Pong is 53 years young this week, introduced November 29, 1972. Pong was the first commercially successful video game. It was the product that put Atari on the map.
Pong was not the first video game, however. Magnavox had a similar video table tennis game in its original Odyssey home console, released two months earlier in September 1972. But Atari’s version is the video game everyone remembers, partly because it was an arcade game. And it was clear that you didn’t have to own a Magnavox TV to play it. Magnavox struggled to overcome that perception when selling its video game consoles, especially early on. And, as Atari fans are fond of pointing out, Al Alcorn‘s implementation was more fun than Magnavox’s.
Pong existed as both and arcade game and a home video game that plugged into a television. It was a computerized version of table tennis, with two paddle controllers batting a ball back and forth across the screen. Where Atari one-upped Magnavox was by letting a player control the angle of the ball by hitting it with the side of the paddle rather than the middle. This subtle change made the game less predictable and more challenging.
Even with that change, Pong was a simplistic game, but the simplicity was the appeal. Atari’s earlier effort, a game called Computer Space, was more complex, but it was harder to learn and frustrating to play. Pong was easy to learn, and the more you played, the better you got at controlling the on-screen ball.
The novelty did wear off, but it took 3 or 4 years. Atari moved on to its cartridge-based 2600 console in 1977 along with the other second generation game consoles, but Pong knockoffs continued to be sold into the early 1980s. I remember getting a Coleco clone for Christmas in 1981 or so.
So even though Pong wasn’t the first video game, it’s widely credited as such, or more correctly as the first commercially successful video game.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Pong wasn’t actually computerized, it had no CPU and no ROM. The entire game was created with TTL logic chips, centered around a chain of counters that kept track of the position of the beam. The home systems integrated all this logic into a custom ASIC.