It’s hard to believe that PONG is a half-century old. But it was 50 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1972, when an upstart company in Santa Clara, California called Atari announced a crazy product: a ping-pong game played on a TV screen, mounted inside a wooden cabinet.
It was the second attempt by the company to carve out a new entertainment genre: the first was Computer Space, a video coin-op game the company had produced the previous year under the uncomfortable business name Syzygy. Sketched out by co-founder Nolan Bushnell and assembled by Al Alcorn, PONG would go on to massive success, creating an entire industry that, within a decade, would be worth $3.2 billion dollars.
This article was originally posted to The Dot Eaters on Nov. 29, 2012
On November 29, 1972, a recently incorporated company in California named Atari announced the release of its first product, an electronic video arcade game called PONG. Two players would stand at the wood-grain and yellow cabinet, twiddling the control knobs that moved two paddles displayed on a B&W TV screen. With the paddles they would play an electronically abstract game of table tennis, batting a little white blip back and forth in an attempt to “Avoid Missing Ball For High Score”, as the simple gameplay instructions prompted.
Conceived by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and designed by Al Alcorn, Pong was a smash success, giving birth to the video game industry. Fast-forward nearly 40 years later, in 2011 that industry was worth US$65 billion dollars.
This newfangled electronic Ping Pong thing comes home, 1975
Among other celebrations of Pong’s 40th birthday, an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest game of Pong was made on Nov. 16, 2012. A 22-story version of the game, complete with festive lighting, was played on the side of the Downtown Marriott hotel in Kansas City, MO.
In a lead-up to the anniversary, earlier this year Atari announced the Pong Indie Developer Challenge. Offering a grand prize of up to $100,000, the company solicited independent app developers to submit their take on the venerable Pong. The three winners were announced on Aug. 2, and they will participate in a profit sharing scheme divided between the three Pong apps that will see them collect royalties up to the winning prize amounts. The top winner, the freemium-based PONG World by zGames, can be snagged at the iOS App Store here.
Pong put Atari on the road to becoming the fastest growing company in American history. It’s no stretch to consider that when you say Pong is 40 years-old today, you’re also saying the video game industry is 40 years-old. So like those tipsy patrons of Andy Capp’s bar in Sunnyvale California, who played the original Pong prototype until it broke and convinced Bushnell and Atari to produce the game commercially, raise a glass to the grand-daddy of the video game industry. Your serve, PONG!
It’s hard to believe that PONG is a half-century old. But it was 50 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1972, when an upstart company in Santa Clara, California called Atari announced a crazy product: a ping-pong game played on a TV screen, mounted inside a wooden cabinet.
It was the second attempt by the company to carve out a new entertainment genre: the first was Computer Space, a video coin-op game the company had produced the previous year under the uncomfortable business name Syzygy. Sketched out by co-founder Nolan Bushnell and assembled by Al Alcorn, PONG would go on to massive success, creating an entire industry that, within a decade, would be worth $3.2 billion dollars.
Soon after dropping out of Reed College, in 1974 Steve Jobs became employee #40 at an up-and-coming company in California called Atari. He was a scruffy young man, who’s abrasiveness and questionable personal hygiene led management to put him on the night shift, so as to ruffle as few feathers as possible.
Even so, Jobs still managed to tick off a lot of people at Atari. Possibly seeing a lot of himself in Jobs, company co-founder Nolan Bushnell kept him around regardless. One day in 1976 he approached the young maverick and asked him to put together the hardware for a new variation of the company’s landmark game, PONG. In this new version, instead two players knocking a ball back and forth with paddles, a person could play alone, hitting the ball up against a wall of bricks at the top of the screen. Jobs was offered $750 for the job, with a $100 bonus paid for every microchip shaved off the design, therefore making the game cheaper to build.
It was Job’s friend Steve Wozniak who actually created the design for Breakout, spending four nights putting the game together with Jobs, all the while holding down his daytime job at Hewlett-Packard. The game turned out to be a big hit for Atari, and the two Steves would eventually break out on their own to create a little computer company called AppleComputer. The computer landscape would never look the same again.
While there were attempts at displaying games on CRT screens previous to it, William Higinbotham’s Tennis For Two could be considered the first video game that most resembled what was to come. A fun-loving type and avid pinball player, Higinbotham had designed parts for the first atomic bombs during the Manhattan Project. He subsequently moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY. There he developed Tennis For Two with the help of fellow technician Robert Dvorak, to be included at the 1958 annual open house at Brookhaven. Built using a Donner analog computer, Higinbotham’s game had players hit a blip of a ball at each other, over a net represented by a line in the middle of the screen. Sound familiar? The game was a smash, creating line-ups of people vying to have a go at computer tennis.
Tennis For Two made a return at the next year’s open house, with added upgrades such as a 17″ monitor and variable gravity effects. The game was then disassembled and used for other purposes. Higinbotham failed to patent his invention, which is probably a good thing. Since he worked for the U.S. government, they would have ended up owning the rights to video games!
There has been a long-standing debate between Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer as to who was the inventor of video games. Speaking strictly chronologically, one would have to give the title to Baer, who developed a TV video game system at defense contractor Sanders Associates in 1968, a system which was bought by Magnavox, named the Odyssey, and produced as a commercial home video game system in 1972. Based on its novelty, the Odyssey sold fairly well but didn’t exactly set the market on fire. That same year, however, Bushnell founded Atari and produced Pong, a similar, coin-operated video ping-pong game who’s runaway success firmly established the video game industry. To muddy the waters further, there is evidence that Bushnell was influenced by Baer’s invention when he conceived of Pong.
