It's a $20 plus billion industry today in USA, but the modern video game industry had a humble beginning.

A New Hampshire engineer named Ralph Baer came up with the breakthrough that got video games out of the lab into the living room. Baer's game was patented in 1968. By the 1970s, improvements in computing fuelled widespread development of video games. Electronic games first entered the consumer market in the early 1970s with the release of Atari's Pong arcade game that was first installed in a bar in Sunnyvale, CA for public playing. Soon other companies like Midway, an old-line maker of equipment for amusement parks, also started getting into the game, followed a year later by the launch of the first video game system for the home by Magnavox. A string of competing new and revamped systems then followed. For a decade US companies dominated both the arcade and video game markets till 1985 when a Japanese company, Nintendo, released its 8 bit Famicom console (re-branded as Nintendo Entertainment System for the US market). Another company, Sega, released its 8 bit Sega Master System in 1987.

In 1989, Nintendo's domination of the industry got even stronger when it introduced its video game equivalent of Sony's Walkman -- Game Boy. Thanks to Tetris, a puzzle game created by Alexy Pajitnov, Game Boy became an instant hit, selling 32 million units in its first three years.

Nintendo seemed unbeatable till Sony launched its own game platform, PlayStation, in the mid-1990s. And later Sony's plans for a next generation PlayStation, Playstation II, awakened the gaming instincts of another technology giant in Seattle, none other than Microsoft.

Today, the console game platform dominates the gaming industry in USA. During 2000's - it has been the story of Microsoft's Xbox beating Sony's PSII, or later PSIII going ahead of Xbox 360 or very recently, Nintendo's comeback through Wii.

By end of 2007, out of $7 Billion console video game market in USA, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo held approximate market shares of 56% / 27% / 17% respectively. Today Wii is the highest selling console in USA. Analysts predict that this trend will continue and PS3 won't beat Wii until 2011, while Microsoft XBox will trail behind both. See the graphical prediction by iSuppli.