Pong

• 1. Introduction

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  Pong, the arcade game Atari launched in 1972, once stopped working in a bar for a nearly comic reason. The owner reported technical trouble, and engineer Allan Alcorn came to repair the prototype he had built. He opened the cabinet expecting a fault in the circuitry. Instead he found the coin mechanism so crammed with quarters that it had overflowed.

  That jammed coin box was an early sign of something nobody at the company had planned for. Pong was the first commercially successful video game, and it came from a machine with two paddles and a ball. Who built it, and why was it ever made? How did a prototype in a bar turn into a factory floor, and then into a product sold in department stores? Why did a rival company take Atari to court, and why did dozens of competitors copy the game almost overnight? And what kept people feeding it quarters, and keeps them talking about it decades later?

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• 2. A Secret Warm-Up

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  In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Syzygy Engineering, hoping to attach a coin slot to a computer with a monitor. Inspired by the game Spacewar!, the pair built Computer Space, which sold poorly. Bushnell then decided to start a company that would license game ideas to others. Its first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation, for a pinball game and a video game that Bushnell described as hockey themed.

  Soon after, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn, whom he and Dabney had known at the electronics firm Ampex. Alcorn was a strong electrical engineer with computer science training. Video games were new to him.

  Bushnell handed him what he privately saw as a warm-up exercise. He told Alcorn that a contract with General Electric called for a simple game: one moving spot, two paddles and digits to keep score. Alcorn tried reading Bushnell's schematics for Computer Space and found them illegible. He drew his own designs instead, using his knowledge of transistor-transistor logic.

  Alcorn judged the basic game too dull, so he added touches of his own. He split each paddle into eight segments that sent the ball back at different angles. The center segments returned it at 90 degrees to the paddle, while the outer segments produced shallower angles. The ball also sped up the longer a rally lasted, and a miss reset the speed.

  A defective circuit meant the paddles could never reach the top of the screen. Alcorn chose to keep the flaw. It made the game harder, and he reasoned that two skilled players could otherwise rally forever. The goal was simple: reach eleven points before your opponent.

  Three months into the work, Bushnell asked for realistic sound effects and a roaring crowd. Dabney wanted the machine to boo and hiss whenever a player lost a round. Alcorn had little space for extra electronics and no idea how to make such sounds digitally. Then he examined the sync generator and found that it could produce several tones, and he put those to work as the game's sound.

  For the prototype, Alcorn bought a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television from a local store. He set it inside a 4 ft wooden cabinet and soldered wires into boards to build the circuitry. Bushnell and Dabney were so impressed that they thought the game could earn real money. They decided to find out whether strangers would feel the same way.

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• 3. Tavern to Factory

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  In August 1972, Bushnell and Alcorn carried the prototype into Andy Capp's Tavern. They chose the bar because of their friendly working relationship with its owner and manager, Bill Gaddis, who bought pinball machines supplied by Atari. They set the game on a table near the other amusements, which included a jukebox, pinball machines and Computer Space.

  The game went over well on its first night, and its popularity kept climbing for the next week and a half. People came to the bar just to play it. Soon other companies came by to inspect the machine too.

  During that stretch, Bushnell traveled to Chicago to demonstrate Pong to executives at Bally and Midway Manufacturing. He meant to use it to fulfill his contract with Bally. But the bar's success changed his mind. He decided Atari would make more money building the game itself than licensing it.

  Finding money was hard. Banks saw Pong as a cousin of pinball, which the general public of the day linked with the Mafia. Atari eventually secured a line of credit from Wells Fargo and used it to expand its facilities for an assembly line. The company announced Pong on the 29th of November 1972.

  Management recruited assembly workers at the local unemployment office and still could not keep pace with orders. The first cabinets came off the line at about ten machines a day, and many failed quality testing. Atari eventually streamlined the process and produced the game in greater numbers. By 1973 it was shipping Pong abroad with the help of foreign partners.

  The returns were remarkable. Pong consistently earned four times as much as other coin-operated machines. Bushnell estimated it took in US$35-40 a day, or 140-160 plays at a quarter each, and said he had never seen anything like it in the industry. Atari sold the machines at three times the cost of making them. By 1973 it had filled 2,500 orders, and by the end of 1974 it had sold more than 8,000 units. Collectors now prize the cabinets, and the cocktail-table versions are the rarest.

  In Japan, Atari Japan officially released Pong in November 1973. The company was later sold to Namco. But two Japanese copies had reached the market first, in July 1973: Sega's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong.

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• 4. The Jackals

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  Only three months after the tavern test, similar machines were on sale from companies such as Ramtek and Nutting Associates. Atari could do little about it. It had not filed patents on the solid-state technology inside Pong, and when it finally did, complications slowed the process.

