Why did they choose Pong as the first video game and not The Odyssey

im very unsure but i think pong was the first made video game it took i think 1-2 years to get another one im not that old but im just giving you info on what i remember on G4  I wanna know, who are "they"? There was no choice about what the first video game would be. There just were no video games, and then there was one. The Odyssey was the first home TV video game system, and basically it was 'pong' as you would think of pong. It was a paddle game that looked just like pong on screen, it just wasn't called pong. It was invented by Ralph Baer around 1966, but not marketed until 1972 when The Odyssey was released by Magnavox, and that was the first home video game. Later that same year, Nolan Bushnell (Soon to be founder of Atari) released Pong. He claimed it was not a copy of Baer's game, but it seems obvious that it was.
Note also .. while The Odyssey (Pong) was the first home video game system, it was not the first video game, or first electronic game. The origins are not entirely clear, but the eariest known electronic game was "Tennis For Two", invented by a New York physicist named Willy Higinbotham around 1958, which was similar to pong. It was never marketed, but was on display and playable for two years.
Then, in 1962 the first 'computer game' was invented by a guy named Steve Russell at MIT. It was called "Spacewar", and was programmed into the PDP-1 computer (an early computer that cost $120,000.). It was a 2-player space battle game that played similar to Asteroids.
I learned these things from the book "High Score! The Illustrated History Of Electronic Games" by Rusel Demaria & Johnny L Wilson.
Ted Whitten