© Mark Ollig
Allan Alcorn designed the video game, Pong, when he was 24 years old and working as an Atari Inc. engineer.
Pong is the challenging table tennis (ping-pong) game we played on our television sets back in the 1970s.
In September 1972, Alcorn installed a standing cabinet version of the Pong video arcade game at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA.
Pong was an instant success and became 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 bar patrons’ dissatisfaction, 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 decided to come out and investigate, he may have smiled after discovering why the Pong machine was not working.
Pong was so popular with the patrons that too many quarters had become jammed inside the cabinet’s coin-catcher, causing the machine’s mechanism to fail.
This story reminds me of 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.”
I digress; back to today’s topic.
Nov. 29, 1972, Atari had obtained enough funding to announce the Pong video arcade cabinet games would be mass-produced on an assembly line and sold commercially.
Three years later, Atari released the home consumer version, called Home Pong, using a game console connected to a television.
In 1975, the Atari Home Pong console sold for $98.95, which in today’s dollars would be around $495.
Before Pong’s popularity, Ralph Baer had invented a simple “dot chasing” video game, called Chase, in 1967.
Playing the video game Chase requires a brown controller box connected to a television.
By 1972, Baer’s brown box developed into what became the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console.
The television maker Magnavox manufactured the Magnavox Odyssey game console; therefore, consumers reasoned the Odyssey console would only work on a Magnavox televisions when, in fact, it worked on any TV.
The attentive folks at Atari picked up on this false belief.
Atari 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.
Ralph Baer passed away Dec. 6, 2014, at age 92.
In 1958, William Higginbotham, an instrumentation division head at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, created a game played using an oscilloscope connected to an analog computer to entertain visitors at the laboratory.
Higginbotham called this game Tennis for Two.
You can see a 1983 video featuring Tennis for Two, using its original components, at https://bit.ly/35TmueN.
In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas wrote the OXO programming code (Xs and Os, or commonly called tic-tac-toe) video game at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Douglas used a 1949 EDSAC (electronic delay storage automatic calculator) British computer.
He wrote the programming code as part of his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction.
OXO was the first computerized digital graphical game in which an individual played the tic-tac-toe game against a computer.
An individual used a rotary phone dial as the game controller when playing OXO.
What’s a rotary phone dial, Grandpa?
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.
Douglas’ human-computer interaction thesis earned him a Ph.D., which started his career in computer science.
World War II radar images were the inspiration for another game played using an electronic analog CRT.
Inventors Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed for a US Patent Jan. 25, 1947, for the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device and were granted US Patent 2,455,992 Dec. 14, 1948.
“In carrying out the invention, a cathode-ray tube [CRT display screen] 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 controlling “the trace of the ray or electron beam” on the display CRT emulates how the 1960 Etch A Sketch game creates the solid lines on its gray screen.
“At Atari, we were young, and we were risk-takers,” Allan Alcorn said during the 2015 Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awards, where he and Ralph Baer (posthumously) were recipients of the Pioneer Award.
Today, Alcorn is 73 years old and lives in San Francisco.
Every once in a while, I still play Pong using the app on my smartphone.
Continue to stay safe out there.
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| Screen grab from the Pong app on my smartphone |