So for our purposes, we consider Baer to be the inventor of video games, and Bushnell to be the father of the video game industry. Such semantics and differing definitions of which is what gets muddled as time advances on, and so we are left with sniping of the sort we see in today’s What Nolan Said:
The quote is taken from an 2007 interview of Bushnell by the online arm of famed German newspaper Der Spiegel. The link points to the English version of the interview. The image is of Bushnell at the Bay Area Maker Faire in 2011, a festival celebrating invention and DIY culture hosted by Make magazine. It comes from cclark395’s flickr feed.
Out of the ashes of Computer Space, an unpopular first attempt at an arcade video game which was released by Nutting Associates in 1971, 27-year-old Nolan Bushnell, along with partner Ted Dabney, incorporated Atari, Inc. today in 1972. Their next attempt, the first game released by the new company, would be a slightly bigger success: PONG.
Bushnell and Dabney had created Computer Space under the auspices of an informal company they dubbed Syzygy, pronounced siz-eh-jee, a term meaning the Earth, Moon and Sun in perfect alignment. Thankfully a candle-making commune had already registered that name, so Bushnell took a term from the Japanese game Go he liked to play, and Atari was born.
Atari co-founders Ted Dabney (left of PONG) and Nolan Bushnell (right of PONG), with Al Alcorn far right
PONG was an instant success, a quicky paddle-ball video game hammered out by Atari employee Al Alcorn, the immense profits of which would carry the company for years. Five years later Atari would create the Video Computer System (later renamed the 2600) home console, which initially struggled but would eventually come to define home video games after the licensing of the Taito/Midway hit arcade game Space Invaders for the games machine. Bushnell eventually sold Atari to Warner Communications, and was muscled out by management in 1978. The name Atari became synonymous with home video games, with the company ruling the roost until the great video-game crash of 1983-1984 would utterly destroy the entire industry.
Atari was eventually split into two companies: industry stalwart Jack Tramiel, fresh off his departure from Commodore, would pick up the consumer division of Atari in 1984 to form Atari Corporation, with Warner continuing the arcade division separately as Atari Games, Inc.. They would eventually sell to Namco in 1985. The Tramiel-led Atari would move more deeply into computers with the Atari ST line, while Atari Games made such arcade games as Marble Madness (1984), Super Sprint (1986) and Hard Drivin’ (1989).
Atari Games logo, 1998
Tramiel eventually merged Atari Corp with hard drive manufacturer JTS, who in turn sold remaining assets to Hasbro in 1998 for a paltry 5 million dollars. French software maker Infogrames would end up purchasing Hasbro in 2000, and rebrand the entire company using the Atari, Inc. name in 2001. Coming around in a neat circle, Nolan Bushnell eventually joined the board of Atari in 2010.
So raise a glass to the company that created the video game industry, 40 years young today.
Here’s my path through gaming history. It most likely started with me and my sister in the lobby of a motel my family was staying at on vacation one year, probably in Miami or Fort Lauderdale. They had a sit-down PONG machine, and we spent a lot of time batting that little white dot back and forth. On another Florida vacation, I remember being at the heels of my mother, shopping at a grocery store that almost certainly Winn Dixie. I saw a tall machine with a big scope standing off to the side, with an apple box conveniently placed so little ones could reach. This was, of course, Sea Wolf. I drifted over to climb up and peer into the scope, and after hitting a few buttons on the console to my surprise the game started up; someone had left a credit in it. Sweeping left and right with the scope, I did my best to sink ships while avoiding the floating mines, trying to line up a shot on that pesky, speedy PT boat.
One day in the back seat of the car one fall, thumbing through the real Christmas bible, aka the Sears Wish Book, I saw the Atari VCS. And all those games! “Mom, can I have this for Christmas?”, I asked. The answer was unexpected. Instead of a “Heck no!”, I got a “maybe”. My parents had to drive a couple of hours to over the border, and pay 400 bucks for it, but I got an Atari under the tree that year.
A couple of years later I sold it at a huge loss for a ColecoVision, the epiphany of which I describe in this article on the site, here. Then I migrated to computer gaming, selling the Coleco at another big loss to buy a Commodore Vic-20. It would be over 20 years until I tried console gaming again. Next, of course, came the C-64. Then I got an Amiga 500. The Amiga was an amazing computer, which I will talk about in an article coming soon. Then an Amiga 600, and as Commodore and the Amiga regrettably went bust, I went dormant for awhile, until picking up a Pentium II somewhere along the line, then moved up the rank building ever-increasingly faster PCs.
Big things, small packages
I finally broke my console exile with the Wii… I was fascinated by the control scheme. From there, I picked up a PS3 and fell in with a great group of gamers over at The Beautiful Peoples Club, an organization for gamers over 30. These days, if I do gaming on the computer it’s with the sorry selection available for my 27″ iMac, although with Steam now supporting the Mac things have gotten better on that front. But still, mostly Team Fortress 2.
So that’s my long, strange trip. Hopefully I’ll live long enough to take a run through a holodeck someday.
