Pong wasn't the first video game that Atari made, but it was the one that made Atari a global phenomenon.

The task to build a tennis like game video game was given to Allan Alcorn who was a new hire at Atari. One of the most incredible and unthinkable (nowadays) thing about Pong was that there was no software involved. Allan Alcorn created Pong using only Transistor-to-Transistor Logic (TTL) since microprocessors were so expensive back in the day.

Pong was a copy, or rather improvement on Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis. Nolan Bushnell played the game at a tradeshow and then instructed Alcorn to make Pong. The approach taken (using TTL) and the game design and mechanics made it a wild success. Scoring and angles were two key innovations/differences from Tennis on the Odyssey.

Pong is frequently referred to as the birth of the video games industry. It was a massive hit becoming an iconic arcade game. Atari was able to make a lot of money from it and that in turn encouraged others to take the leap and see game development as a viable business!

The US had succeeded in cementing the video games industry with Pong. It would be only a few short years before Japan came knocking dominate the area!

Build your own Pong: Modular Ping - Alex J. Lowry's Electronics Homepage

David Winter's awesome site that covers the history of Pong in great detail: Pong-Story: Main page

Pong wasn't the first video game that Atari made, but it was the one that made Atari a global phenomenon.

The task to build a tennis like game video game was given to Allan Alcorn who was a new hire at Atari. One of the most incredible and unthinkable (nowadays) thing about Pong was that there was no software involved. Allan Alcorn created Pong using only Transistor-to-Transistor Logic (TTL) since microprocessors were so expensive back in the day.

Pong was a copy, or rather improvement on Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis. Nolan Bushnell played the game at a tradeshow and then instructed Alcorn to make Pong. The approach taken (using TTL) and the game design and mechanics made it a wild success. Scoring and angles were two key innovations/differences from Tennis on the Odyssey.

Pong is frequently referred to as the birth of the video games industry. It was a massive hit becoming an iconic arcade game. Atari was able to make a lot of money from it and that in turn encouraged others to take the leap and see game development as a viable business!

The US had succeeded in cementing the video games industry with Pong. It would be only a few short years before Japan came knocking dominate the area!

Build your own Pong: Modular Ping - Alex J. Lowry's Electronics Homepage

David Winter's awesome site that covers the history of Pong in great detail: Pong-Story: Main page