Book/Game

Pong is one of the first video games to emerge which helped start the video game industry. The first Pong prototype was engineered by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise for Atari, however, its surprising quality and success led to its manufacturing and release as a video arcade game. 

Pong was a 2D video game that imitated the playing of ping Pong or table tennis as it involved two paddles that players moved to exchange a small ball across the screen. It is important to note that the ball speeds up after a few rounds to make longer games less dull and harder to keep winning. The game was displayed on a television screen and the paddles were controlled by two knobs. Pong was the first video game that required two players and could not be played by one player, it also was cheap relative to other games at the time (10 cents for a round instead of the usual quarter). 

Since the creation of its first console in 1972 there have been many updated consoles for this game ranging from ones that were found in arcades in 1973, to ones found in homes in 1975, and ones that were found on portable phone devices in 2012. 

In this exhibit, I will focus on the prototype version of Pong which is what started the innovation of all the ones that followed.

The first item shows the screen of the game. This is what the players would see when they play the game. The score is found on the top of the screen and there is a ball being exchanged between two paddles across the dotted line on the screen. From this picture, we can see that the screen was in black and white and had a very simple design.

In the second item, we can see the prototype of Pong which shows how the “machine” looked like. The television screen is seen in the middle of a simple small brown and orange wooden box. The controls which are two knobs are right in front of the screen and could be turned up and down to move the paddles. It is important to note that there is no evident writing on the console other than the name of the game “PONG” in all black capital letters in between the two knobs.

From the same time period, we can see the third item, the game Odessey which is the first video game (released in may while Pong was released in November). It did not gain as much attention nor succeed compared to Pong. This is partially the reason why many mistake Pong for being the first video game even though in reality it was Odessey. Also, Odessey was not purely one hardware, it included cards, dice, paper money, and poker chips.

In the description of the game, it is stated: “Magnavox Odyssey was not considered a commercial success, especially in comparison with Pong’s runaway popularity. Among the contributing factors, poor marketing played a large role. ” Pong on the other hand was advertised as a simple game that did not require much thought to play. This shows that the selling point of Pong in comparison to other games during the same era is its simplicity and ease.