  The market filled with what people called Pong clones. Author Steven Kent estimated that Atari built less than a third of the machines out there. Bushnell nicknamed the copyists "Jackals" because he believed they enjoyed an unfair advantage. His answer was to out-invent them. Atari would make more inventive games and concepts than anyone could copy.

  That meant sequels with new twists. Pong Doubles let four players compete in pairs. Super Pong and Pin-Pong followed, and Atari advertised Pin-Pong as the only video game simulating classic pinball. Quadrapong put four players against one another on a four-way field, and Kee Games released the same game as Elimination.

  Bushnell also dreamed up a free-to-play version meant to keep children busy in a doctor's office. He first called it Snoopy Pong and built the cabinet like Snoopy's doghouse, with the character on top. To avoid legal trouble he retitled it Puppy Pong and turned Snoopy into a generic dog. He later put the game in his chain of Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants.

  Competitors soon started producing games that departed from the Pong format to varying degrees. That pressed Atari to urge its own staff to move beyond Pong. In 1976, Atari released Breakout, a single-player cousin of Pong in which a ball knocks bricks out of a wall. It drew its own crowd of imitators, among them Arkanoid, Alleyway and Break 'Em All.

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• 5. Home Pong

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  A single game on a large-scale integration chip cost around US$50,000 to develop. Once the chip existed, though, mass production became much cheaper, and copying the design became harder. Bushnell believed the new chip technology would allow pioneering in new game concepts. After Pong's success he asked his staff for new products, and Atari began shrinking the arcade circuit board down to one small chip for the home.

  In 1974, Atari engineer Harold Lee proposed a home version that would plug into a television. Its codename was Darlene, after an Atari employee. Alcorn and Lee built the design on the same digital technology as the arcade games, and they worked in shifts to save time and money. Lee worked out the logic by day, and Alcorn debugged it in the evenings. Engineer Bob Brown then helped them assemble a prototype.

  That prototype was a device on a wooden pedestal with over a hundred wires. A single chip designed by Alcorn and Lee would eventually replace them. The chip was finished in the second half of 1974, and at the time it was the highest-performing chip in any consumer product.

  Selling it was harder. Bushnell and Gene Lipkin, Atari's vice-president of sales, pitched toy and electronics retailers, who turned them down as too expensive. Then Bushnell spotted a Magnavox Odyssey ad in the sporting goods section of the Sears catalog and contacted the company. A Sears representative, Tom Quinn, loved the idea and offered an exclusive deal. Atari's executives declined, hoping for better terms elsewhere.

  In January 1975, Atari set up a Home Pong booth at the American Toy Fair in New York City. It drew no orders because of the price. At the show, the team ran into Quinn again and arranged a meeting to get a sales order.

  Quinn suggested a demonstration for executives in Chicago. Alcorn and Lipkin went to the Sears Tower, where an antenna atop the building broadcast on the same channel as the game. They won approval anyway. Bushnell told Quinn he could make 75,000 units by Christmas, and Quinn asked for double. Bushnell knew Atari could not build 150,000 but said yes.

  Venture capitalist Don Valentine helped fund a new factory, supervised by Jimm Tubb, which filled the Sears order. The first units, sold under the Sears name Tele-Games, reached shoppers from late October to mid-November 1975. They carried a one-year warranty and cost $98.95, with an optional AC adapter for another $7.95. Atari released a version under its own name in 1976.

  About 150,000 units sold that holiday season, making Home Pong the most successful product Sears had ever stocked. The retailer gave Atari a Sears Quality Excellence Award. Atari's own branded version added another 50,000 sales. Collectors today find Atari's consoles common, while APF Electronics' TV Fun consoles are moderately rare. Sears Tele-Games versions often cost less than those with the Atari name.

  Imitators arrived quickly. Magnavox reissued its Odyssey with simpler hardware and new features. Coleco entered the market with the Telstar console, which offered three Pong variants. Nintendo began its video game business with clones of Home Pong. Two such systems together sold over a million units, and that revenue helped the company survive a hard financial stretch and pushed it toward games.

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• 6. The Odyssey Question

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  In May 1972, Bushnell visited the Magnavox Profit Caravan in Burlingame, California. There he played the table tennis game on the Magnavox Odyssey demonstration. He thought it lacked quality, but seeing it led him to hand the project to Alcorn.

  How Pong began is disputed. In 2011, Bushnell said the idea came from earlier electronic tennis games he had played, including a version on a PDP-1 computer in 1964, while he was in college. Alcorn has said it was a direct response to Bushnell watching the Odyssey's Tennis game.

