Who created Pong? As with many stories from the early days of videogames, it's a little complicated.
Although there are many inventions that could reasonably make some claim to being the first videogame, there's no question what the first big hit game was: Atari's Pong. The iconic table-tennis game became an overnight sensation after a prototype first appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972, and in no time at all videogames went from almost zero to a multi-billion dollar global industry.
And the men responsible for it are getting their due.
Next month at the DICE Awards in Las Vegas, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will bestow Pioneer Awards, which commemorate the contributions of the game designers whose work shaped the medium in its early days, to Allan Alcorn and Ralph Baer. Alcorn designed Pong, and Baer created the home gaming machine Odyssey, whose killer app was a table-tennis game that predated---and directly inspired---Atari's.
The award will be presented posthumously to Baer, who died last month at the age of 92.
Baer first conceptualized the home videogame console in 1966 while working as an engineer at defense contractor Sanders Associates. It was a skunkworks project at first, since creating toys was not the mission of the military contractor. But Baer's concept of making the television set into an interactive medium showed such promise that Sanders soon made the project official, licensing the technology to Magnavox, which released it in 1972 as the Odyssey.
What would become a familiar scene soon followed: Kids sitting cross-legged in front of a TV, clutching controllers, enraptured by the game on the screen. Baer's son Mark has an interesting twist on that, since he can reasonably claim to be the first kid to do that.
"I can recall sitting in [my father's] bedroom, when he had an old black and white TV with the little pull-starter... playing some manifestation of early videogames," said Baer, who will accept the Pioneer Award next month on his father's behalf. "Playing that alone, and with my brother."
"I would like to believe that I was the first one to win a videogame, because I kicked my brother's butt," he says. "I'm certain of it."
Beyond the idea of playing games on a television, Baer also created a wide variety of games to play: Skiing. Baseball. Simon Says. Target shooting, with a life-size rifle controller. Baer and his team were creating entire genres of videogame out of whole cloth, one after the other. But one of them was clearly the most fun, by a mile: ping pong.
"That was the big one, right from the get-go," says Mark Baer. The practice of bouncing a ball back and forth across the screen might have caught on more with Odyssey players because the primitive hardware couldn't render much beyond squares that flitted across the screen. You could place an acetate overlay, included with the console, over your TV screen to add a green field and white lines if you wanted an extra layer of "realism." But the gameplay was so gripping that the dots were more than enough.
One of the early Odyssey players was none other than Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, who visited a Magnavox product showcase in the spring of 1972, signed the guestbook, and played the Odyssey. When he returned to his nascent company, he assigned a project to Alcorn, a young recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley that Bushnell had just hired as one of Atari's first employees.
"I suspect they were saying, let's give Al an easy thing to get going on," Alcorn says. "And Nolan at some point described this game idea, a very simple game idea, of a ping-pong game on a screen." Bushnell, Alcorn recalls, was very keen that the game should have an on-screen score display, which Odyssey lacked.
Additionally, to get Alcorn motivated to do great work and keep the costs down, the fast-talking, former carnival barker Bushnell spun up an elaborate lie: Atari had landed a contract with General Electric to produce a home videogame machine, he told him, and it had to have a cost of goods of less than $50.
None of this was true. Alcorn was having trouble meeting the cost requirements, but this wasn't as big an issue as he'd feared: "Nolan didn't seem too concerned, which was surprising to me. But also, what wasn't surprising to me but should have been is that nobody from General Electric ever came by, or wrote us a letter or anything. And I'm just pushing ahead, and Nolan would say, 'That's fine, you're doing great.'"
Had Alcorn known that this tennis game was just a throwaway project meant to get him banging on something, perhaps he wouldn't have put so much care into the design of Pong. But since he had visions of this appearing under kids' Christmas trees with a General Electric logo on it, Alcorn iterated and iterated.
"I was motivated to make it playable," he says. "So the little things like the ball reflecting off of the paddle at different angles, I tweaked that up to try to make it as fun to play as I could."
As Alcorn came close to completing the project to Bushnell's specifications, Atari's founder threw him for one last loop. "At the end, Nolan says, it's got to have sound. And I said, 'Oh my God, you never said that, Nolan!' And he says, 'Yeah, I want the roar of a crowd applauding.'"
Alcorn thought Bushnell was nuts. He was already way over budget on this machine, and Nolan wanted realistic, synthesized sounds? "So I went off and, in half a day, poked around and found tones that were already in the circuit that I could pull out with less than one additional chip." That became the iconic, instantly recognizable, computer-age bouncing-ball sound the game is famous for.
"Certainly, they took the idea," says Mark Baer, "and ran with it." Pong, besides being a more polished, refined, and fun version of Odyssey's tennis game, had one big advantage: Since Atari released it not as a home machine but as a coin-operated game, the cost of entry was 25 cents. Odyssey cost $100 in 1972, the equivalent of $560 today. This was a sticking point for Baer, who'd engineered the machine to be a lean, mean $19.95 product. He felt Magnavox had gone overboard adding bells and whistles.
"To put the Magnavox Odyssey in perspective, indeed, Nolan saw it and that inspired [Pong]," Alcorn says. "But it wasn't inspired because, 'Wow, we're going to make a fortune, we're going to piggyback on that great success,'" he says. "It was, this is the simplest game he could think of. The whole outcome of this thing in retrospect was kind of like the movie The Producers: This was never supposed to be a successful game. So what's the problem in copying something you're never going to sell?"
Odyssey wasn't a flop, but it didn't become the instant hit Pong did. In fact, Pong's success was actually visited back onto the Odyssey, which had its biggest sales in 1974---after Pong had become a huge arcade success, but a year before Atari could launch its first Home Pong product.
"Things progress," says Mark Baer. "Orville Wright did not come up with the jet. They came up with what they came up with, and people took it from there."
