The history of video games goes as far back as the 1940s, when in 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Este Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a "cathode ray tube amusement device." Video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. There are currently considered to be eight generations of video game consoles, with the seventh and the eighth concurrently ongoing.
Early Founders
During the golden age of video games in the 1970s, it was a rush to the start to see which company and which programmer could create a video game and platform that could trump the rest. However, most large video game manufacturers can trace their roots far before that decade, reaching back into the early 1900s or even the late 1800s. While some video game companies, such as Nintendo and Sony, would begin their economic pursuits in other fields, companies like Atari and Sega were created with an eye toward producing the ultimate gaming system.
The first major video game company to come into being was Nintendo, which would eventually make video games popular again in the 1980s. Nintendo is a Japanese company that was created in 1889 and was originally named the Marufuku Company. In 1951, this company, which manufactured Western-style playing cards in Japan, would take the name Nintendo, meaning “leave luck to heaven. In 1891, the Philips Company, owner of Magnavox and an important frontrunner in the video game production race, was established in the Netherlands. In 1947, another major video game icon was founded under the name Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company. After the founders realized this name was too cumbersome to say and remember easily, they modified the Latin word