The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar

The Very First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar

On the Birth of PONG and the Rise of Atari

A revolution was televised in 1972. It cost beer drinkers 25¢ a play. After work, thirsty folks rambled into Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA to knock back frothy, cool mugs and test their skill against the cruel silver ball. Cheap beer and pinball characterized this workaday watering hole, as did peanut shells casually tossed to the floor. One late summer day, those eager to pull the plunger on Bally’s Skyrocket or Gottlieb’s groovy 4 Square encountered a strange, sedate intruder encroaching upon the world of titillating backglass art, hypnotic playfields, and the cacophony of clamorous clang.

There, conspicuously perched on a wooden barrel-cum-pedestal, sat a small hand-painted orange contraption with contact paper decorating its sides in the sordid splendor of woodgrain, its earth tones very much of an era steeped in a melody of harvest gold, rust, and avocado hues. The gizmo’s stout bluntness raised the question: “What is it?” Its modest cabinet revealed nothing more than a small, black and white Hitachi TV. This tube emitted weird photons set deep in a cabinet of curiosity with its protruding wooden bezel deceptively amplifying the dimension of the TV screen, a diminutive 13-inches.

In contrast to a conventional TV, this screen didn’t display broadcast television. A mesmerizing phosphorous square ball “bouncing” across the small screen divided by what resembles a “net” has replaced All in the Family. Thin rectangles, possibly “paddles” move vertically. Numbers—“the score”—flash left and right above the “court.”

One spot. Two paddles. A square ball, net, and score. That’s it.

Sparse, frighteningly minimal compared to the tawdriness of the typical pinball playfield. Beneath the screen a brushed steel plate houses two knobs, one for each pair of hands to turn. Whereas with pinball a player can prod, pulsate, and press on their own here, a player has no choice but to compete directly against another person. This thing’s a social mixer, taking two to tango. Knobs are intuitive, familiar. They already twist to adjust a Volkswagen Beetle’s AM/FM radio tuner or lower the volume on a wooden TV console at home. Instructions are absent. A single, monosyllabic word appears in all-caps SHOUTING this thing’s name: “PONG.”

The prototype to PONG proved so wildly popular and profitable, its innards couldn’t digest the success. It isn’t accompanied by “PING” to make this device legible, a little more obvious to the uninitiated or inebriated. Christening the machine took priority over explaining what to do with it, though its on-screen score, divided court with oppositional paddles make it largely perceptible. The basic ingredients are all there.

Until now, people only watched TV. Why imagine anything else beyond Mary Tyler Moore? A ruddy coin box, one probably liberated from a mechanical pony ride, or laundry machine signals that to play this TV requires 25¢. Another symptom of the era’s Great Inflation: a single game of pinball costs a dime; a beer ran just shy of a buck. Will anyone pay to play?

That question brews at a certain table in the bar. Quietly clutching their beers with an eye keenly fixed on this anomaly are two of the three men responsible for its existence: Nolan Bushnell and Allan “Al” Alcorn. They sit back, looking on in apprehension, hoping someone spots the machine on its barrel, walks up to it, inserts a coin, and plays… all before their beers go flat along with the hopes they’ve pinned on this experiment.

A few weeks later, Bushnell and Alcorn’s telephone at their newly formed company, Atari Inc., rang angrily. An annoyed voice on the other end belted: “the damn machine is broken.” Alcorn drove frantically over to Andy Capp’s to diagnose the problem. As he opened the cabinet, he quickly discovered that the malfunction wasn’t the circuitry or the hardware. No, instead, the makeshift bread pan used to collect quarters had spilled over causing the coin-mechanism to jam. Alcorn started scooping up quarters from the floor by the handfuls. The prototype to PONG proved so wildly popular and profitable, its innards couldn’t digest the success. Hardly a glitzy image—a burly engineer panning silver from a peanut shell laden bar floor—for the dawn of the video game industry but a marvelous problem to have for a tech start up.

Half a century later, PONG still resounds. The prototype from Andy Capp’s Tavern now rests as an illustrious object at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and PONG at large basks in the prestige of being one of the first video games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play. NPR’s popular “Morning Edition” reported the game’s golden jubilee on November 28, 2022 with a short segment entitled, “Where did the time go? Video game ‘Pong’ turns 50.”

Contrasting Elden Ring’s blockbuster quality soundtrack with that of Pong’s primitive mmPUCK tone, host Rachel Martin quips that listener’s radios are not glitching. Atari SA marked the occasion of Pong’s 50th with Atari 50, a “greatest hits” multi-platform software collection, rebranding its slogan with the retro-luscious “Since 1972” in celebration of its legacy.

Like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite, Atari’s origin story is renowned. Told and retold across countless blogs, newspapers, magazine articles, and books written by fans, journalists, and academics, confirmed in interviews and oral histories, revisited and recreated in documentaries, even shared at museums the world over. That pile of loose change collected by Alcorn seemingly grew into a mountain of riches that presaged “the birth of the video game industry” too often followed by the inevitable listless cliché, “and the rest is history.”

For Atari, this moment launched the fresh-faced company as a major West Coast player in the coin-op amusement industry back East, eventually enabling the company to profitably shift into consumer electronics for the home market, before crashing down to earth ten short years later. But in that time, PONG begat an entire industry, an iconic and enduring brand, not to mention a cultural and social phenomenon with revenue now well into the billions globally.