Dude, just look how cool this is. What an awesome feat of mega-early arcade engineering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qlfEuzj6U
I suppose this is as good a place as any to clarify my personal definitions about what is and is not, a video game. Jet Rocket is an electro-mechanical video PROJECTION game, and I count those. Under my definition, a video game is an electronic game that is designed around a video signal output to a screen that needn't be made of glass, by any means including projection. Playing Super Smash Brothers by way of a projector in a movie theater doesn't make it any less a video game. This makes the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device my answer for "the first known video game" as it is a fully designed game meeting those criteria, whether a prototype was ever physically made or not. Most games, after all, exist only as information. If you want to render this definition ridiculous, this also means that aiming a laser pointer at the floor and watching the cat pounce at the target is PROBABLY "a video game." It's just a poorly designed one with inconsistent rules. Anyway...
Jet Rocket is, as far as I'm aware, literally the first electrically powered flight simulator game, technically the first FPS video game (Shoot the Bear does not feature anything resembling a screen, though I guess it does at least employ a laser, I think?), and features primordial "in-world" movement in a way that at least qualifies it for consideration as the first "open-world" game. That's a HELL of a resume, and yet somehow we're not all talking about Jet Rocket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qlfEuzj6U
I suppose this is as good a place as any to clarify my personal definitions about what is and is not, a video game. Jet Rocket is an electro-mechanical video PROJECTION game, and I count those. Under my definition, a video game is an electronic game that is designed around a video signal output to a screen that needn't be made of glass, by any means including projection. Playing Super Smash Brothers by way of a projector in a movie theater doesn't make it any less a video game. This makes the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device my answer for "the first known video game" as it is a fully designed game meeting those criteria, whether a prototype was ever physically made or not. Most games, after all, exist only as information. If you want to render this definition ridiculous, this also means that aiming a laser pointer at the floor and watching the cat pounce at the target is PROBABLY "a video game." It's just a poorly designed one with inconsistent rules. Anyway...
Jet Rocket is, as far as I'm aware, literally the first electrically powered flight simulator game, technically the first FPS video game (Shoot the Bear does not feature anything resembling a screen, though I guess it does at least employ a laser, I think?), and features primordial "in-world" movement in a way that at least qualifies it for consideration as the first "open-world" game. That's a HELL of a resume, and yet somehow we're not all talking about Jet Rocket.