Pong

Pong is a very famous sports video game.

It is a two-dimensional game that acts like table tennis. Two players use paddles to hit a ball back and forth. One player controls a paddle on the left side. The other player controls a paddle on the right side. You move your paddle up and down to hit the ball. The goal is to be the first to reach eleven points. You earn a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. This simple game helped start the whole video game industry.

An engineer named Allan Alcorn built the game. He actually made it as a training exercise for himself. His bosses at Atari, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, were very surprised. They thought the quality of his work was excellent. Bushnell got the idea from a tennis game on the Magnavox Odyssey. Alcorn used his knowledge of electronics to build the game. He even used a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television for the first prototype. He placed the TV inside a wooden cabinet to make it look like a real machine.

Alcorn added many clever features to make the game more fun. He divided the paddle into eight different segments. This change allowed the ball to bounce back at different angles. The center segments return the ball at a 90-degree angle. The outer segments return the ball at smaller angles. He also made the ball move faster the longer it stayed in play. A simple mistake in the circuit meant paddles could not reach the very top. Alcorn decided to keep this defect because it made the game harder. He even found a way to make the game play sounds using the electronics.

In August 1972, the first prototype went to a local bar. This bar was called Andy Capp's Tavern. The game was so popular that the coin box overflowed with quarters! Because of this success, Atari began making many more machines. They even started shipping games to other countries like Japan in 1973. In Japan, two other companies released their own versions first. These were called Pong Tron by Sega and Elepong by Taito. Atari eventually grew into a large company with its own assembly lines.

Later, people could play the game in their own living rooms. In 1975, Atari released a home version through Sears stores. This version was called Tele-Games. It used a special new chip to make it small enough for a home. Building this chip was expensive, but it made making many games easier. The home version was a huge commercial success. Today, Pong is seen as one of the most important games ever made. It is even part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.