Video gaming today is a blockbuster industry, complete with top-of-the-line graphics that look as close to real life as possible. But for many, their gaming history started with just two lines and a dot, playing a game that celebrates its 45th anniversary this year – Pong.
One of the earliest arcade games, Pong first arrived in 1972. It was the first game developed by Atari, a company that would be synonymous with video games throughout much of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell tasked developer Allan Alcorn with developing a table tennis game simply as a training exercise, but the quality of Alcorn’s product was so impressive that the company decided to manufacture it for the mass market.
Pong is, by today’s standards, extremely simple. There are two “paddles” at either end of the screen, and they bounce a dot representing the ball between them. Score is kept track at the top of the screen via blocky digits. Alcorn’s programming of the paddles gave the game more depth, though, as the paddles were actually divided into eight small segments that returned the ball back at different angles. Notably, the paddles themselves were unable to actually reach the top of the screen – this was actually due to a defect in one of the circuits, but was left in the game for the sake of added difficulty.
After developing a prototype cabinet, the folks at Atari decided to test out Pong in a local bar, where it was an immediate hit. The bar actually called Atari after a few days due to some technical problems – but the problem itself was that the coin slot was too full of quarters from people wanting to play the game. By November of 1972, the arcade version of Pong started to roll out across the U.S., and it shipped internationally the following year.
The first home version of Pong released exclusively through Sears in 1975 and was branded with the Sears “Tele-Games” name; Atari released a version with their own branding the next year. The gaming industry quickly responded to the success of Pong with dozens of clones in order to try and capture the same sort of success that Atari was enjoying. Atari themselves would remake the game for a number of different platforms. The success of Pong led to the development of the equally-successful Breakout, a single-player variant of the game where the goal was to bounce a ball up against a tiled wall.
Simple though it may have been, Pong was the original benchmark for success in the video game industry by which many others were compared. It was the first arcade video game to see mass market success and helped pave the way for the rest of the industry’s success over the last four and half decades.