![]() The arcade version included 66 integrated circuits, a pair of 555 timers, and a few transistors. Pong was developed before the debut of microcontrollers, the circuit board consisted of hardwired, discrete logic components. Under the guise of a contract for General Electric, Bushnell asked Alcorn to design a game similar to ping-pong that could be played on a television. At the time, video games were mostly the domain of research laboratories and universities. Alcorn had majored in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, but had never played a video game before. Nolan Bushnell and Samuel “Ted” Dabney had recently started Atari, and they hired Alcorn as their third employee. The game was actually created as part of a training exercise to get a young engineer namedĪllan Alcorn acquainted with video-game development. The first player to reach 11 points wins.Īllan Alcorn, shown here in 2011, designed Pong as an exercise, to learn about how to design video games. If you miss, your opponent scores a point. The ball speeds up the longer you rally, and each hit is accompanied by a satisfying “click” sound. Players can move their paddle vertically (but not horizontally) to deflect the ball, and the ball can also bounce off the top and bottom of the screen. ![]() The game mimics table tennis, with two people competing against each other to get the ball past their opponent. Pong, it is simplicity itself-represented on screen as a moving dot, two vertical lines with which to hit the dot, and squared-off digits reflecting the score. ![]() In case you have somehow never encountered Was this really fun? To celebrate the half-century persistence of Pong, I set out to discover why so many people love the most boring video game of all time. Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot-not even a round ball-bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. ![]() And Pong still has a place in active research, for training AI algorithms, strengthening neural networks, and developing the brain-machine interface called Neuralink, among other things.Īnd yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong kick-started a global video-game industry that is now worth upwards of US $300 billion. It had earned the designation “the longest-lived home video game console in video game history” thanks to Atari 2600 games that brought the fun of the arcade into millions of homes across the world.Pong is the first video game that millions of people welcomed into their homes to play on their own televisions. After a successful 13 years on the market, the Atari 2600 was officially discontinued in 1990. Strategy comes into play when the power pellet is consumed.Ĭonsidering the ten best Atari 2600 games library, it’s easy to see how 30 million units could have sold. Luckily, there are power pellets that give Pac-Man the ability to eat ghosts for a limited time. The player must avoid the ghosts while attempting to consume every pellet. In this game, the player charges through mazes lined with pellets, ghosts, and power pellets. Although Pac-Man was a best seller, many consumers complained that this version was inferior to the arcade original. Pac-Man was by far the most popular of all the Atari 2600 games.
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