The Idea For Pac-Man Came While Eating Pizza.

National Video Games Day is observed annually on September 12th.

Video game players across the United States enjoy this day with much enthusiasm. From their very earliest days, video games been a blend of art form and industry.

• On July 25, 1983, Walter Day and the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard out of Ottumwa, Iowa founded the United States National Video Game Team. Their early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed the first patent for an interactive electronic device in 1947.  It was called the “Cathode ray tube amusement Device.”
• Some other early examples include:
  • The Nimrod computer at the Festival of Britain (1951)
  • 0X0 – a tic-tac-toe computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC (1952)
  • Tennis For Two – An electronic interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham (1958)
  • Spacewar (1961)
• Each game used a different means of display. Some used a panel of lights or graphical display. Yet others featured an oscilloscope or the DEC PDP-1 vector display.
• Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, in 1971, was the first commercially sold, coin-operated video game.
• Magnavox Odyssey was the first home console in 1972.
• Atari’s Pong followed with an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975.
  “The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop  Pong  clones and their own systems, spawning the video game industry.”
• The creator of Pac-man got the idea of the game while he was eating the Pizza. The shape of iconic Pac-Man came in his mind after he took a slice of pizza. 
• 3,333,360 Points Is The Max Score You Can Get In ‘Pac-Man’. The creators of Pac-Man did not know how the game ended as it was designed to run indefinitely. It was only when Billy Mitchell finished the game, after all its internal storage ran out, that they saw how it ended.
• Pokemon was inspired by butterflies!  As a kid, Satoshi Tajiri, the series’ creator, used to collect caterpillars and watched them turn into butterflies. He revealed that the Pokemon was inspired by butterflies!.
• Mario is one of the most popular video game of the history. But the name of the character was taken from the name of Mr. Mario Segale who was the landlord of Nintendo’s first warehouse
• The highest grossing video game of all the time is World of Warcraft. The game has made over 10 billion dollars over its life time.
• The classic coin-op Space Invaders was originally developed so that all the enemies moved at the same speed. However, as players destroyed the alien invaders the computer had fewer objects to draw, so it could render the objects faster. The result? As you destroy critters, the remaining ones “march” toward Earth faster.
• Many American public libraries carry video games as an attempt to lure teenagers into a library. The result is more teenagers coming to the library and books are being checked out at a rate that exceeds what it was before the gamers arrived.
• With over 25 billion hours (2.85 million years) of total game playtime, people have played call of duty for longer than the course of human existence.
• The surface area of Minecraft’s overworld (on the PC version) is approximately 9,258,235 times larger than that of the earth.
• Game Boy was the first video game console to be played in space by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov. The game he played was Tetris.
• The entire game of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is less than 1MB in size.
• Miyamoto believed “donkey” meant “stupid” in English, and assumed the name Donkey Kong would convey the sense “stupid ape” to an American audience. When he suggested this name to Nintendo of America, he was laughed at, but the name stuck.
• Rockstar Games hired a private investigator to locate the remaining relatives of one of the members of the Skatt Bros. in Utah in order to obtain license rights to the song “Walk The Night” for use in Grand Theft Auto IV.
• Scientists have shown that playing Tetris can ease cravings for sex, drugs, and food.
• After his mom died, Albert Ransom learned to code and built an indie game called CandySwipe. Two years later, a near-identical game called Candy Crush Saga was released.
• The average age of a person who plays video games is 30.
• Activision, the company behind the Call of Duty series, runs an endowment dedicated to finding employment opportunities and jobs training for veterans. The Call of Duty Endowment claims to have helped place over 25,000 vets in well-paying jobs since 2009.
• There is a hiding spot in Pac-man where you can sit still safely for as long as you like.
• Barack Obama campaigned in 18 games.   During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama purchased ad space in 18 games that ran in 10 states. The “Vote for Change” billboards were in Burnout Paradise, Skate, Madden, and more that targeted the demographic of ages 18 to 34.
• Puzzle and strategy games are the most popular genres among those who often or sometimes play video games.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Techlo Media

ID Tech

Fact Republic

Game Informer

Pew Research