What is Pong? Who owns it? And a brief history

One of the oldest, popular arcade games that you’ll find on the market today is PONG – a game that features 2D graphics centered on providing players with a Tennis-like gaming experience. The object of the game is basically for players to survive by continuously hitting the tennis ball from one side of the screen to the next without having it miss the racket or square object. Now, before we go more in-depth as to what exactly PONG is we should probably answer a very important question – was PONG the first arcade game? No. The first arcade game was the less well-known game of Computer Space – a game that may not be as popular but was created an entire year before PONG was created.

Video of Pong Gameplay

A brief history of PONG

So, here’s the funny thing about PONG it was originally released in the year 1972 by the gaming manufacturer Atari (somewhere in this story someone is going to get sued – sorry for spoiling that for you). Here’s the long story about the creation of PONG. In the year 1972 the co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, assigned the creation of PONG to Allan Alcorn, an American engineer. The idea behind PONG was founded on the back of an electronic ping pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey (the company who ended up suing Atari for patent infringement. The results of which ended up being rather favorable for Atari.)

A little about the creator’s hand in creating PONG

Alcorn, the creator of PONG, was hired on the basis that he had both skill in the engineering field as well as previous experience with the owners of Atari. The funny thing about the game PONG was that it was originally created so that Alcorn could have a bit of experience developing video games. Bushnell, one of the co-founders, came up with the idea fro playing various other table tennis-modeled games on other computers. The whole premise behind PONG was that Alcorn was to create a game that had the following things: the ability to keep score, 2 square rackets for returning the ball, and (yes, you guessed it) a ball that had the ability to move back and forth between the 2 rackets). And, just as Bushnell asked Alcorn was able to create PONG with little to no difficulty.

In order to develop the game, Alcorn had to use his understanding of logic as well as of human enjoyment (at least when playing video games). He noticed that simply returning the ball back to each paddle would lack creativity and went on to add difficulty features that would allow the player to “struggle” a bit as the game progressed. To achieve the desired effect Alcorn divided the pieces of the paddle into segments and added angle returns to each segment. He also made it so that the ball would be returned at a faster rate after each serve ( a feature that would inevitably be reset if the player is unable to return the ball after a serve). And that’s just a little bit about the game’s development – there’s a ton more.

A brief overview of the remaining PONG storyline:

In 1972 a prototype of PONG was installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern
On 11/29/1972 PONG was announced by Atari
In 1973 Atari began shipping PONG to various different countries
By 1974 a home version of PONG was suggested by Harold Lee, one of Atari’s engineers
In April, 1974 Atari got sued by Magnavox for Patent infringement

To play the game online you can go here

http://www.freepong.org/

The results of the PONG case

Atari got kind of lucky with the results of the case they had against them with Magnavox. The entire deal with the case was that Magnavox felt that the idea for PONG came from a table tennis game they had featured on the Odyssey and that Atari wasn’t listening to them in terms of ceasing its production. Luckily, Atari didn’t end up having to take the case to court (as that would’ve cost them a whopping 1.5 million dollars in legal fees and would have likely put them out of business). Instead, they ended up settling the case for $700,000 which ended up covering their licensing fees for the game and ensured that they could continue making their PONG related video games and accessories.

*this also made sure that they didn’t have to pay any royalties from the sale of the game – which is a great deal if you consider how profitable the game was for Atari. It also helped that Atari withheld quite a bit of information about their products for about a year – just so that Magnavox couldn’t get rights to their other PONG products.

Who owns it?

While the game PONG was created by Allen Alcorn and received licensing from Magnavox, it’s owned by Atari – the company Allan Alcorn worked for at the time.