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»As early as 1951, a young 29-year old TV engineer named Ralph Baer worked at Loral, a TV company. His Chief Engineer, Sam Lackoff, asked him to Build the best television set in the world. Designing a TV set was an easy task for Ralph, and he wanted to add a new concept that his boss did not understand: playing games on the television set. The video game concept was born, but could not be implemented since the boss refused the idea. In September 1966, Ralph came back to his 1951 idea of playing games on TV sets and started building the first video game prototypes. Therefore, Ralph Baer is accordingly credited as the inventor of the video game.

1947, however, is believed to be the first year when a game was designed for playing on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). This very simple game was designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann. A patent application was filed on January 25th, 1947 and U.S. Patent  #2 455 992 issued on Dec 14th, 1948.« (via)