PONG

'''Pong''' is a video game released originally as a coin-operated arcade game by Atari Inc. on November 29 1972.^[1] ''Pong'' is based on the sport of table tennis, and named after the sound generated by the circuitry when the ball is hit.^[2] The word ''Pong'' is a registered trademark of Atari Interactive,^[3][4][5] although the term "pong" is often used generically to describe the related genre of "bat and ball" video games. Although ''Pong'' is often regarded as the world's first video arcade game, Computer Space by Nutting Associates had been launched a year earlier in 1971.^[6] ''Pong'' was the first video game to achieve widespread popularity in both arcade and home console versions, and launched the initial boom in the video game industry. ''Pong's popularity led to a successful patent infringement lawsuit from the makers of an earlier video game, the Magnavox Odyssey. ''Pong'' is a first generation video game, a term used to describe the video game industry between 1972 and 1977.^[7]

Contents

History

Other versions and platforms

In popular culture

Further reading

See also

References

External links

History

The earliest electronic ping-pong game was played on an oscilloscope, and was developed by William A. Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. His game was called Tennis for Two.^[8]
In September 1966, Ralph Baer, then working for Sanders Associates, wrote a short paper outlining a system for playing simple video games on a home television set.^[9] Originally, his chief engineer Sam Lackoff asked Baer to build a television set. Baer decided to add a new concept, playing games, on television.^[10] He developed a computer version of a ping-pong game, and his ideas were patented. Magnavox licensed the technology from Sanders Associates, and in the middle of 1972 the company began selling the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. The Odyssey was capable of playing a dozen different games, including a basic version of table tennis and a slightly more complex version of tennis.^[11][12]
Displaying animated graphics on a television screen and reacting in real time to user input would have required more computing power than 1960s consumer products could deliver. Although technology had progressed significantly by 1970, the tasks performed by a modern-day cell phone would still have required a mainframe computer the size of a small apartment. Despite this, technology had evolved sufficiently to make video games a practical proposition. It was possible to create a tennis video game by restricting the graphics to just one line per paddle, a dotted line for the net and a square for the ball. Moore's Law shows how the cost of producing complex technology with transistors falls over time, and this helped video games to be sold at affordable prices for home use in the 1970s.
In May 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey was demonstrated at a trade show in Burlingame, California. Nolan Bushnell attended the event and played the Odyssey's table tennis game.^[13] In June 1972 Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a new company which they named Atari, with a starting capital of $250 each. Bushnell was a keen player of the board game Go, and the word ''Atari'' in Japanese has a meaning similar to the term ''check'' in chess.
Bushnell was concerned that his pioneering 1971 video arcade game, Computer Space, had been too complicated for some users. In an interview, he said of the game: "You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn't want to read instructions. To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play; something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play."² Bushnell envisioned creating a video car driving game for arcades and hired Allan (Al) Alcorn, an electronic engineer who had recently finished college. Concerned that this project would be too complex for his new employee, Bushnell's first request to Alcorn was to create a ping-pong game. The game that Alcorn created was fun to play and since the name ''Ping-Pong'' was already trademarked, it was called simply ''Pong''. The dominant arcade game at the time was pinball, and unlike pinball ''Pong'' was conceived as a game for two players. Amusement industry experts were unsure about ''Pong's potential, and initially there was little interest in the product.^[14] The Mother Of All Video Games
Before Bushnell departed on a trip to Chicago to meet with pinball machine manufacturers Williams and Bally/Midway, it was agreed that ''Pong'' should undergo a field test. Bushnell and Alcorn then added a coin-operated switch to the machine so that it could be used as an arcade game. The instructions of the game were simple: ''Avoid missing ball for high score''.^[15]
The system was tested initially in a small bar in Grass Valley, California and Andy Capp's Tavern, a bar in Sunnyvale, California. After only one day the game's popularity had grown to the point where people lined up outside Andy Capp's waiting for it to open.¹
After a while the unit broke down, and the bar's owner called Al Alcorn at home to have him remove the game. When he opened the unit he discovered the problem - the milk carton placed inside to catch the coins was overflowing with quarters, causing the coin switch to become jammed. According to the account given by Nolan Bushnell, the ''Pong'' cabinet at Andy Capp's broke down the day after it was installed, while Alcorn remembers it working for two weeks before the breakdown occurred.^2[16] Bally/Midway turned down ''Pong'' after watching a demonstration, but the successful trial at Andy Capp's led Atari to manufacture the coin-operated games itself. The games were manufactured in a converted roller skating rink.^1[17]
The coin-operated ''Pong'' games manufactured by Atari were a great success, and by the end of March 1973 between 8,000 and 10,000 of the units had been sold.^[18]
The makers of the Magnavox Odyssey insisted that they held a patent on the concept of a tennis video game, and in 1974 Sanders/Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari. This was the first lawsuit relating to intellectual property rights in the video game industry. Lawyers for Magnavox found witnesses who recalled seeing Nolan Bushnell playing the Odyssey's table tennis game at the trade show in Burlingame, California in 1972, and obtained a guestbook from the event that he had signed. Atari settled out of court by agreeing to pay $700,000 to license the patents that Magnavox held on the Odyssey.^[19] On January 10, 1977, Judge John Grady of the Federal District Court in Chicago ruled in favor of Sanders/Magnavox on all counts relating to the lawsuit. The ruling upheld the claim that US patent #3,728,480 entitled ''Television Gaming and Training Apparatus'' was the pioneering design for a video game.^[20][21]

