What was pong originally played on

As a result, Atari encouraged its staff to produce more innovative games. Several sequels were released that built upon the original's gameplay by adding new features. Pong has been referenced and parodied in multiple television shows and video games, and has been a part of several video game and cultural exhibitions. Nolan Bushnell had played the electronic ping pong game on the Magnavox Odyssey in Burlingame, California.

He hired Allan Alcorn [ Al Alcorn ] who is good in computer science. Alcorn's assignment was to create a game based on the ping pong game as a warm up exercise.

Bushnell looked and played the game and Atari manufactured it. The game is a 2-d sports game played in a simple way. The player uses the paddle to knock the ball back and forth and must get the ball past the other paddle to get a score.

The score is represented by digits on top of the screen. The control is a dial. After several demonstrations to TV manufacturers, Magnavox signed an agreement in and the first video game system was released in May Odyssey. The history of PONG games and derivates just started, would spread all over the globe, and die in the early s. Atari's game was quickly copied and improved in Later in , home video games became popular and were sold by numerous companies.

Others like First Dimension ran a poor business and did not survive the strong competition from Atari, Sears, Coleco, Magnavox and others.

In Europe , video games appeared in homes in The early and fragile european market was formed of a few small companies selling cheap systems made of discrete components. Once General Instruments released the first low-cost chip allowing to build a complete PONG system with few external components, a whole industry was launched and hundreds of manufacturers released their own line of PONG video games all over the world.

Since many systems marked the golden age of the early video game history, this site has been divided into several parts. Click the thumbnails to access the pages. Introduction: The video game history started in a strange and complicated way and it is important to avoid confusions with what happened in the s and s.

SD and SD systems. PCx cartridges. Weird systems: Videotronic 2. Weird systems: Playtech Telesport. Make-It-Yourself: Magasine articles. PONG systems schematics. Make-It-Yourself: Kit adverts. Magnavox Odyssey emulator. Interesting articles:. But is it really the case? Although not complete due to the large number of Ball and Paddle games released all over the world in the s, it has been carefully compiled after daily checks of online auctions since , hence relevant rarity ratings.

Please understand that there is no relevant price guide for these games because their demand changes every day. Who did it first? Baer Ralph Baer's interesting discussion about his invention. He explains why he is the real inventor of the video game, and clearly explains the original definition of the video game as of when it has been invented. Getting Things Straight by Ralph H.

Baer Another great article explaining why Magnavox sued various video game manufacturers, and why video game history is often altered by mistaken information.

So when I went home for spring break and mentioned that I was writing something about video games for my internship at the Smithsonian, was I surprised when my uncle pulled out his video game console from ? Not really. My uncle still had the two joysticks and a collection of 11 games, including Space Invaders and his favorite, Asteroids. The most impressive thing was that if we had the right adapter, I could theoretically plug this machine into my TV and play the games my uncle grew up with in his teens.

This Tele-Game console was basically the Atari , just with a Sears name. The Atari was the longest running console in history. Atari Pong game in crate in The founder of Atari and the co-creator of Pong was engineer Nolan Bushnell.

What came first, Atari or Pong? He hired Al Alcorn and had him program a simple game to test his programming experience. The result was a table tennis video game called Pong. Pong was first introduced as an arcade video game in a small bar in Sunnyvale, California. Pong is a simple game, but it has a complicated history. 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.