KING PONG

A history of the dirt-simple but massively influential video game.

Pong, first released in 1972, wasn’t the first video game; that would be Spacewar!, developed at MIT in the early 1960s. Nor was it the first video game to make it into arcades; that title belongs to Computer Space, developed by Atari founders Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell. But Atari’s Pong was the first to become a legitimate phenomenon and moneymaker, and Guins’ academic but readable survey of the game reveals how it was as much a marketing and social coup as a technological one. First installed in a bar in Sunnyvale, California, Pong competed with coin-operated games like pinball machines, but at 25 cents a game compared to the more common 10 cents, it drew a healthier profit than its analog brethren. (Engineer Allan Alcorn recalls receiving a call that the game was malfunctioning, only to learn that the problem was that too many coins had jammed the machine.) Dabney and Bushnell parlayed Pong’s arcade success into a home gaming system, but even there, Atari wasn’t first; in 1972 Magnavox had released a clunkier system, Odyssey, that was expensive and not very user friendly. As Guins explores how Atari beat its competitors, he debunks a few myths that surrounded the company, particularly that its offices were a slacker haven that lucked into millions. The vibe was indeed laid-back at Atari HQ, but the leaders demonstrated plenty of marketing savvy, negotiating the company into a prime spot in Sears’ popular holiday wish book in 1975 and inventing a fake competitor, Kee Games, to get more Atari products into arcades. Guins doesn’t explore the game’s legacy much beyond its place in various museums, but he does nicely show how its success was an uncanny mix of timing, innovation, and salesmanship.

Gaming history that’s also valuable as sociology and business scholarship.