When was atari pong invented

He described how he wanted the game to look, specifying details down to the line dividing the screen and the rectangular paddles on either side. The game needed to be cheap, he said, and ideally, it would contain no more than 20 chips. It needed to use the clever video-positioning technique that Alcorn so admired.

Alcorn, determined to impress General Electric, drove to a department store on El Camino Real and bought its best black-and-white television.

Back at the office, he designed segmented paddles, with each segment sending the ball careening back at a different angle. The sync generator inside the television, he discovered, already contained certain tones, and with a bit of manipulation, he came up with a satisfying pong sound when the ball hit the paddle. He configured the game so that play would speed up after a few rallies. When Alcorn went to the founders for additional ideas, Bushnell pushed for sounds of crowds cheering for good shots.

Dabney suggested boos and jeers for misses. It was a perfect encapsulation of the differences in the two men: Bushnell all enthusiasm, Dabney more guarded. After only three months, Alcorn had a working prototype of the game, which either he or Bushnell named Pong. When asked in who had come up with the name, Alcorn and Bushnell each pointed at the other.

Alcorn thought the game played well, but he worried that he had failed in his assignment. Telling Bushnell that Pong was finished but too complex, Alcorn offered to redesign it. Bushnell suggested that they play. He had played the game while Alcorn was developing it, but this time, he grew increasingly excited with each rally.

The phrase had a specific meaning for Bushnell: easy to learn but hard to master. When Alcorn again worried aloud that General Electric might reject the game due to its high chip count, Bushnell seemed to smile to himself. Then he let Alcorn in on a secret: there was no General Electric contract. Bushnell had lied. Pong was an in-house exercise that Bushnell had thought would help Alcorn master the video-positioning trick.

Alcorn was surprised but not angry. He would feel the same way three years later when he learned that Bushnell had been able to describe the Ping-Pong game he wanted in such fine detail because he was describing a table tennis game sold by Magnavox for its Odyssey system. In essence, he had assigned Alcorn to reproduce the Magnavox game. Bushnell recorded so many new ideas every day that little sheets of paper covered in his scrawled hand-writing regularly dropped from his pockets.

And Bushnell, with his nearly limitless imagination and more limited technical ability, needed Alcorn to help realize his visions. A metal panel with P-O-N-G on the front offered the only nod to aesthetics. Onto the side of the box, Dabney welded a coin slot of the sort used in Laundromats and kiddie rides. Bushnell and Dabney knew the owner. The three Atari employees plunked Pong down on a decorative barrel. It was not much to look at, particularly next to the slickly packaged, blinging and flashing pinball machines and the beautiful Computer Space Bushnell had convinced the bar owner to put on the floor.

Nonetheless, two guys soon separated themselves from the crowd of muttonchopped men at the pinball machines and began inspecting Pong. After a minute, one man dropped a quarter into the coin box. The prototype Pong had no directions, but the players figured it out.

They seemed to enjoy their few minutes of playing, their heads pushed together in front of the screen. Bushnell stood up. He had to go talk to those guys, he said. Alcorn followed him across the bar. No one corrected him. There was some satisfaction in having built a game so cool that people were pretending to have a connection to it. There was something wrong with the Pong machine. Explaining that he would need to play a few games to diagnose the problem, Alcorn bent to unlock the coin box so he could throw the inside switch that would grant unlimited free games.

As soon as he pulled the door open, he saw the quarters. Coins had filled the coffee can that served as a coin box and overflowed onto the wooden floor of the cabinet. Pong had not been starting because the coin box was too full to trip the start mechanism. His immediate solution was to replace the coffee can with a larger receptacle: a milk carton. The next step was to build a few more prototype machines and send them to other bars for testing before deciding on the exact features to include in the final version of the game.

Dabney found a local shop, P. He counted the coins that had been deposited through the coin slot. If each quarter represented 20 or 30 turns of a knob, Pong needed a potentiometer that could rotate a million times in three months without failing.

It is widely accepted that when Bushnell was working on it, he studied contemporary computer games. He also was aware of the work of Ralph Baer , the designer of the first home video game, the Magnavox Odyssey.

Bushnell tested the Odyssey and its table tennis video game at a trade show in California in That same year, Atari came out with Pong and in , Magnavox took the company to court. Atari and Magnavox settled and Magnavox gave Atari an exclusive license to reproduce the game. Two years later, in , Atari released the Atari , the same year my uncle bought his Tele-Game console. Like many other people, he spent hours in the basement defeating aliens, destroying asteroids, and trying to convince my grandmother to join him.

Will my brother follow in my uncle's footsteps and be wiping the dust from his PlayStation 3 console 40 years from now? He swears he won't, but I have a funny feeling that he will save things just like all my other relatives - his Game Boy is already starting to collect dust under his bed. Check out the Lemelson Center's latest podcast on on making music for video games and using video games to make music. Skip to main content. Blog Home About Archive. Pong, Atari, and the origins of the home video game.

By Angela Modany, April 17, Games for the Tele-Game console. Posted in From the Collections , Intern Perspectives. Subscribe to our feed Subscribe by e-mail. One of the early Odyssey players was none other than Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who visited a Magnavox product showcase in the spring of , signed the guestbook, and played the Odyssey. When he returned to his nascent company, he assigned a project to Alcorn, a young recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley that Bushnell had just hired as one of Atari's first employees.

None of this was true. Alcorn was having trouble meeting the cost requirements, but this wasn't as big an issue as he'd feared: "Nolan didn't seem too concerned, which was surprising to me. But also, what wasn't surprising to me but should have been is that nobody from General Electric ever came by, or wrote us a letter or anything.

And I'm just pushing ahead, and Nolan would say, 'That's fine, you're doing great. Had Alcorn known that this tennis game was just a throwaway project meant to get him banging on something, perhaps he wouldn't have put so much care into the design of Pong. But since he had visions of this appearing under kids' Christmas trees with a General Electric logo on it, Alcorn iterated and iterated.

As Alcorn came close to completing the project to Bushnell's specifications, Atari's founder threw him for one last loop. And I said, 'Oh my God, you never said that, Nolan!

Alcorn thought Bushnell was nuts. He was already way over budget on this machine, and Nolan wanted realistic, synthesized sounds? He felt Magnavox had gone overboard adding bells and whistles.