When was pong invented

The result was a table tennis video game called Pong. Pong was first introduced as an arcade video game in a small bar in Sunnyvale, California. Pong is a simple game, but it has a complicated history. It is widely accepted that when Bushnell was working on it, he studied contemporary computer games. He also was aware of the work of Ralph Baer , the designer of the first home video game, the Magnavox Odyssey. Bushnell tested the Odyssey and its table tennis video game at a trade show in California in That same year, Atari came out with Pong and in , Magnavox took the company to court.

Atari and Magnavox settled and Magnavox gave Atari an exclusive license to reproduce the game. Two years later, in , Atari released the Atari , the same year my uncle bought his Tele-Game console. Like many other people, he spent hours in the basement defeating aliens, destroying asteroids, and trying to convince my grandmother to join him.

Will my brother follow in my uncle's footsteps and be wiping the dust from his PlayStation 3 console 40 years from now? He swears he won't, but I have a funny feeling that he will save things just like all my other relatives - his Game Boy is already starting to collect dust under his bed.

Check out the Lemelson Center's latest podcast on on making music for video games and using video games to make music. Just thought I would add some information to this for you.

I think there are a few inaccuracies to what you write here. Actually in Rusch made the suggestion of a type of game that ended up as ping-pong.

After that they made that game into a type of Hockey game. Bushnell was one of the three Partners that came up with the Atari however before that he made the ping-pong arcade type games.

That what I think happened anyways. I am the great niece of Bill Harrison and the facts given were very nice to know. My uncle Bill died earlier this year in April. He was a great man and very humble. Taking credit for this would be the last thing he ever wanted out of making this game, so thank you.

Name required. Email required. Click here to cancel reply. Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. 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 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. Beyond the idea of playing games on a television, Baer also created a wide variety of games to play: Skiing. 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. 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. Editorials » Hobbies and Interests » Gaming ». Most Popular. The Best Junior Golf Drills. What is Translation? What is a Shared Vision? Top Searches on. Singapore Jobs.