 The ancestors to these games include the cathode @-@ ray tube amusement device , the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to incorporate a cathode ray tube screen . The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope , with a set of knobs and switches . The device uses purely analog electronics and does not use any digital computer or memory device or execute a program . It was patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith , Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947 . While the idea behind the game was potentially to use a television set as the display and thus sell the invention to consumers , as Goldsmith and Mann worked at television designer DuMont Laboratories , the patent , the first for an electronic game , was never used and the device never manufactured beyond the original handmade prototypes . This , along with the lack of electronic logic circuits , keeps the device from being considered the first video game . Around the same time as the device was invented , the earliest known written computer game was developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948 , a chess simulation called <unk> , though it was never actually implemented on a computer as the code was too complicated to run on the machines of the time . Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a real chess game against an opponent , but was never able to run the program on a computer . 
