My eighth year on this Earth was a good one, as I recall. I was in the third grade. I played softball in the Summer. And all throughout the year, I shot baskets in my backyard. What more could a kid want?
Well. Unbeknownst to me, there were a lot of good things just lying in wait out there in the big blue yonder. And on a Christmas morning to come, our family found such a thing.
You see. On November 29, 1972, Atari released Pong. Yes. Pong. It was a simple arcade ping-pong game. This would be the wonder game that ended up launching today’s massive video game industry.
Blip. Blip….. Blip. Blip…..
It wasn’t the first, as the idea of video games had come up before. Back in 1952, a Cambridge professor created OXO. It was a tic-tac-toe game on a screen. And then, in the late ’50s, engineer Ralph Baer suggested that home TVs could be used to play games.
But those were both experiments. Pong was the first game to truly break through.
Atari’s founders were Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. They hired engineer Allan Alcorn. They gave Alcorn what was supposed to be a practice assignment. They wanted him to make a better version of the ping-pong prototype they had seen at a trade show.
Alcorn took that little project all the way home. He added speed, strategy, and even a scoreboard. And that beautiful game, Pong, was born.
They had to test it. So Atari placed the game at a local bar called Andy Capp’s in Sunnyvale, California. Other arcade machines there pulled in about $10 a day. Pong made $40. The quarters poured in. Everyone loved that good old Pong.
Within a year, Pong machines were spreading to bars and arcades across the country. In 1977, Atari released a home version for its 2600 console.
And just like that. Millions of living rooms soon had a Pong match in progress, including ours. The console went on to sell more than 30 million units before being discontinued in the early 1990s.
Every game we know today, from Pac-Man to Mario, Fortnite to Zelda, can trace its roots back to that little dot bouncing between two paddles.
Pong wasn’t flashy by today’s standards. But it was like magic. And oh, it was incredibly fun.
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“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — George Bernard Shaw
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“Play is the highest form of research.” — Albert Einstein
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“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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