Pong (MB Hall of Fame Inductee)

Hall of Fame Inductee
Pong
Original Release: 1972 (Arcade)
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari

If there’s one video game that most people recognize that came out prior to the home console rebirth in 1985, it was Pong. It wasn’t the first video game nor was it eye-catching. However, it was easy to get and fun to play with another person. Pong got people playing video games and laid the foundation for the entire genre of entertainment.

Pong wasn’t intended to take the world by storm. In fact, Pong was supposed to be more of a demo game and training exercise for a prospective game developer. Atari had been commissioned to create a game for Bally and Midway in 1972. Atari had hired computer engineer Allan Alcorn to come up with a simple game with limited functions so that Alcorn, who had never designed a video game before, could become accustomed to developing for the growing trade.

The premise of the game is incredibly simple and is immediately playable by any passerby. Long rectangles representing paddles are shown on the left and right side of the screen. In between the paddles is a small square representing a ball. Each player has control of a paddle and must prevent the ball from crossing their end of the screen. The idea is a kin to that of ping pong or table tennis. In its original form, there were no power-up or tricks. There wasn’t even any real colour. Just two paddles and a ball made the game a hit because it was new and accessible.

Alcorn took the project very seriously. The idea was supposed to be something similar to what the Magnavox Odyssey had made as a table tennis game for their home console. He studied other video games and felt that they were either missing something or that they were too simple. He wanted Pong to be a simple game that beginners could enjoy but something more experienced players would also have fun with. He saw limitations with other video tennis games and saw where they needed improvement. Some of his ideas came in the form of that the location of where the ball hit the paddle influenced the trajectory of the return. This added a bit of skill to the game as players could position the paddle how they wanted to give them the return they wanted to deliver. Another interesting concept implemented was that the ball would go faster the longer a rally continued. The speed would return to normal once someone scored a point (or missed the return depending on your point of view). This was a great addition in that it prevented things from getting boring because of being accustomed to a certain speed and it prevented games from going too long.

Then there were things that Alcorn added to the game by accident and decided to leave them in because it improved the game. One thing was that the paddles were unable to reach the top of the screen. Alcorn could have fixed this but decided against it because it offered a little bit of difficulty in what appeared to be a simple game.

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were impressed with the product. They tried a prototype out in a bar nearby Atari’s offices to test it. It was a very big success. In fact, it was so popular that when Atari brought the unit to a meeting with Bally and Midway Manufacturing to see about marketing the game for sale, the unit experienced mechanical issues due to the fact that there were too many quarters in the machine.

Realizing that they had a monster hit on their hands, Bushnell decided that Atari should be the ones to bring the game to market and to turn down Bally and Midway’s offers. This was very risky though as many banks were hesitant to loan money for a video game, especially since many leisure games in bars were associated with gang activity. They were finally able to raise enough money to manufacture the game. However, the manufacturing of the game was a failure. Too few cabinets were being made a day and most of them experienced many malfunctions.

Atari was finally able to make Pong units in decent quantity that were able to handle the rigours of long play sessions. In 1973, Pong became a hit. The company wanted to make a home version of the game. Home Pong began as a project in 1974 but instead of Atari having to turn away prospective manufacturers, they were chasing after hesitant sellers. The problem was that the video game carried a steep price tag and made it hard to sell on the mass-market. Sears finally ordered 150 000 units in 1975, even though they had initially rejected a sales pitch the previous year from the company. In time for the Christmas season of 1975, the Sears Tele-Games version of Pong was released.

Atari wasn’t able to reap the rewards of Pong’s successes for long. Magnavox took Atari to court for copying their concept of video table tennis. While the lawyers for Atari felt that Magnavox didn’t have a leg to stand on, Bushnell and others at Atari were not sure if Atari could afford the huge legal costs associated with the case. They entered a deal with Magnavox which would see Atari become a franchisee of Magnavox and see all the royalties go to Magnavox.

It wasn’t the only financial slip up that Atari suffered with Pong. Even though Pong was incredibly popular in arcades during the mid-70s, many of the machines were not the Atari version of the game. Around two-thirds of the all the Pong games out there were actually Pong knock-offs. While Magnavox went after the companies after taking control of the rights to the game, Atari had never filed a patent and had let other companies create copycat versions. Atari felt it was a better idea to be innovative and come up with new games instead of worrying about other companies coming up with Pong clones.

Atari didn’t stop with Pong. They came out with various versions of the game throughout the early years. Each version changed different variables such as paddle length, ball size and the speed of how fast the ball would travel. Additional paddles were added so that four players could play in teams of two (like pairs tennis) or in a free for all competition where paddles would also be positioned on the top and bottom of the screen in addition to the left and the right. Pong also helped spawn many other classic titles like Breakout and Tempest where they offered some of the same mechanics in different types of gameplay.

While Pong in its pure form pretty much has disappeared, the simple game is still found mixed in with the fancy, more complex games that are being released today. The last game to carry the Pong name was released in 1999 for the original Playstation. The game offered the original game but also had a reimagined version with a huge graphical overhaul and additional gameplay elements such as power-ups. Many of the mini-game compilations that we are seeing on the current generation of consoles have some type of game that offers the gameplay of Pong.

The legacy of Pong is strong. It may have started off as an experiment and looks incredible simple but there’s much more beneath the two paddles and ball. Pong laid the foundation to the birth of both the arcade and home video game markets. Most people will never have played the original version but the concept is so simple that most everyone will have played the idea of it at least once.