Pong
Created | Updated Mar 6, 2002
<P><B>Avoid missing ball for high score.</B></P>
<P>The first video game to make it big was 1972's "Pong." It was named after one-half of the hollow, sonar-like sounds made when the game's blocky little tennis ball hit the side of the screen. It pinged. It ponged. ("Ping-pong" was already copyrighted.)</P>
<P>In its day, Pong was wildly popular. It ushered in what would be the golden age of video games: the big arcades populated by teens and animatronic animals and glimmering compu-sounds, raking in more sheer wealth in quarters than Reagan ever made selling missiles to the Iranians.</P>
<P>The guy who made it big off Pong was Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell didn't invent the game. He was a young engineer and former part-time carnival worker, recently relocated from Utah to California and recently married, who dreamed of getting people to pay to play video games. He was <I>bent</I> on it. Out of her nursery room went his baby daughter; her room became his workshop. There he and another engineer, Ted Dabney, toiled on an "Asteroids"-like game called "Computer Space," where you had to avoid falling into the sun. The game didn't do very well. Neither did his marriage.</P>
<P>Was "Computer Space" too hard for people to master? Bushnell thought so. He hired another engineer, Al Alcorn, to build a simpler game. They tried a driving game. Then Alcorn wrote "Pong" -- inspired by a primitive tennis game Bushnell had once seen at a nuclear research lab in New York. The rules of Pong were simple. "Avoid missing ball for high score," the instructions on the screen said.</P>
<P>They set up the first Pong at Andy Capp's -- a bar in Sunnyvale, California. With high hopes, Bushnell flew off to a meeting with executives of Bally Midway. He wanted to convince the executives of the leading American pinball company that Pong could be a hit.</P>
<P>They laughed at him. Computer games? That people would play money to play? That would turn a profit at 25 cents a game? He had to be joking.</P>
<P>Bushnell winged his way back to California in despair.</P>
<P>The next morning, Bushnell, perhaps miserably hung-over, perhaps having faced defeat with a Mormon kind of sobriety, answered the phone. It was the bartender from Andy Capp's, who had been trying to call him. The goddamn machine was stuck, he said, and there was a line of people waiting to play it. When Bushnell got there, he inspected the machine. The circuitry looked OK. Was it a problem with the little flickering monitor? Nope. The paddles? Nope.</P>
<P>Turns out the milk carton that caught the quarters was jammed. Too many coins in it.</P>
<P>Bushnell, who would be getting around in a fleet of limosines in a few years, knew he was on to something. Soon after, he started Atari. (He also started a chain of kiddie restaurant/arcades called Chuck E. Cheeze that served godawful pizza and featured such robotic animal performers as "The Beagles" and a gyrating dog who did Elvis songs.)</P>
<P>As for what was Andy Capp's, it's now a comedy club -- according to some guy at a bar in nearby Santa Clara.</P>
<P>The first video game to make it big was 1972's "Pong." It was named after one-half of the hollow, sonar-like sounds made when the game's blocky little tennis ball hit the side of the screen. It pinged. It ponged. ("Ping-pong" was already copyrighted.)</P>
<P>In its day, Pong was wildly popular. It ushered in what would be the golden age of video games: the big arcades populated by teens and animatronic animals and glimmering compu-sounds, raking in more sheer wealth in quarters than Reagan ever made selling missiles to the Iranians.</P>
<P>The guy who made it big off Pong was Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell didn't invent the game. He was a young engineer and former part-time carnival worker, recently relocated from Utah to California and recently married, who dreamed of getting people to pay to play video games. He was <I>bent</I> on it. Out of her nursery room went his baby daughter; her room became his workshop. There he and another engineer, Ted Dabney, toiled on an "Asteroids"-like game called "Computer Space," where you had to avoid falling into the sun. The game didn't do very well. Neither did his marriage.</P>
<P>Was "Computer Space" too hard for people to master? Bushnell thought so. He hired another engineer, Al Alcorn, to build a simpler game. They tried a driving game. Then Alcorn wrote "Pong" -- inspired by a primitive tennis game Bushnell had once seen at a nuclear research lab in New York. The rules of Pong were simple. "Avoid missing ball for high score," the instructions on the screen said.</P>
<P>They set up the first Pong at Andy Capp's -- a bar in Sunnyvale, California. With high hopes, Bushnell flew off to a meeting with executives of Bally Midway. He wanted to convince the executives of the leading American pinball company that Pong could be a hit.</P>
<P>They laughed at him. Computer games? That people would play money to play? That would turn a profit at 25 cents a game? He had to be joking.</P>
<P>Bushnell winged his way back to California in despair.</P>
<P>The next morning, Bushnell, perhaps miserably hung-over, perhaps having faced defeat with a Mormon kind of sobriety, answered the phone. It was the bartender from Andy Capp's, who had been trying to call him. The goddamn machine was stuck, he said, and there was a line of people waiting to play it. When Bushnell got there, he inspected the machine. The circuitry looked OK. Was it a problem with the little flickering monitor? Nope. The paddles? Nope.</P>
<P>Turns out the milk carton that caught the quarters was jammed. Too many coins in it.</P>
<P>Bushnell, who would be getting around in a fleet of limosines in a few years, knew he was on to something. Soon after, he started Atari. (He also started a chain of kiddie restaurant/arcades called Chuck E. Cheeze that served godawful pizza and featured such robotic animal performers as "The Beagles" and a gyrating dog who did Elvis songs.)</P>
<P>As for what was Andy Capp's, it's now a comedy club -- according to some guy at a bar in nearby Santa Clara.</P>
