Pong: The Game That Started an Industry
1972 · game
In November 1972 a wooden cabinet with a small screen was installed in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. On the screen were two white lines, a square dot and a score. The instructions were one sentence long. Within days the machine stopped working, and when the engineer came to repair it he found that it had jammed because the coin box was full.
Pong had been written by Allan Alcorn at a new company called Atari, as a training exercise set by its founder Nolan Bushnell, who had no intention of selling it. Bushnell had seen a television tennis game demonstrated by Ralph Baer, whose home console reached the market that same year, and the resemblance later led to a patent dispute that Atari settled. What Alcorn added was feel. The ball speeded up as a rally continued, and the angle of return depended on where it struck the paddle, so that a game of two lines and a dot rewarded skill.
Around eight thousand arcade cabinets were built, and by 1975 a home version sold through a department store chain put the game into living rooms in time for Christmas. Video games moved from a curiosity in university laboratories into ordinary commercial life in about three years.
Pong is simple enough that anyone can be shown it in five seconds, which is the reason it worked in a bar. It established the arcade, the home console and the idea that a screen could be something you act on rather than only watch. Every part of an industry now larger than film and recorded music together can be traced to a cabinet whose coin slot was too small for its first evening.