Pong

Pong (Arcade)  1972

 

Third arcade electronic game, first video game with widespread success (it was also a commercial success and led to numerous copies),  first perfectly emulated game, first 858x525 screen resolution

 

Monochrome game

Arcade system: Atari Discrete Logic

Pong arcade
Original poster

Gameplay video

Pong arcade
arcade cabinet
pong
Article from 1978 , New-York times
Pong
Magazine review- Electronic Games (1983)
Pong arcade
Magazine review - Videogames (1982)

Review
New-York times, October 25, 1981   By Aaron Latham

"The first game Atari turned out was a kind of video Ping-Pong called Pong.Bushnell put his simple Pong game in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, Calif., to see if anyone would pay to play it. A couple of days later, he got a call that his beloved game had broken down. The gallon bucket used to catch the money was overflowing; the quarters were backed up. Pong was drowning in money.
Atari, prepare to be attacked! An estimated 100,000 games were sold, but only about 10 percent of those were sold by Atari. The others were copies and counterfeits. Some of the copies were American-made, but most of them were from Japan. King Pong was the first video-games blockbuster. They talk about them as if they were movies. When he was a kid, Mike had a friend who owned a second-generation Pong game that played doubles as well as singles. It was embedded in a Naugahyde-covered coffee table.
'Anything new I tried,'' Mike remembers. ''It was a revolutionary game.'' Pong made bucketfuls of money for a couple of years."

Trivia:
1) Developer Bushnell told the company (Alcorn) that he wanted the game to feature realistic sound effects and a roaring crowd. Dabney wanted the game to "boo" and "hiss" when a player lost a round. Alcorn had limited space available for the necessary electronics and was unaware of how to create such sounds with digital circuits. Primivitive "bounce" sounds created instead.
2) A few days later, the prototype began exhibiting technical issues and Gattis contacted Alcorn to fix it. Upon inspecting the machine, Alcorn discovered that the problem was the coin mechanism was overflowing with quarters.
3) Game ompany name is "Atari" (a word equivalent to the term "check" used in the Japanese strategy board game "Go" (Bushnell was an avid Go player) and has a 'FUJI' symbol (from the Japan's largest mountain 'Fujijama') as its logo.

4) Next upgrade of video games screen resolution happened in 1993. Pong has resolution 858x525, until Hi-Ten Bomberman (1993) was released in HD.

5) This is the oldest video game that you can officially buy today online (Steam) (as part of Atari Vault compilation - added as DLC in 2019).

6) Emulated in: MAME

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