©Mark Ollig
How
many of you recall playing the challenging table tennis (ping-pong) game called
Pong on your television back in the mid-1970s?
Ah
yes, I, too, was addicted to playing Pong.
Allan
Alcorn, who worked for Atari Inc. as an engineer, designed Pong when he was 24
years old.
A
standing cabinet version of his video arcade game was first installed in
September 1972, at an establishment called Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA.
Pong
was an instant success, and was being regularly played by the bar patrons.
However,
a couple of weeks after its installation, the Pong video arcade machine began
having problems and stopped accepting quarters.
Much
to the dissatisfaction of the bar patrons (and I imagine the tavern owner), the
Pong game stood inoperative, and so the bar manager called Atari and said, “The
machine is broken,” and asked to have someone come out and fix it.
When
Alcorn, himself, came out to investigate, he may have smiled after discovering
why the Pong machine was not working.
The
cause of the trouble was too many quarters had become jammed inside the
cabinet’s coin-catcher.
This
story takes me back to the days when I was out repairing public payphones
(What’s a payphone, Grandpa?).
Sometimes
I’d find quarters, dimes, and nickels had become lodged inside the payphone’s
coin chute assembly, causing the phone to become “out of order.”
But,
I digress back to today’s topic.
Atari
had obtained enough funding to announce, Nov. 29, 1972, that Pong video arcade
cabinet games would be mass-produced on an assembly line and sold commercially.
Three
years later, Atari released the consumer version, called Home Pong, using a
game console.
The
Atari Home Pong console connected to a television and sold for $98.95, which in
2017, would be nearly $580.
Before
Pong was on the scene, Ralph Baer had invented a simple “dot chasing” video
game, called Chase, in 1967.
This
game is played by connecting a brown controller box to a television.
By
1972, Baer’s design developed into what became the Magnavox Odyssey home video
game console.
The
Magnavox Odyssey game console was manufactured by the television maker of the
same name, Magnavox, so consumers reasoned the Odyssey console would only work
on a Magnavox television, when, in fact, it could be connected to any
television.
The
attentive folks at Atari picked up on this false belief and began printing
“Works on any television set, black-and-white, or color” on all of its Pong
game boxes in what I consider a brilliant advertising strategy. The result was
increased sales of Pong game consoles among Magnavox television users.
Going
back to 1958, William Higginbotham, instrumentation division head at Brookhaven
National Laboratory in Upton, NY, created a game played using an oscilloscope
connected to an analog computer as a way of entertaining visitors to the
laboratory.
Higginbotham
called this game Tennis for Two.
The
year 1952 saw the first computerized digital graphical game called OXO, in
which an individual played the tic-tac-toe game against a computer.
A
person used a rotary phone dial as the game controller when playing OXO.
Dialing
a digit from 1 to 9 represented the location of where to place an X or O on the
tic-tac-toe board displayed on the computer’s cathode ray tube (CRT) display
screen.
Alexander
S. Douglas wrote the programming code for OXO at the University of Cambridge in
the United Kingdom.
The
OXO game was played using the processing power of a 1949 British computer
called Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator.
Going
back further, we find World War II radar images to be the inspiration for a
game played using a CRT.
Inventors
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed for a US Patent Jan. 25, 1947.
Dec.
14, 1948, both were granted US Patent 2,455,992 for Cathode Ray Tube Amusement
Device.
“In
carrying out the invention, a cathode-ray tube is used upon the face of which
the trace of the ray or electron beam can be seen. One or more targets, such as
pictures of airplanes, for example, are placed upon the face of the tube.
Controls are available to the player so that he can manipulate the trace or
position of the beam, which is automatically caused to move across the face of
the tube,” reads the text from their patent.
A
player’s manipulating “the trace of the ray or electron beam” on the CRT of
their device has been likened to how an Etch A Sketch game creates the solid
lines on its gray screen.
Check
out this informative YouTube interview with Pong’s Allan Alcorn at
http://bit.ly/2z4fyJk.
Be
sure to visit my Bits & Bytes online webpage at
https://bitscolumn.blogspot.com.
(Pong video arcade game cabinet)
This column originally published Feb. 14, 2011, and was recently updated by the writer.