The idea for a home console version of ''Pong'' was conceived in 1973 and a prototype was designed by Al Alcorn, Bob Brown and Harold Lee during 1975. The project was named ''Darlene'' after a female co-worker at Atari.^[22] ''Pong'' had some important differences from the original Magnavox Odyssey, which had been discontinued in 1974. The Odyssey used discrete electronic components as a legacy of its 1960s roots, while ''Pong'' was based on an integrated circuit containing many components on a single chip. The chip in the home version of ''Pong'' was the most complex developed for a consumer product at the time. ''Pong'' boasted on-screen digital scoring, something the Odyssey lacked, but while the Odyssey offered a range of different games through plug-in circuit boards, the first ''Pong'' console played the table tennis game only. The Odyssey lacked sounds and ''Pong'' made a distinctive bleeping noise through an internal loudspeaker each time the ball was hit. The Odyssey could add spin to the tennis ball through a button on its controllers, while ''Pong'' could add eight levels of spin automatically depending on which part of the bat the ball hit. This was a feature found in the arcade version of ''Pong'', and helped to produce varied play. In both the Odyssey and ''Pong'', when the ball hit the top or bottom of the screen it bounced back in, a feature more like squash than tennis. The player gained a point in ''Pong'' when the opposing player failed to return the ball. Since domestic televisions in the 1970s lacked audiovisual inputs, the ''Pong'' console was connected to the television by converting its output to a radio frequency signal that was fed in through the antenna socket. Some consumers had been confused by the name of the Magnavox Odyssey, believing that it would work only with Magnavox televisions. However, both the Odyssey and ''Pong'' were compatible with any make of television that had an antenna socket.^[23]
The ''Pong'' console was demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1975. The buyers from the major retail outlets showed little interest, believing that the public was not sufficiently interested in video games for the home. However, soon after the show Atari contacted Tom Quinn, the sporting goods buyer for Sears, Roebuck and Company. Quinn was familiar with the ''Pong'' game found in arcades and bars, and decided to take a chance on the new console. He met with Nolan Bushnell and asked how many units Atari could produce in time for the Christmas holiday season. Bushnell reckoned that they could produce 75,000, but Quinn wanted double that number of units and offered to pay to boost production to that level. In return, Sears would become the exclusive retailer of ''Pong'' under the Sears Tele-Games label.²²

Christmas 1975 turned out to be the most successful period for sales of ''Pong'' home consoles, with customers lined up outside Sears stores waiting for new shipments of the game to arrive. The first consoles retailed at $100, the equivalent of around $400 at today's prices. The burgeoning popularity of ''Pong'' caught the attention of Al Franken and Tom Davis during the first year of the television show ''Saturday Night Live''. The comedy duo wrote and voiced several segments in which no actors were visible, and all that viewers saw was a ''Pong'' game in progress looking just as it would if they were playing the game themselves. Franken and Davis would talk to one other as friends, rarely mentioning the game itself, and with the conversation occasionally having a detrimental impact on their game skills.²²
A consequence of the popularity of ''Pong'' was that enthusiasts would play the game for hours at a time on their home consoles, leading to damage to the television screen being used as the display. Since the white lines forming the tennis court were shown constantly, they could become burned into the phosphor coating on the cathode ray tube of the television, causing irreparable damage to the screen. After a number of incidents where this occurred, the instruction books of tennis video games mentioned the risk and advised against extended play, or suggested that the brightness and contrast controls of the television be turned down in order to reduce the risk of damage. Another feature of constant play was the tendency of the paddle controllers to wear out and require replacement.^[24]
Cloned versions of the ''Pong'' home console soon appeared, with the AY-3-8500 chip launched by General Instrument in 1976 offering a range of pong-style games to any manufacturer. By 1977 the market was saturated with cloned pong consoles and demand was in decline. Seeking a quick exit from the industry, many companies sold off their games at discount prices. The result was the first crash in the video game market, an event later echoed by the Video game crash of 1983. The public's interest in pong consoles had waned by the late 1970s, and the units had ceased production by the early 1980s. By this time more sophisticated games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man had become available, and the sound and graphics capabilities of pong consoles were seen as old-fashioned. The technology of the home video game market had also evolved in 1976 when the manufacturer Fairchild released its new programmable console, the Video Entertainment System or VES.^[25] Unlike the dedicated pong consoles which had a fixed number of built-in games, the VES could offer a range of games via plug-in ROM cartridges. Atari launched its own programmable system in October 1977, the Atari Video Computer System or VCS. This later became known as the Atari 2600, and the use of plug-in cartridges was the defining feature of the second generation video consoles that dominated the market during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nolan Bushnell says that Atari sold a total of 38,000 coin-operated ''Pong'' games, although taking into account the large number of clones, it is estimated that over 100,000 units were sold, making it the most popular arcade game of all time.^[26][27]

Other versions and platforms

Many versions of ''Pong'' were released, including ''Pong Doubles'' (a four-player variant), ''Quadrapong'' (also four-player), ''Super Pong'' and ''Doctor Pong''. Some of the later consoles offered color graphics, while the original ''Pong'' was in black and white. In 1976 Atari released ''Breakout'', a single player variation of ''Pong'' where the object of the game is to remove bricks from a wall by hitting them with a ball. ''Breakout'' was updated successfully in 1986 by the Taito Corporation under the name ''Arkanoid''.
''Pong'' has been reissued for a range of modern platforms, including:

★ There is a version for the PlayStation, and it has been included in the recent TV Games collections, which are console-on-a-chip systems featuring classic games from the Atari 2600 era.

★ ''Pong'' is also available on ''Arcade Classics'' for the Sega Genesis.

★ A simulation of the original version with cabinet art and an updated version of ''Pong'' are available in the ''Atari Anthology'' video game for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. The original ''Pong'' cannot be emulated by today's video games since it uses 7400 chips and discrete logic rather than a modern central processing unit.^[28]

★ Atari's 1991 arcade game ''Off the Wall'' features a competitive bonus round that plays exactly like a round of ''Pong''.

★ In the Atari game Test Drive Overdrive, users can play ''Pong'' when the game is loading. In single-player mode you play against the computer, but in multi-player mode you can play against the other player.

In popular culture

★ The opening song of Frank Black's album ''Teenager of the Year'' is entitled ''Whatever Happened to Pong?'' The lyrics detail the story of two brothers who place wagers on ''Pong'' competitions in bars.^[29]

★ Tennis player Andy Roddick starred in a 2006 commercial for American Express in which his opponent was ''Pong''. His trainer advises him: "He returns everything." Roddick seems stumped as to how to defeat the computer's bat, until he realizes that it has no forward movement. He then hits a drop shot over the net in order to win. The commercial was called ''Stop Pong'' and spawned a website where the player, as Roddick, tries to beat ''Pong'' in a five minute game.^[30]

★ In the 1976 film ''Silent Movie'', Dom Deluise and Marty Feldman tinker with the hospital bedside monitor to which the studio chief is hooked up, causing its display to turn into a ''Pong'' game.

★ In the film ''Airport '77'', children can be seen playing a cocktail cabinet version of ''Pong Doubles''.

★ In an episode of ''King of the Hill'', Peggy and Bobby are busy throughout the entire episode playing ''Pong''. Without a pause button they fall asleep with the ball bouncing back and forth.

★ In an episode of ''That '70s Show'', Kelso and Red try to make the game more challenging by tinkering with the console and making the paddles smaller.

Further reading

★ ''Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari'' by Scott Cohen ISBN 978-0070115439

★ ''The Ultimate History of Video Games'' by Steven L. Kent ISBN 0-7615-3643-4

★ ''Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames'' by Leonard Herman ISBN 978-0964384828

See also

★ History of computer and video games

References

1. Atari PONG - The first steps
2. Atari Pong (Arcade Version)
3. Atari Threatens Pong Clock Makers
4. Atari Retro Classics
5. Atari Anthology
6. KLOV Computer Space entry
7. A history of first generation video games
8. The first video game
9. Ralph Baer's design for a home video game system written in September 1966
10. http://pong-story.com/intro.htm The History of Pong
11. The First Video Game
12. The 1972 Magnavox Odyssey
13. Video Games: In The Beginning, , , , Rolenta Press, ,
14. Atari: The Lost Years of the Coin-Op, 1971 – 1975 (Parts I - IV)
15. Avoid missing ball for high score
16. ATARI'S PONG - A LEGEND BEGINS
17. History of Atari
18. However, Atari did not obtain a patent on its system until November 1973, and by this time numerous other manufacturers had produced versions of ping-pong video games. Cloned versions of PONG
19. Patent infringement lawsuit
20. The 1976 patent infringement ruling
21. US Patent #3,728,480 April 17, 1973 - ''TELEVISION GAMING AND TRAINING APPARATUS''
22. Atari Pong Codename: "Darlene"
23. ATARI'S PONG - CONQUEST OF THE LIVING ROOMS
24. History of Screensavers
25. ClassicGaming.Com ChannelF Museum Entry
26. Interview with Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari
27. Atari Pong Coin-op
28. Emulating ''Pong''
29. Whatever happened to Pong?
30. Stop Pong

External links

★ pong-story.com, the most comprehensive site about Pong and its origins.

★ The Atari Museum An in-depth look at Atari and its history

★ Pong and its rivalry with the Magnavox Odyssey

★ Pong article at The Dot Eaters, a history of Pong and its development

★

★ List of home Pong systems (in 1976 General Instruments, released the AY-3-8500 chip capable of running Pong which led to an explosion of consumer consoles, a large number of which are listed on the site)

★ Atari's Pong - A legend begins

★