One of the first video games ever made, Pong turns 40 today. On November
29th 1972, a little company known as Atari released one of the first
successful video games of all time – Pong. The game can be considered as
the start of the video game industry.
For those of you that don't know, Pong was an arcade game
later ported to the home consoles. It was a simple concept of tennis
where two sticks were present at the opposite ends of a screen and a
ball bounced between them.
Here are some fun facts about how Pong
came into being. In 1958, a physicist named William Higginbotham (yes,
that was his name) created a game called tennis for two. This was during
the era when computers were the size of entire rooms so of course not
many people knew of its existence. Fast forward to 1966, Ralph Baer (a
German-born American video game pioneer, inventor, engineer, known as
"The Father of Video Games", who is noted for his many contributions to
games and the video game industry) chased a crazy dream of a TV you can
play. In 1968, Baer invents and patents a Ping Pong style game and the
rest as they say is history.
There have been many versions of the games from arcades in bars to home
consoles and even versions of the game made for your smartphone.
Fun Fact: The late Steve Jobs worked for Atari before he founded Apple.
Those of you that are interested in
knowing the origin and the story of the legendary game Pong can take a
look at this video below.
Six months ago, Atari celebrated its 40th birthday. Although the company
isn’t the name it was in the video game industry, we still have
memories of a time when Atari made some of the best games in the
business. You can read our 40 years of Atari - the rise and fall of the
company that gave us Pong here.