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The 1st video game came out in about ' 68  . It was called Pong and it was very rudimentary. It was a black screen with two verticle small rectangles that were supposed to be ping-pong balls. There was a white vertical line down the middle that was supposed to be like a net on a ping-pong table. You were supposed to shoot your '' ball '' across the table . Some of them were more like hockey. It looked like I described, only without the white deviding line. It had like a net a each end and you would try to get your white blob over there to the net. Then, they came out with those verticle rockets that you would try to shoot up and miss the astroids and all that.  Now, we're in the  70s, and video games started to look like the ones we know now days. They had Pac Man , those cute little yellow round circles that would open their mouth and try to eat cubes , or what, to get thru a maze. My nephew , who was a kid in the 70s and mostly the 80s, preferred Pac Man to just about any other game, no matter how sophisticated the games got.

Before the era of electronic ping pong, hungry yellow dots, plumbers, mushrooms, and fire-flowers, people waited in line to play video games at roller-skating rinks, arcades, and other hangouts. More than fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play “Tennis for Two,” an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game.   Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958.

 From:  http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp