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Do you remember how old you were when you first saw this screen?  In my case, I was six and, since my father didn’t want a TV, I had to go to a friends house to play it.

Although its my starting point, Pong is not the first ever video game:

In the beginning (1958!) there was “Tennis for Two” by Willy Higginbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.  “Tennis for Two” begat the Magnavox Odyssey.  In 1972 an ambitious young, Silicon valley entrepreneur saw an early version.  This man…

…was Nolan Bushnell.  It inspired him to start Atari, which was the first dedicated video game company.

He didn’t know that he resembled John Craven at the time.

He assigned the company’s first engineer, Al Alcorn, to build a simple bat and ball game called…

…Pong

So called because the name Ping Pong had been trademarked.  Certainly not the last time that this problem has occurred.  At least it wasn’t Pong.com.  In England it had a different name, because “Pong” had smelly connotations over here.

Pong was a very simple game with very simple instructions: “Avoid missing ball for high score” which, by the way, is a pretty good rule for life.  This was really the beauty of the game.  Remember – nobody even knew how to play a videogame in 1972 apart from a bunch of Phd students at MIT and there were no arcades so the first videogames were in bars.  You REALLY needed a simple game!

The following passage, taken from "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari," is an account of Pong's first night at Andy Capp’s bar in Sunnyvale:  

“One of the regulars approached the Pong game inquisitively and studied the ball bouncing silently around the screen as if in a vacuum. A friend joined him. One of [them] inserted a quarter. There was a beep. The game had begun. They watched dumbfoundedly as the ball appeared alternately on one side of the screen and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end of the screen. The score was 5-4, his favor, when his paddle made contact with the ball. There was a beautifully resonant "pong" sound, and the ball bounced back to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to use his paddle. Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the constant pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing, everybody in the bar had played the game. The next day people were lined up outside Andy Capp's at 10 A.M. to play Pong.”    

Then came Home Pong in 1974 and the Atari VCS in 1977. The first cross-platform development and the first coin-op conversion (but not the last!).  There were very many clones of the game, each offering more features, such as colour, or better prices and so on.  This was the first rush of me-too’s. 

What’s great about Pong (and what is different between Pong and Bushnell’s Space War clone):

•  It’s about as simple as it could get.  Maybe a logician could define a simpler game but I can’t.

•  You can see how it works by watching the demo mode.  The instructions are redundant.

•  It works by analogy to something in the real world.

•  Sound (one sample: “Pong”) is critical to the appeal, game play and psychological addictiveness

•  It had a scoring system that generated competition and interaction between players

•  It generated word of mouth viral marketing: “hey look at this”

•  It didn’t invent anything: it combined new technology, game play and accessibility in a way that didn’t exist before.

•  It invented a new business model: instead of buying a $120,000 PDP-1 to play space war at $300 per hour, you could play for 25c.

Interestingly, Pong was not Nolan Bushnell’s first ever video game.  His first game, which stiffed, was called Computer Space and it was based on a game he had played at college called Spacewar!

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