Hello, Gamer's Friends! Today we play everything from GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 to Free Fire and PUBG, with hyper-realistic graphics that would have seemed like science fiction a few decades ago. But do you know which game came first, or how the console you're holding today actually came to exist? In this post, we're walking through the real, verified history of video games, from the very first playable game ever built to the release that changed open-world gaming forever: GTA.
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History of Video Games: From the World's First Game to the Rise of GTA
We now have games for PC, consoles, and phones covering every genre imaginable, but the roots of the industry go back further than most people realize, and the first "video games" looked nothing like what we play today. They ran on lab equipment, not consoles, and were built to demonstrate technology rather than to entertain. Here's how we actually got from that starting point to the games we play now.
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Tennis for Two: The World's First Playable Video Game (1958)
Tennis for Two is widely credited as the first video game ever built. It was created by physicist William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and first shown to the public on October 18, 1958, during the lab's annual visitors' day. The game ran on an analog computer and displayed a simple side-on view of a tennis court on a five-inch oscilloscope screen, essentially an early cathode-ray tube monitor. Two players used separate controllers with a dial and a button to lob a glowing dot back and forth over a "net."
Higinbotham built it in a matter of hours as a way to make the lab's exhibits more interactive, not as a commercial product, and he never patented it since it was created as a government employee. It disappeared after a couple of years once Higinbotham moved on to other projects, but it's still regarded by most historians as the first game built purely for entertainment rather than research or a product demo.
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After Tennis for Two, a handful of experimental games followed, mostly puzzle and academic projects, but none of them reached the public in any meaningful way. It would take over a decade, and a completely different approach, for video games to actually reach people's living rooms.
The Magnavox Odyssey and Pong: How Home Gaming Actually Began (1972)
This is the part of the story that most retellings get backwards. The game most people think of as "the first video game," Pong, wasn't actually first. Months before Atari's Pong hit arcades, an engineer named Ralph Baer had already brought video games into people's homes.
Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey
Working at Sanders Associates in the late 1960s, engineer Ralph Baer and his team built a prototype called the "Brown Box," the first multiplayer, multi-game system designed to plug into a television. Sanders licensed it to Magnavox, which released it commercially as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, the first home video game console ever sold. One of its built-in games, a simple tennis match, is the reason Baer is often called the "father of video games."
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That Odyssey tennis game matters because Atari's Nolan Bushnell reportedly played it at a Magnavox demo event before Atari built Pong. Magnavox and Sanders later sued Atari over it, and won. So while Pong is the game most people remember, the Odyssey narrowly got to market first, and effectively set the template Pong would run with.
Pong: The Game That Made Arcades a Thing
Atari's Pong arrived in arcades in late 1972, and it's the game that actually turned video games into a mass-market phenomenon. It kept the same basic idea as Tennis for Two and the Odyssey's tennis game, two paddles, one ball, but packaged it into a coin-operated cabinet that anyone could walk up to and play. That accessibility is what made Pong a hit even though it wasn't first.
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Pac-Man: The Game That Made Arcades Global (1980)
Pac-Man was developed by Namco's Toru Iwatani and first test-marketed in Japan on May 22, 1980, before a full Japanese release that July and a US release through Midway that October. You control Pac-Man through a maze, eating dots while avoiding four ghosts, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, unless you grab a power pellet, which briefly flips the chase around. It became one of the best-selling arcade cabinets of all time and turned Pac-Man into one of the first genuinely marketable video game characters, well before "gaming mascot" was even a concept.
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Want the full breakdown of Pac-Man's ghosts and how each one actually behaves? We've covered that in detail here: Pac-Man: Meet Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.
Duck Hunt: Bringing the Light Gun Into Living Rooms (1984)
Duck Hunt was developed by Nintendo and first released in Japan in April 1984 as an arcade cabinet, before arriving as a launch title for the NES in North America in October 1985, and in Europe in 1987. You control an unseen hunter and his dog, using the NES Zapper light gun to shoot ducks flushed out of the grass. Miss, and the dog laughs at you, which somehow made losing worse than the game itself. Bundled with Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt became one of the best-selling games of the era and a big part of why the NES caught on so fast in the US.
Super Mario Bros.: The Platformer That Rewrote the Rules (1985)
Super Mario Bros. launched in 1985 and reshaped what a video game could be. You play Mario, working through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser, running, jumping, and stomping through increasingly clever level design. It's still considered one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its influence is all over modern platformers, from level pacing to power-up design.
