Pong (electronic game)

Pong is a pioneering electronic game created by Atari in 1972. The game plays like a simple form of table tennis, with players controlling moving “paddles” that direct a “ball” back-and-forth across the screen. It began as a test project for a new programmer at Atari and became so popular upon its release that it was soon featured in bars, restaurants, and college campuses across the country. While not the first commercially produced video game, Pong was the first to be successful and is often credited with being the starting point of the modern video game industry. The game was eventually manufactured for home use in 1975 and spawned a lawsuit along with a series of imitators. In recognition of its impact on both the computer industry and American culture, Pong has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame, and an original game cabinet is part of the collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Background

With the development of the earliest electronic computers in the 1940s and 1950s, programmers often created games to test the limits of the machines and demonstrate their capabilities to the public. In 1958, physicist William Higinbotham created a game called Tennis for Two as a way to impress visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Higinbotham’s game, which was displayed on an oscilloscope—a device for measuring electrical output—featured a bouncing dot that could be hit back and forth between opponents by pressing a button. Though never released to the public, Tennis for Two is often considered the first true video game.

In the early 1960s, a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a game in which two spaceships took part in a dogfight in space. The aptly named Spacewar! became a sensation on the MIT campus and was soon shared with other computer programmers at universities across the country. Despite its popularity, the game could only be played on large mainframe computers such as those found in colleges and research laboratories.

In 1966, an electronics engineer named Ralph Baer began working on a way to make computer games accessible to home audiences. Baer developed technology that allowed a player to control a dot on a home television screen. From this innovation, he created a prototype home video game system that was sold by the Magnavox electronics corporation in 1972 under the name Magnavox Odyssey.

Overview

In the mid-1960s, Nolan Bushnell was an electrical engineering student at the University of Utah when he was introduced to the game Spacewar! at the campus computer lab. He was so fascinated with the game that he would often sneak into the lab at night just to play it. Bushnell had the idea to combine an electronic game such as Spacewar! with the pinball games popular in coin-operated arcades, but the technology was not available at the time. After graduation, Bushnell met fellow electrical engineer Ted Dabney and together they developed a method that could create moving dots and shapes on a screen by using smaller circuit boards instead of large computers. Using this technology, they released the first coin-operated video game, Computer Space, in 1971. The game was very similar to Spacewar!, but proved to be too complicated for the average user and failed to catch on with the public.

In 1972, Bushnell and Dabney officially formed a new company called Atari in the northern California city of Sunnyvale. That same year, Bushnell attended a commercial demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and noted the system’s version of a table tennis game. Bushnell did not think much of the game but told newly hired employee, Al Alcorn, to create a similar game as a way of testing Alcorn’s abilities. Alcorn was given instructions to come up with an inexpensive game that used fewer than twenty computer chips.

Alcorn worked on the project for three months. His game featured two lined segmented “paddles” that could be moved vertically on either side of the screen. When the dot, or “ball,” hit a paddle, the ball bounced off at an angle. Players needed to move their paddle to intercept the ball. If they missed, the opposing player scored a point. The first player to get eleven points won the game. Alcorn also added an electronic “blip” sound whenever the ball hit a paddle or bounced off the top or bottom of the screen. At first, Alcorn thought that he had failed his task because he had to use more than seventy chips in creating it; however, Bushnell was so impressed with the game that he decided to market it.

The game, now dubbed Pong, was built into an orange wooden cabinet and placed at a local tavern in Sunnyvale. Within a week, the bar manager called Alcorn to say that the machine was broken. Worried that his game couldn’t stand up to continued use, Alcorn showed up to fix it only to find the “problem” was its coin box was full of quarters. Bushnell knew that Atari had a hit on his hands and, after a few adjustments—including replacing the cabinet’s orange color with yellow—decided to manufacture and distribute the game.

Pong was such a success that each game could earn about $40 a day—an unprecedented amount for a coin-operated game at the time. By the end of 1973, Atari had received orders for 2,500 Pong units and by 1974 more than 8,000 units had been sold worldwide. While the game became a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s, Atari only sold about 12,000 total units. The company never sought a patent for the game, and, as a result, imitators often sold their own versions of Pong. In 1974, Atari developed a home console version of Pong, and, partnered with the retail giant Sears, sold about 150,000 units after its Christmas 1975 release.

By this time, the success of Pong had attracted the attention of Ralph Baer and Magnavox, which had a patent for its table tennis game. Magnavox sued Atari, but rather than face a costly court battle, Bushnell settled. He agreed to pay a licensing fee to Magnavox, which allowed Atari to continue selling its home consoles. Eventually, the Pong consoles were overtaken by the next wave of game technology, video console systems that used interchangeable cartridges. These systems allowed users to play a host of new games, rather than just one. Atari continued to make sequels to Pong, including a version that allowed doubles play and another where a player could direct the ball to break through a wall of bricks.

Bibliography

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“The Father of the Video Game: The Ralph Baer Prototypes and Electronic Games.” Smithsonian Institution, www.si.edu/spotlight/the-father-of-the-video-game-the-ralph-baer-prototypes-and-electronic-games/video-game-history. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.

Hansen, Dustin. Game On!: Video Game History from Pong and Pac-Man to Mario, Minecraft, and More. Macmillan Publishing, 2016.

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Modany, Angela. “Pong, Atari, and the Origins of the Home Video Game.” National Museum of American History, 14 Apr. 2012, americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2012/04/pong-atari-and-the-origins-of-the-home-video-game.html. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.

“Pong.” World Video Game Hall of Fame, 2019, www.worldvideogamehalloffame.org/games/pong. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.