This is more of a flat out question, and although there may be some objective and factual answers I imagine a lot of people have their own opinion since there's bound to be some legitimate unknowns.  Me personally, I'm just not really sure and now the question is really eating at my curiosity.  Here's all I really know in vague chunks

• Arcades started in America and pinball machines were essential their predecessors.  But when did Arcades start in Japan?  And was the overlap unrelated?
• I know there were some home console attempts in the US before the NES came along, but the NES is where modern console gaming finally "launched."
• But why Japan?  Why did home console gaming appeal so much to Japan and the US?  Was it beause they were economically stable enough to have a financially able customer base?  Why didn't Europe catch on fire with this new entertainment like America (maybe "American consumerism?).

Well, computers were mass-produced since the 60's and became cheap enough to use them for entertainment in the 70's. Ok, stuff like PONG didn't even have a processor, but it became very important later.

Don't forget the Atari 2600 and home computers.

Yeah, I think on the hardware side we can give a lot more credit to America with mass computer production and then also the "cabinet" platform used for Pinball machines, and then eventually arcades.  But software-wise it seems like Japan was where creativity struck the most.

Or is Japan singled out too much in home console gaming when really it was mainly just one company that really set the industry on fire back then?

1. I don't know.

2. No. The first and second gen formed the third (NES). This created a market, showed the basics what to do. Nintendo was present and learned how to do things. And it showed the problems, with the gaming-crash. So I would say, without Atari and the others in first and second gen the NES would look different or wouldn't even happened. So console-gaming launched really with the the first two gens.

3. Japan was big enough to sustain a manufacturer alone and closed enough to stay mostly free of the influence of the gaming-crash. That's why Japan. The US is simply a big but mostly homogen market (same rules, same currency, same language) and also wealthy in a global scale. That's why it is a good target for every consumer-product. Europe may be wealthy, but it has different languages and had back then different currencies and different laws.

You also might want to look at these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_game#History

Beat me to it!

The Atari was my first system so I'm probably biased, but I think you could make an argument that the 2600 was the first video game console to really get the public's attention.  It wasn't the first console by any stretch (in fact, it was preceded by an entire generation) but was it not the first multi-million-selling console?  I'd have to check that to be sure.  But I know that, back in the day, it was the console to have (in terms of popularity).

Come to think of it, weren't the Atari's loadable cartridges a big deal at the time?  I'm not sure if the first gen even had any non-dedicated consoles.  Weren't they all dedicated platforms prior to the second gen?  This is going back before even my time, so I can't say for sure.

How...?

Are you a ghost?

NES was no more a modern console then its predecessors. The Atari VCS (later known as 2600) was the first widely successful cartridge based gaming console. Before that, the firs successful home gaming device was Atari's pong, the home version of the first successful video game ever, the arcade version of Pong. There are a variety of of game devices that predate Pong, most notably the Magnavox Oddyssey (first TV game, which had all of it's games hardwired in and required overlays for different in game environments) and the first commercially released game, Spacewar. They were bothcommercial flops, but they pave the way for the industry we know today.

The Fairchild F Channel was the first cartridge based system, also a flop. The first console war was between the Atari VCS, Colecovision and Intellivision systems, as well as about a half dozen other systems (or more) that are almost too numerous to mention.

I think the Vectrex arguably had the first aproximation to the "modern" game controller, but the NES pad is what most famously spawned what is now effectively the modern gaming controller.

Yeah, Williams Electronics (Defender, Joust) was a producer of pinball machines.

Japan (80's) and the USA (70's) dominated the micro chip industry. I think it's no coincidence that video games were established first in those countries.

Electro-mechanical games (mostly light-gun shooters and racing games) came from Japan in the late 60's (SEGA, Taito) and 70's (NAMCO, Nintendo, Konami). I probably forgot some companies... Companies like ATARI and Midway established them in the USA.

We have ATARI (home consoles and arcade machines) and the Magnavox Odyssey in the US in the early 70's with successful video games. Japanese companies like SEGA or Nintendo released their own hom console PONG clones a little later. SEGA also copied Magnavox games and created some new games. Well, there was a lot of copying from all sides...

Many of the Japanese companies that produced electro-mechanical games started to develop their own video games in the mid-late 70's/early 80's like Space Invaders, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong or Frogger. They also became very popular in the West and helped to establish a mass-market (Arcades + Atari 2600).

When I signed up, someone else had the name I wanted so I used angle brackets, not realizing the site would interpret my username as an HTML tag.  And now, it's kind of become my identity.  So, in short, yes... I'm a ghost.

Oh, and my username is in my sig.

Lol, cool.