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Prince of Persia: The Rise of Cinematic Movement (1989)
Prince of Persia, released by Broderbund in October 1989, was designed by Jordan Mechner and built around rotoscoped animation, meaning the character's movements were traced from real footage of a person running, jumping, and climbing. That gave the Prince fluid, realistic motion that felt completely different from anything else on shelves at the time. Beyond the animation, the game leaned on puzzle-solving and precise platforming rather than pure action, a formula that later inspired everything from Tomb Raider to Assassin's Creed, which is even set in the same Prince of Persia universe lineage in spirit.
Tekken: The Arrival of 3D Fighting Games (1994)
Tekken was developed by Namco and released in arcades in December 1994, before landing on the original PlayStation in 1995. It started life as an internal Namco test for animating 3D character models, built on tech from the racing game Ridge Racer, but it turned into a full fighting game after Namco brought on developers with experience from Sega's Virtua Fighter. Tekken's four-button setup, one for each limb, gave it a more intuitive feel than most fighting games of the time, and it went on to become the first PlayStation game to sell over a million copies.
GTA: The Game That Redefined Open-World Freedom (1997)
The original Grand Theft Auto, developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North), launched in October/November 1997 on PC, with a PlayStation version following in December. Played from a top-down view across three fictional cities, it let you roam freely and pursue crime-driven missions instead of following a strict linear path, which was a genuinely new idea for a mainstream release at the time. Today's GTA V, and the upcoming GTA VI, are built on the same "go anywhere, do almost anything" foundation that this scrappy 1997 original established.
Curious what's coming next in the franchise? We covered the pre-order details separately: GTA 6 Pre-Orders Are Live in India: Price, Editions, Release Date & Everything You Should Know.
Quick Timeline: Milestone Games at a Glance
| Game | Year | Why It Mattered |
|---|---|---|
| Tennis for Two | 1958 | First playable video game, built purely for entertainment |
| Magnavox Odyssey | 1972 | First home video game console |
| Pong | 1972 | Made video games a mass-market arcade phenomenon |
| Pac-Man | 1980 | First globally marketable video game character |
| Duck Hunt | 1984 | Brought light-gun gameplay into homes via the NES |
| Super Mario Bros. | 1985 | Set the template for modern platformers |
| Prince of Persia | 1989 | Pioneered rotoscoped, cinematic character movement |
| Tekken | 1994 | Brought 3D fighting games into the mainstream |
| Grand Theft Auto | 1997 | Established the open-world, go-anywhere formula |
From CDs to Cloud Gaming: What Happened After GTA
After GTA, things moved fast. CDs gave way to DVDs, then digital downloads, and consoles evolved from single-purpose machines into full entertainment hubs that stream video, run apps, and connect online. If you want to see how far the hardware side of this has come, our GeForce NOW cloud gaming breakdown covers where that evolution stands right now, and our Top 10 Best Retro Games That Still Hold Up in 2026 is a good next stop if this history dive made you nostalgic for the older stuff.
Gaming's influence has also spread well beyond entertainment. Reaction-time and decision-making research increasingly uses game-based training, including in military and medical simulation contexts, and the old idea that games are simply bad for you doesn't hold up against that. Used in moderation, they're a genuinely useful skill-building tool, not just a distraction.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions About the History of Video Games
Q: What was the first video game ever made?
A: Tennis for Two, built by William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory and first shown to the public on October 18, 1958, is widely credited as the first video game.
Q: Who is considered the father of video games?
A: Ralph Baer is commonly called the father of video games. He created the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, the first video game console ever sold to consumers.
Q: When was Pac-Man made?
A: Pac-Man was first test-marketed in Japan on May 22, 1980, with a full Japanese release in July and a US release that October.
Q: What was the first battle royale game?
A: There's no single "first." The genre grew out of a DayZ mod for Arma 2 in 2012, built by Brendan Greene, later known as PLAYERUNKNOWN. H1Z1 (2015), later renamed Z1 Battle Royale, is generally seen as the first standalone battle royale release, and PUBG (2017) made the genre mainstream.
Q: When did the original Grand Theft Auto come out?
A: The original GTA launched on PC in October/November 1997, with a PlayStation version released in December 1997.
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