Notably, Stewart Brands turn to computers was heavily influenced by seeing people playing Spacewar! at Stanford in Fall 1962.
"What I saw was an interaction around computers that was as intense as anything I saw around drugs or anything else that I knew. People were absolutely out of their bodies playing. It seemed that computers were doing everything that drugs had promised. Drugs were much more self-limiting than computers: the hackers had found something better than drugs, but theirs was the same bohemian frame of reference."
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/04/artsandhuma...
Ten years later, after editing the Whole Earth Catalog, he wrote "Spacewar – Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" (the famous Rolling Stone piece), which may have helped immensely in popularizing the idea of computer games.