The history of National Video Game Day is actually the history of video games. This history goes as far back as early 1900's. The first video game created was invented by William Higginbotham in 1958. The game he created was similar to the simple game of tennis.
The first arcade video game created was called computer space and it was created in 1971, introduced by Nutting society. In 1972, Atari introduced pong to arcade. Basically, the history of National Video Game Day is the history and development of video games.