A Simple Tennis Game Launched the Arcade Era

On November 29, 1972, the young company Atari announced Pong, a coin-operated arcade game that reduced table tennis to two paddles, a ball, and a beeping dot. There was no microprocessor inside: engineer Al Alcorn wired the entire experience from analog circuitry, building it as a training exercise that co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney never expected to sell.

Its genius was its simplicity. Anyone could grasp the rules in seconds, and the game’s tiny on-screen instruction — “avoid missing ball for high score” — was all players needed. A prototype placed in a Sunnyvale bar reportedly jammed because its coin box overflowed with quarters.

By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry.

The craze pulled video games out of laboratories and into bars, arcades, and eventually living rooms. A home version followed in 1975, and within a few years the once-novel idea of playing games on a television screen had become a defining feature of modern popular culture.