My thoughts are going to jump all over the place on this one, and I apologize for that in advance. But as you shall soon see, this is absolutely necessary, because of the following:
- The history surrounding the granddaddy of video games is rich and some of the most important gaming lore you can expose yourself to.
- The game itself is stupid simple.
This dictates we’ll spend less time on the game itself and more on its context, which I think is appropriate.
So buckle up for a trip through the earliest EARLIEST days of video game history, a crap-ton of Atari trivia, a significant tangent into Breakout, and oh yeah, even some discussion of the game in the headline itself.
This, my friends, is “Pong.”
Pong at a glance:
Genre: Twitch arcade game
Released: 1972
Platform: Arcade
No. 34 on Next Generation’s Top 50 Games of All Time
Released in 1972 by Atari, itself a fresh-faced company just beginning its own odyssey into arcade and home computer dominance, Pong was a stand-up cabinet that featured a ping-pong style interface, wherein two players would quite simply try to hit a ball back and forth and get the ball past the other player’s paddle. Doing so would earn you a point, and the first person to 11 points won.
This was not, in fact, rocket science.
(It was digital table tennis.)
But interestingly enough, Pong wasn’t the original version of itself, as it very closely resembled the first commercial home video gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey.
The Odyssey is its own historical tangent, though it’s probably enough to say – at least for the purposes of this article – that they had this whole table tennis idea first, and they did it on a home console, which comes off as super impressive until you look at what else the system could do … which wasn’t a whole heck of a lot.
(This would create another opportunity for Atari later, as we’ll soon see.)
But anyway, you, as the consumer circa the early 70s, could buy this Odyssey machine, have it take up all the space, and it would play a jankier version of Pong for you.
And that was it. There were some other games, mind you, but they also involved dots and required peripherals that clunk-ified the experience further.
Pong innovated in the sense that it made the paddles wider (more like real paddles!) and it distributed the game in such a way that people could partake for 25 cents instead of $100 (closer to $700 in modern dollars). Other small differences in the game included different sections of the paddle producing different return angles for the ball, as well as the ball increasing in speed the longer a point goes on.
Probably due partly (mostly?) to that entry price of a quarter, Pong is widely credited with being the very first commercially successful video game, which is a slightly different designation than a simple “it was the first video game EVARRR!”, but certainly no less important. Also, at the very minimum, it IS one of the first games ever developed, even if we’re a little fuzzy on who was actually technically first.*
* How a person defines the medium probably determines one’s designation of who was truly first, hence our fuzziness. Around 1952 or thereabouts is when interactive games started incorporating CRT displays, and those by and large included things like tic-tac-toe (“OXO”) and checkers (draughts). “Tennis for Two” came along in 1958, but all of those games were pretty much all academic in nature, utilized primarily by researchers at universities to show off their mad tech skillz. Another game, “Spacewar!” (which was sorta like Atari’s “Asteroids”) was dropped in 1962, and it was available to a slightly larger audience than simply geeks at universities (it could be ported from machine to machine), but it (along with its spiritual sequel “Galaxy Game,” an actual overt, intentionally commercial game) wasn’t a money-maker either, leading us to lean into the “commercially successful” qualifier above in declaring Pong the grandfather of the industry.
In addition to not being first, the other dirty little secret of Pong is that it isn’t perfect (GASP). There’s a little gap at the top of the screen/playing field which your paddle can’t reach. So there are some balls that no matter how good you are at the game, there’s no way you can hit them.
I actually kind of like this, as I think of it as an important life lesson – it’s impossible to be perfect – but there’s no way to know if this was intentional at the outset or not (Atari’s developers did become aware of the flaw and declined to fix it, however.)*
* This, of course, is also much of the reason I didn’t give the game a perfect score and why it’s as low on my countdown as it is, though I very much do enjoy the game, and I think it’s important that every video game enthusiast play it at least once. And I do ultimately endorse the trap area, as it limits the length of potential matches so that they don’t continue indefinitely. Still, the game, by the strictest definition, is flawed.
Allan Alcorn developed the game, and he would go on to be Atari’s chief engineer, developing such products as the 2600. Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney immediately saw the potential in Alcorn’s “Pong” and moved quickly to monetize it.
They were correct to do so. The arcade cabinets were an instant success, so much so Atari had trouble keeping up with the manufacturing demand.
Boosted by name recognition and strong word of mouth, Atari debuted a home version of the game – ingeniously called “Home Pong” – for around that same $100 price point as the Odyssey and people gobbled it up. The arcade cabinets as well as Home Pong also inspired a slew of copycat machines. This series of events resulted in many lawsuits and much scrambling to establish patents (belatedly, but that’s okay!).*
* Interesting side note here: Nintendo, at the time a struggling card game company, saw success in duplicating and selling their own versions of “Home Pong,” inspiring the company to go all-in on making video games. That worked out pretty well for them, methinks. (It similarly inspired noted publisher Konami in much the same way.)
