General Discussions

National Video Games Day is observed annually on September 12th.

Video game players across the United States enjoy this day with much enthusiasm. From their very earliest days, video games have gone on to become an art form and industry.

There was, at one time, a United States National Video Game Team, founded on July 25, 1983 in Ottumwa, Iowa, by Walter Day and the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard.
The early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example: 1947 – “Cathode ray tube amusement Device” was filed for a patent on January 25, 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.

Some other early examples include:

The Nimrod computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain
0X0 – a tic-tac-toe computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC in 1952.
Tennis For Two – 1958 – An electronic interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham.
1961 – Spacewar

A different means of display was used for each game from a panel of lights to a graphical display to oscilloscope or the DEC PDP-1′s vector display.

Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, in 1971, was the first commercially sold, coin-operated video game.
Magnavox Odyssey was the first home console in 1972.
Atari’s Pong followed with an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975.
“The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, spawning the video game industry.”



CELEBRATE

Get out your favorite system and spend your time gaming. Today is also a day to try a new game. Use #NationalVideoGamesDay to post on social media.

I have a great stupid question (to take with several grains of salt):

Do we all have to go to 'Ottumwa, Iowa' to celebrate?

I think it might be a little late for this year.

Never-the-less, I remember playing Pong in 1979, and it was still "hot"

Thanks for those refreshing information and encouragements to play more