before they became ubiquitous in the second half of the 20th century were there any/many futurists or sci-fi writers that predicted the existence & popularity of video games?

by grapp
When_Ducks_Attack

Strangely, no. While Sci-Fi writers from the so-called "Golden Age" predicted (or caused to happen via their writings) many things in the future, one famous blind spot was personal computers.

To be sure, sci-fi had computers, usually vast room-sized behemoths that could do a million calculations a second. But while other technologies would shrink to ridiculous sizes (nuclear power generators that would fit in your hand), the computer never really did. Indeed, Isaac Asimov's legendary Foundation trilogy doesn't have computers at all. Robots, yes, but no computers.

Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is set in the colonized Moon, before, during and after a revolution. The Authority has but a single computer, named "Mike", to run everything from payroll to oxygen distribution. It is, of course, bigger than a house and buried deep beneath the surface.

In one of Arthur C Clarke's stories, the room-sized navigation computer for a spaceship fails. It falls to a man who's Japanese grandfather had taught him how to use an abacus to teach the crew how to do the calculations to generate a course to return to Earth. It's said to be "a hundred thousand calculations" that the computer could do a million times faster.

A story may have terminals to the main computer available, but stand-alone systems were never small enough to fit on a desk until the personal computer started to pop up in the '70s.

A good source for more reading is Science Fiction and Computing, edited by Ferro and Swedin.

Without personal computers, the video game concept never really popped up, though using the Master Computer to play music or view a show was common enough.

In a genre that predicted or caused to be created so many things, such as the waterbed, waldos, and even the cellphone in 1948, it's always surprising to me to realize how badly they missed on something that seems like would be such a natural concept for SF.