Pong was not the first video game

I am just old enough to remember Pong, a mid-1970s black and white video game loosely based on tennis. Pong was the first video game that Americans were exposed to. For many years, I supposed Pong was the first video game ever created, but a book by John Hight and Jeannie Novak, Game Project Management, notes that "Naughts and Crosses," (British English for "Tic Tac Toe") actually predates Pong by more than two decades:

The first computer game was created by programmer A.S. Douglas in 1952 as part of his doctoral thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge. It consisted of simple naughts and crosses (tic tac toe) programmed on a vacuum tube computer called EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator). EDSAC was one of the first computers, and it literally filled a room. The programs were crude by today's standards: A few lines versus millions of lines of code. Douglas adapted EDSAC's monitor tubes to fashion a 35 x 16 pixel screen. ...

The text adds that the first video game system was developed in 1966 by Ralph Baer. The system, "TV Game," used "video signals to place game objects on the screen of an ordinary television set." Baer was also behind Magnavox's Odyssey system in the 1970s. I don't remember Odyssey, but I do remember Odyssey2 from the latter part of the decade.

Then there's Spacewar, started by three M.I.T. students in Cambridge in the early 1960s.

Of course, the big system from the 1970s was the Atari 2600, which all of the boys in my neighborhood were obsessed with for several years starting in 1978 or so. It was far more advanced than Pong, but the graphics seem primitive now. However, the gameplay on some titles was quite good -- I still remember Pitfall, Frogger, and a simple head-to-head tank war which had dozens of variations to choose from (obstacles, guided shells, etc.).