Pong was not the first video game, and it was not even the first video tennis game. What it did first was make money. In 1972 Atari put a black-and-white television, two knobs and a coin slot into a wooden cabinet, and set it up in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. The story told ever since is that it stopped working because its coin box was jammed full of quarters. Within a year more than 25 companies were copying it, and within four years Magnavox’s lawyers had made Atari pay for the idea.
Fast facts
- Maker: Atari, the company Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded in 1972.
- Engineer: Al Alcorn, Atari’s first full-time engineer.
- Released: autumn 1972, in the arcades.
- The game: two players turn knobs to move paddles up and down the sides of the screen and bat a square “ball” between them; the first to 11 points wins.
- Home version: a single-chip Pong sold by Sears for Christmas 1975.
- Lawsuit: Magnavox and Sanders Associates, owners of the Odyssey patents, took on Atari and other coin-op makers; Atari settled.
Bushnell’s specification, Alcorn’s game
Bushnell’s first arcade game, Computer Space, had been built and sold by Nutting Associates in 1971. “We built 1,500 and had to sell some by force,” Bill Nutting told Video Games in 1982. Players, Bushnell found, would put a coin in and stand baffled at its thrust, fire and rotate buttons. His next game would be one they already knew how to play.
Bushnell and Dabney set up their own company, and hired Al Alcorn, a young engineer Bushnell knew from the electronics firm Ampex. His first job was a ping-pong game. “He defined it, and I built it, though there were little things like the sound that I added to it,” Alcorn told Video Games. Bushnell got the credit for years afterwards, which he joked about: “I get the credit because I have more access to the press.” Accounts differ on what the game was meant for. Bushnell later said Pong “was never intended to be a marketed item… but a training item for Al”. Alcorn remembered being told it was to be a cheap consumer product, a “throwaway”: “I couldn’t design it cheaply enough, though, so we decided to make it a coin-op.”
The finished cabinet carried a single line of instructions: “Avoid missing ball for high score.”
Andy Capp’s
Atari offered the game to the established coin-op makers first. “Nutting didn’t want it, Midway didn’t either,” Video Games reported. So Atari placed a prototype itself, in Andy Capp’s, a tavern in Sunnyvale. The anecdote that followed was in print within ten years and has several versions. Electronic Games had the machine breaking down “immediately” because “the coin box is jammed to overflowing with quarters!” Video Games Player said the patrons “practically beat each other up for the privilege of dropping quarters into its slot” until it jammed. InfoWorld’s 1984 guide to Atari put it “several hours after it was installed”, and added the caution “so the story goes”. In David Sheff’s account there was a queue in front of the machine all day, and the next day too.
The Odyssey
Bushnell had not invented video table tennis. At Sanders Associates in New Hampshire, Ralph Baer and his colleagues William Rusch and William Harrison had worked out TV games in the 1960s and patented them, and Magnavox began making their design as the Odyssey in 1972. Its games, in Baer’s words, were “a line down the middle to indicate the net, and paddles and balls”. In May 1972 Magnavox took the Odyssey on a tour of dealers, and on 24 May, at Burlingame, California, Bushnell played its ping-pong and handball games for about half an hour. In court he later recalled telling Nutting that it was “a home unit, not very interesting to play, no competition”.
Baer was blunt about what happened next: “Pong was no coincidence. Pong was a derivative of Odyssey, not the other way around by any means. It’s a matter of record. Bushnell or one of his boys actually saw Odyssey sometime during the course of ’72.” A federal judge reached the same view. In Magnavox v. Chicago Dynamic Industries, Judge John F. Grady of the Northern District of Illinois found no persuasive evidence that Bushnell “had conceived of anything like the Pong game prior to the time that he saw the Odyssey game. When he did see the Odyssey game, what he did basically was to copy it.” Bushnell did not accept the word. “I didn’t see how anyone could patent a ping-pong game,” he told Video Games in 1984.
Baer also gave Pong its due. The Odyssey sold about 100,000 in 1972, but Magnavox built more than it sold and hardly promoted it in 1973. “If it hadn’t been for the coincidence that Nolan Bushnell started in the arcade business in the fall of ’72 with the first Pong machine,” he said, “I think the whole thing would have gone down the drain.”
