PONG: One Little Girl’s Memoir

Growing up in the seventies, the arrival of the Sears Catalog brought eager excitement to my brother and me every holiday season. We would circle toys we wanted for Christmas and beg our parents to no end for the things we wanted. We didn’t always get what we wanted, but one year we did... and it changed everything. PONG had arrived in our home. Oddly, I never played video games beyond the age of 16 however, being a kid in the era of the invention of the home video game was pretty amazing. And the story of how PONG came to be is even more fascinating. 

Mark P. Wolf’s book The Medium of the Video Game introduced me to Nolan Bushnell, my new childhood hero. Utilizing his engineering expertise, spare parts from work, a used black and white television, and his daughter’s bedroom as a workshop, Bushnell created his first video game, Computer Space. This was in 1971, when imaging technologies were minimalist. Using vector graphics to create a two-dimensional game using only iconography (dots, squares, and rectangles), it still met all the requirements of a video game: conflict, rules, player ability, values outcomes, and the identity of the computer as a player.

Bushnell then partnered with an investor and they created their own company, Atari, which in Japanese means “check” in chess (p. 25). In 1972, Bushnell created PONG, “a tennis-like game featuring two paddles swatting a ball back and forth.” (p. 25). The prototype’s mode of exhibition was a coin-operated game placed in a bar. It was a huge hit (pun intended). Atari entered the home market in 1975 with the console television version of PONG, striking a deal with Sears to sell the product. With Atari’s invention of the Video Computer System (VCS) cartridge console system, the microprocessor chip technology allowed for greater consumer affordability and cheaper production, resulting in record sales during the Christmas of 1978. One of those sales that year? Our purchase. 

To my brother and I, PONG was unbelievable, like men landing on the moon. And while video game technology has immeasurably surpassed the likes of PONG, it still seems cooler to have been a part of the very first video game boom. Intrigued? You can play PONG too. Just click here: FREE PONG!