Therefore, to fully understand the dawn of the video game age, it is helpful to pause and look back on the first hundred years of coin-operated entertainment, roughly spanning the period from 1871 to 1971. In the period before cost-effective large-scale integration, an affordable, feature-rich home video game remained a nonviable proposition (yes, there was the Magnavox Odyssey, to be discussed later, but it was primitive and arguably did not deliver a good cost-to-game-play ratio), but the coin-op industry represented an outlet into which a company could sell a $1000-$2000 product to an operator for use by the general public, who would help the operator recoup his costs one quarter at a time.
The birth of the first viable electronic interactive entertainment industry in 1972 resulted from the convergence of two separate forces: computer technology that was finally becoming cheap enough to incorporate into a mass market entertainment product thanks to advances in integrated circuits, and a coin-operated entertainment business with well developed manufacturing and distribution channels across the United States, Western Europe, East Asia, and South America.
