at MIT, created the first computer game called Spacewar! in 1962.  It was a combat game which took place in space, where the players fought each other in their own spaceships.  It was built on the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-1 computer and featured a moving background, non-player obstacles, and synthesized music.
The first video game console (television gaming apparatus): was the Brown Box invented by Ralph Baer in 1968.  Millions of TVs existed in the United States in the late 1960’s, but they were only used for viewing radio broadcasts.  Ralph Baer determined that he could create a gaming apparatus that could be hooked up to the televisions and allow people to play interactive games with a piece of hardware using their televisions as video displays.  The design was ultimately purchased by a company called Magnavox, which bought the concept device from him, fine-tuned it, and made it into the first commercially sold video game console: the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972.  Among the first game options were a light-rifle shooting game, a baseball game, a volleyball game, and a racing game.  Other educational options--though not "games" in their definitive sense--were available as well, such as an interactive US States study map.

Source: Supercade- A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 (Van Burnham)
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