Pong

Pong is another one of the first arcade games available by Atari, Inc. It was released on November 29, 1972. Pong is much like the sport, table tennis and the sound is much like that of the ball when it is hit when playing table tennis. Pong is sometimes regarded as the first video game to be made but the game Computer Space was actually released a year before Pong was. Pong was the first one to achieve popularity around the world and was given the credit for being the first video game to launch the boom of the video world in both the arcade and the home console versions of the games. Over the years there have been many versions of Pong released.The first Pong arcade was tested in a small bar in Grass Valley, California and in Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvalle, California. The game gained such popularity that it had people lining up outside of Andy’s place to play it after only the first day waiting for the place to open.

The coin operated arcade Pong game was so successful that by the end of march, 1973, there were 8,000 to 10,000 units sold. Bally/Midway turned down the offer to manufacture the arcade games so Atari did it and sold the units so in 1974 Sanders/Magnavox filed a lawsuit against Atari because they claimed they had the property rights to the game. The case was settled out of court and Atari agreed to pay $700,000 to license the patents that Magnavox held on the Odyssey and on January 10, 1977 the judge of the Federal District Court in Chicago ruled in favor of Sanders.Magnavox and ruled that the $3,728,480 was the television gaming and training apparatus pioneer design for the video game. Atari’s Super Pong was refined with more option. The home console version was designed in 1973 and the project was named Darlene, which was the name of a co-worker at Atari. The Magnavox Odyssey was discontinued in 1974 and the new Pong had many new features and designs. The Pong console was demonstrated in June, 1975 at the Consumer Electronics Show. The first Pong console games were sold through Sears, Roebuck, and Company. Sears had the exclusive selling rights to the console game. The first console Pong games sold for $100. People were lined up in front of Sears stores to buy them. This is about $400 value at today’s prices. Some people played the game for hours and this resulted in burned lines in the phosphor coating on the cathode ray tube in the television. This caused irreparable damage to television sets so the company gave instruction books suggesting that the players not play for long extended periods of time and also suggested that the brightness and contrast controls on the television be turned down to avoid damage to the television set.