Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed the patent on the 25th of January 1947. The United States Patent Office issued U.S. Patent 2455992 to them by the 14th of December 1948.
William Higinbotham engineered Tennis for Two using an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The game ran on an analog computer without any pre-existing software or digital code.
Ralph H. Baer developed the Brown Box prototype while working at Sanders Associates in 1966. Magnavox commercialized this technology as the first home video game console called the Magnavox Odyssey which released in 1972.
Revenues dropped from around four billion dollars in 1983 to less than one billion dollars by 1985. Many North American companies closed down during this collapse due to loss of publishing control and oversaturation.
The view that video games were an art form became cemented in 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. This ruling established that video games were protected speech with artistic merit.