Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games and the first sports arcade video game. It is a table tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics.
Pong was the invention of Nolan Bushnell, a young engineer who introduced video table tennis to arcades in 1972. Simple and addictive, Pong launched the craze for home video games. The home version was Introduced by Atari, Bushnell's company, in 1974--long before anyone had seen a personal computer.
Before there was Pong, there was Odyssey, invented by Ralph Baer in 1966. Programmed for 12 games, Magnavox's TV-based game required plastic overlays to identify colored playing fields on the screen. It also came with two hand controls and such traditional board game equipment as dice, playing cards, and play money. Consumers strongly preferred Pong's simplicity, and Pong and its numerous knock-off relatives dominated the game market until 1977, while Magnavox abandoned Odyssey about a year after its 1972 debut.
It was in many ways a reaction to the first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space, from 1971, an overly ambitious effort based on Spacewar!, a pioneering mainframe computer-based space combat simulation from the 1960s developed by and for engineers (which will be covered in an upcoming article, "Spacewar! (1962): The Best Waste of Time in the History of the Universe").
Unfortunately, Computer Space proved too complex for the first wave of would-be gamers to handle. Whereas Computer Space had boldly gone where no coin-op had gone before, Pong merely asked players to "avoid missing ball for high score." The banal but intuitive gameplay made it the right game at the right time.
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