The patent case
Sanders’s patents, and Magnavox’s licence to them, covered the basic idea of playing games on a television screen. Magnavox went to court against the coin-op makers; Baer recalled that the first case set Williams, Atari, Bally Midway and Chicago Dynamics against Magnavox, and that he spent about three days on the stand. Atari filed its own action asking the court to declare that it did not infringe, and Magnavox counterclaimed. Atari then settled. Bob Brown, one of Atari’s engineers, told Video Games: “Atari felt we could win. We ended up settling on paying royalties for a year and after that Magnavox would go after the competition, so our competitors would always be in litigation.” Video Games noted in 1984 that the Sanders patents had always been upheld, and in 1983 Baer said the main patent alone was worth “many, many millions of dollars”.
Copies
Settling did not protect Atari’s market. “Needless to say, Pong was a monster. Every company copied it,” Video Games wrote, including Allied Leisure, where Gene Lipkin, later Atari’s head of marketing, was working. “Nolan would roll over fresh if he hears this,” Lipkin said, “but our Paddle Battle was a better game.” Video Games Player reckoned in 1982 that Atari had sold 10,000 Pong machines, while more than 25 companies had made Pong-type games, over 100,000 in all: Atari got “one tenth of the action”. Atari answered with variations of its own, including Pong Doubles and Quadrapong.
Pong at home
In 1975 Atari brought Pong home. The engineer Bob Brown asked a colleague in the coin-op division, Harold Lee, whether the game could be put on a single chip. Alcorn remembered spending six months getting that chip to work. Atari had no way to reach shops, and found one in Sears, Roebuck, whose sporting goods buyer, Tom Quinn, took the risk. Sears sold it under its own Tele-Games name. “We went into production with the idea of selling 50,000 units,” Brown said. “We ended up doing double that in the Christmas ’75 season. People were waiting two hours in line to sign up on a list just to get a Pong game.”
The money from home Pong went straight back into stock for the next Christmas, and in October 1976 Atari sold itself to Warner Communications. Its next home machine played cartridges: the Atari 2600. The Atari entry follows that story, and the sports games entry traces what bat-and-ball games became.
Sources
- Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 40–41: Bill Nutting on Computer Space; Pong turned down by Nutting and Midway; Alcorn as Atari’s first full-time engineer and “He defined it, and I built it”; Bushnell’s “I get the credit”; every company copying it and Lipkin’s Paddle Battle; Pong Doubles and Quadrapong; home Pong, Bob Brown, Harold Lee, Sears and Tom Quinn, 50,000 planned and double that sold.
- Steve Bloom, interview with Ralph Baer, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, pp. 20–24 and 80–81: the Sanders patent and its inventors; the court battle “that ended in a settlement between Magnavox, Sanders and Atari”; the first case and Baer’s time on the stand; “a line down the middle to indicate the net, and paddles and balls”; the Odyssey’s 1972 sales; “Pong was a derivative of Odyssey”; “the whole thing would have gone down the drain”.
- Frank Lovece, “The Birth of a Notion”, Video Games, vol. 2 no. 4, January 1984, pp. 40–43: the Sanders inventors and the Odyssey’s production in 1972; the Odyssey tour and Bushnell at Burlingame on 24 May 1972; his testimony; Bushnell’s and Alcorn’s accounts of what Pong was for; Judge Grady’s finding in Magnavox v. Chicago Dynamic Industries; Bushnell’s reply; Atari’s declaratory judgment action, the Sanders patents always upheld, and Bob Brown on the settlement.
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, p. 23, “Great moments in videogame history”: the Andy Capp’s test and the jammed coin box.
- Video Games Player, vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, p. 18: Computer Space’s controls; the Andy Capp’s story; Atari’s 10,000 Pong sales; more than 25 imitators and 100,000 machines.
- Scott Mace and the editors of InfoWorld, InfoWorld’s Essential Guide to Atari Computers (Harper & Row, 1984), “The origin and evolution of Atari”: the Andy Capp’s story, “so the story goes”.
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999), chapter on Atari: the instruction line on the cabinet and the queue at Andy Capp’s.
- Digital Press issue 52, May 2003, p. 6: Al Alcorn on the six months spent on the home Pong chip.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012: the Sears Tele-Games-branded home Pong.
- Code the Classics, Volume 1, devised by Russell Barnes (Raspberry Pi Trading, 2019), “Tennis – Pong”, p. 27: the game ending when a player reaches eleven points.