Atari was not exactly morally superior amid this poaching environment – they did, afterall, come in second with this particular gaming concept – but what made them stand out from the pack is that they were visionary. They saw that there was a market for these kinds of games, and that they would need to make even more creative, cutting-edge games to stay ahead of their competition … not merely sell Pong forever and ever.
Toward that end, Atari started developing and marketing gaming systems (such as the aforementioned 2600) and home computers that could run multiple applications/software, so that people wouldn’t have to buy this whole big, bulky and ridiculous thing every time they wanted to play a new game.*
* Don’t tell this to people who collect arcade cabinets and pinball machines … they’ll never recover.
They also went all in on making new games, so as to try to stay ahead of all of the copycats.
This eventually led to the creation of “Breakout,” which was another paddle game, but was single-player instead of two-player and involved you systematically destroying a brick wall with your paddle and ball.*
* I LOVE Breakout. It’s really cool. It’s not in the same universe as Pong in terms of historical importance, but it’s a good game, and I wanted to give it a shoutout here. The thing about Breakout is that it got better over time with every subsequent release refining the concept and execution of said concept more and more. I was particularly fond of a version that I played in the mid to late 80s on my Dad’s Tandy Home Computer (how’s that for a nostalgic name drop?), because the ball moved about at a good, reasonable pace and the paddle control was solid (plus I liked the way the game looked). Again, refinement. My current favorite version of the game is in the “Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration” release. It’s called “Neo Breakout” and features modern graphical touches and music and is just all-around wicked cool and I highly recommend it.
But of course, Atari wasn’t limited to just paddle games.
They also made games about space ships!
I jest (a little). I mean, the lineup of games the company cranked out as a result of Pong’s initial success is impressive – including the previously mentioned Breakout and Asteroids, but also such hits as “Centipede,” “Yars’ Revenge,” “Adventure,” “Missile Command,” “Lunar Lander,” “Tempest,” “Gravitar,” and most importantly of all, “Scrapyard Dog.”
Okay, I’m kidding about Scrapyard Dog, which sucks, but seriously, the list is long enough that I left a bunch of stuff off of there. Atari’s longevity and productivity was more than tip-of-the-cap worthy … it was legendary.
Ultimately, their drive to innovate is probably what most made Atari successful, and by extension, this success grew the legend and importance of Pong.
History is written by the winners, as the saying goes, and in the case of Pong, methinks this is significant.
Pong matters because it spawned a gaming dynasty AND an entire industry.
That’s a pretty good day at the office, if you ask me.
So what makes it worth playing today?
Where I think I would try to put Pong into proper context within the industry’s history is that it is the first game that was popular, and within that it becomes an important part of the story (and thusly, an “essential” game).
Without Pong being successful, you don’t have companies like Atari, Nintendo, and Konami being inspired to dive into video games themselves. The industry as a whole just doesn’t exist if some game doesn’t come along and pave the way for everyone else.
That is Pong. That is what Pong did.
In and of itself, the game is pretty fun to play, a good example of programming simplicity eliciting a positive emotional response.
And it’s a social game, demanding you play in pairs. And social games, at least in their intent, are always awesome.
Pong is also an excellent example of the type of early programming that was being done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. That isn’t to be dismissed either. Everyone should play some games from that era just to get the experience … and Pong is certainly as good a choice as any other.
What breaks the tie is that this particular game, Pong, was monumentally important.
I mentioned “Atari 50” briefly above, and I intend to write more about it soon, but I really, REALLY, do not hate that as being your entry point here. It contains Pong and a bunch of the other Atari games I mentioned, and it is a wonderful history lesson on an important gaming company.
But you also don’t have to drop the change on that to play Pong … you can find freeware versions of it pretty much everywhere. And there are some so-so sequels that came along decades later such as “Pong: The Next Level” and “Pong World” that are worth acknowledging as existing, though they don’t really capture the essence or purity of the original game, but will do in a pinch.
In summation, just play Pong.
It’s not going to change your world – it already did that – BUT it will make you smile for a bit.
(Plus it’s a really easy game to check off your backlog. It takes like two minutes.)
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (Arcade)
- Home Pong
- Video Olympics (Atari 2600)
- Buncha other ports (Genesis, PSP, DS, Gameboy Advance, among others)
- Buncha websites and apps that are decent enough approximations, if not entirely licensed or “official”
- Buncha sequels that reinvision the original game
- Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (Atari VCS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S)