  In April 1974, Magnavox sued Atari, Allied Leisure, Bally Midway and Chicago Dynamics. Magnavox argued that they infringed patents held by Sanders Associates, covering TV games in general and the way players interact with machine-controlled objects on a screen. Magnavox also presented detailed records Ralph Baer had kept on the Odyssey's design since 1966. Other evidence included witness depositions and a signed guest book showing that Bushnell had played the Odyssey's table tennis game before Pong appeared.

  Bushnell did not deny it. He later said, "The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever."

  In June 1976, Bushnell chose to settle out of court. His lawyer thought Atari could win, but estimated US$1.5 million in legal costs, more than the company could afford. Magnavox offered to make Atari a licensee for US$1.5 million, paid in eight installments. Magnavox also gained the right to full information on Atari products announced or released over the following year.

  Magnavox kept pursuing the other defendants, and proceedings began shortly after Atari's settlement. The first case was heard at the district court in Chicago, with Judge John Grady presiding. Magnavox won against the remaining defendants.

  The settlement terms may have affected Atari's next big product. The company may have delayed announcing the Atari 2600 by a few months to avoid revealing information about the system to Magnavox.

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• 7. Cultural Legacy

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  In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Pong 56th on its list of the top 100 video games. A year later, Next Generation put it among the top 100 games of all time. The magazine recalled its staff ignoring hundreds of thousands of dollars of 32-bit software to play Pong for hours when the Genesis version came out. In 1999, the magazine placed it 34th on a list of the top 50 and called it "the ultimate two-player challenge."

  Entertainment Weekly named Pong one of the top ten games for the Atari 2600 in 2013. Several publications credit it with launching the video game industry as a profitable business. Author David Ellis called the arcade game one of the most historically significant titles. Steven Kent credited Pong and the Atari games after it with the arcade phenomenon, and called the home version the real start of home consoles. Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra described its release as the start of a new entertainment medium, and said its simple, intuitive play made it a hit.

  Bushnell prized something else about the game. Because Pong required two players and only one hand each, he saw it as a social lubricant. He recalled that a woman holding a quarter might pull a man off a bar stool to ask for a game. Players sat shoulder to shoulder, could talk and laugh, and could even hug as they became friends. People have told him over the years, "I met my wife playing Pong," and he called that a nice thing to have achieved.

  The game now sits in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In 2015, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted it into its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

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• 8. Pong Everywhere

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  In 1977, Atari put Pong and several variants into Video Olympics, one of the original launch titles for the Atari 2600. The game has since turned up in many Atari compilations. Those include Arcade Classics on the Sega Genesis, a Game Boy Advance cartridge paired with Asteroids and Yars' Revenge, and Atari Classics Evolved on the PlayStation Portable. Others are Retro Atari Classics on the Nintendo DS and Atari: 80 Classic Games in One! for personal computers. The Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration collection of 2022 added Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One.

  Bally Gaming and Systems made a slot machine version under an agreement with Atari. Pong also appears as a loading screen minigame in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox editions of TD Overdrive: The Brotherhood of Speed, though not in the Windows edition.

  New editions kept coming. In September 1995, Atari Corporation reportedly had a 3D platform game with puzzle and shooter elements underway for the Atari Jaguar, called Pong 2000, but it never shipped. In 1999, Hasbro Interactive released Pong: The Next Level for home computers and the PlayStation, with 3D graphics and many power-ups. For the game's 40th anniversary in 2012, Atari released Pong World for iOS, developed by zGames. In 2020, Chequered Ink developed Pong Quest, which Atari published on Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. A remake has also been announced exclusively for the Intellivision Amico.

  Pong shows up across popular culture too. It has appeared in That '70s Show, King of the Hill and Saturday Night Live. In 2006, an American Express commercial pitted tennis player Andy Roddick against the game's white paddle. Neuromancer for the Commodore 64 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for the Xbox 360 both nod to it. The concert event Video Games Live has played Pong audio in a retro arcade medley, and Frank Black wrote a song called "Whatever Happened to Pong?" for the album Teenager of the Year.

  In February 2006, Atari took legal action against the Dutch design studio Buro Vormkrijgers, which had made a Pong-themed clock as an office side project and decided to sell it. The two sides agreed that the studio could produce a limited number under license.

  Art galleries have embraced the game as well. In 1999, French artist Pierre Huyghe made an installation called "Atari Light," in which two people play Pong on an illuminated ceiling using handheld devices. It was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2007. The London Barbican Art Gallery included Pong in its Game On exhibition in 2002.

  Beginning in 2012, Chuck E. Cheese's wove Pong into the rebranding of its mascot. A backstory published in 2014 says Chuck E. won $50 in a Pong tournament, moved to New York City, and eventually met the rest of his band.

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