There are several versions of how the history of video games really began. One of the most credible indicates an exact date: November 29, 1972. That day Atari, a startup founded a few months earlier by Nolan Bushnell (“a dreamer who dreamed great dreams”), announces the birth of Pong.
If you are not very young you have probably played it: it was the first, truly great success of the videogame world. It was on-screen ping-pong, electronic tennis. But to review it today, considering that the ball could bounce off the sides as if there were walls, and this made the exchanges unpredictable, but also longer, you would say that the Pong it was like paddle, the sport that has been spreading for a couple of years, but inside an arcade, a cabinet with a screen and knobs.
That it would be a great success had been understood since the first prototype came positioned in a recently opened bar in Sunnyvale, California: Andy Capp’s Tavern (map below). Atari, they knew the owner because they supplied him with pinball machines and convinced him to play the first one Pong between the jukebox and the arcade of Computer Space. It was an instant hit that Atari discovered when they saw that the coin container (dollar quarters) was always full and this blocked the car.
Pong he was born by chance. It didn’t have to be a real video game. Bushnell had a contract to develop an automobile video game and had hired to do so a talented but inexperienced young engineer, Allan Alcorn. To get him to practice he had assigned him the task of doing something simple by lying about the fact that there was a contract with General Electric behind it (it was not true). The idea was a kind of electronic tennis: there were already very rudimentary similar things around and even a product launched by a competitor of, Atari, but it had not been successful. Alcorn’s skill was the ability to transform a simple game on the verge of boredom (two rackets that postpone the ball until one misses) into something exciting that required a certain skill: to do it he divided each racket into 8 segments, each of which sent the ball over at a different angle, as if it were an effect. This made trading more difficult and rewarded the best player. He then added the fact that the ball became faster as the exchange was prolonged making it more and more difficult and therefore causing a conclusion.
When Bushnell saw Pong realized that that exercise was a videogame ready for its debut, which took place on November 29, 1972. Next year we will celebrate 50 years: Pong it has entered our popular culture, in books and films. In a fairly recent commercial tennis player Andy Roddick can be seen playing it.
maps: where Andy Capp’s Tavern was located
Andy Capp’s Tavern no longer exists: there was a place called Rooster T. Feather’s, but that place, the 157 West of Camino Real it is still considered by many to be the place where video games were born.
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