On October 18, 1958, the world's first video game was created! William Higinbotham and Robert Dvorak, Sr. showed off their tennis simulator game to a crowd at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was called "Tennis for Two" and was the first known electronic game to use a graphical display (they used an oscilloscope). Although the game was very similar to Pong, there is no known relationship between the two games.
On October 18, 1985, Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America. It was originally released in Japan in 1983 as the Famicom as a test. Upon release, the NES was a hit, as it was bundled with a friendly robot named R.O.B., and the NES is often credited as one of the reasons the United States recovered from the Video Game Crash of 1983. Nintendo sold 60 million+ units of the NES by the time it was discontinued in 1996.