# Pong

> Series 1: the based 44 | LEGENDARY | 1/44

**Published by:** [gaming is based.](https://paragraph.com/@gib/)
**Published on:** 2025-09-20
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@gib/pong

## Content

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.By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17168362By Magnavox - https://i.redd.it/sh1dypss5o821.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65167330Pong 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!Additional ResourcesBuild 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

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