 Throughout the rest of the 1960s , digital computer games were created by increasingly numerous programmers and sometimes sold commercially in catalogs . As the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers , and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created , a wider variety of games began to be developed . Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry with the display of the coin @-@ operated arcade game Galaxy Game and the release first widely available arcade game Computer Space , and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game Pong and the first home video game console , the Magnavox Odyssey , which launched the first generation of video game consoles . 
