The Gizmodo portal decided to share a little-known fact about one of the very first and most popular video games in history. This article focuses on the Pong game, which was developed by Allan Alcorn, who came to Atari. It turns out that this video game was not planned as a commercial product.
When Alcorn was hired by Atari in 1972, Nolan Bushnell, who founded this company with Ted Debney, told Allan that Atari had recently signed a contract with GE, under which Bushnell had pledged to create a very simple electronic game of table tennis. The task was to create a field in which two vertical lines (imitating tennis rackets) fought off a ball, as well as a scoreboard showing the current score in the game. Management was carried out through two controllers, the so-called paddle.
But the fact is that in fact, Bushnell did not sign any contract with GE, but just wanted to instruct Alcorn to develop something very simple, because Alcorn had no experience in the design and development of video games, although he had a very useful set of knowledge in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. And even despite the fact that this game was ultimately not intended for a wide audience, Bushnell wanted to make Alcorn think that this project is very important and requires a lot of effort to be made in its implementation.
After reviewing the technical assignment for this game, Alcorn found it quite boring and therefore decided to diversify the game a little: to make the ball bounce off the racket when struck from different angles. In addition, Allan made the ball increase the speed of departure after each successful strike. On a happy occasion, an error appeared in the code of this program, as a result of which the ball could now fight not only from the rackets, but also from the upper and lower edges of the playing field. Alcorn considered that this would make the game even more interesting, as experienced players would try to deceive their rival by sending the ball in a different direction.
Despite the fact that the game Pong was originally conceived as a simulator for training programming skills, Bushnell and Dabni were very impressed by what Alcorn had developed in just a few months. And although the executives were still skeptical about the commercial potential of this product, they decided to try the prototype in the Andy Capp's Tavern bar and look at the reaction of visitors. They thought that if the game appealed to the visitors of the establishment, they would try to find a way to sell it to Bally Manufacturing or Midway Manufacturing - two companies with which Atari had contracts for the development of other games.
In the end, both of these companies are very interested in this game. However, during the first week since the test began at the bar, the game began to “hang”, and Alcorn was sent to repair it. Once in place, Alcorn discovered that the malfunction of the game was due to the fact that the coin bag (the role of which was performed by the usual carton packaging for milk) was overfilled, and the coins, falling on the electronic board, caused a short circuit.
The pub manager later admitted to Bushnell that visitors literally lined up to play this game. From that moment on, Bushnell understood and decided that Atari itself should start mass production of this game. For the realization of this idea, Bushnell told (actually deceiving) Bally that Midway allegedly sees no potential in this game. Then he convinced Midway that Bally did not see the commercial potential in Pong. When both companies heard this, they decided to retreat. So Bunella had all the rights to Pong and at the same time the opportunity to continue working with these companies.
After numerous financial and industrial difficulties, the first arcade game Pong entered the market, which immediately gained immense popularity, bringing the creators from one arcade machine from $ 35 to $ 45 a day. Later, Atari released a home version of the game, which was exclusively distributed through the Sears retail network. The home version has become so popular that on the first Christmas, when the game went on sale, it sold more than 150,000 copies of Pong. So, the originally developed simulator for sharpening programming skills was the first commercially successful game in history and the ancestor of the first game boom.
Bonus Facts:
- According to Nolan Bushnell, Atari got its name after the phrase that sounded in the logical board game “Go”. In this game, when taking the next stone (chips) of the opponent, the player usually says “atari”, which is equivalent to the word “check” in chess. The very word "atari" is formed from the Japanese word "ataru", meaning "hit the target";
- The idea of the Pong game could (and maybe could not) appear in Bushnell's head after becoming acquainted with another electronic version of table tennis developed by Magnavox. The bottom line is that the game from Magnavox was developed earlier than Pong. In some versions, Bushnell was able to play this game on Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. It is said that a few months before the release of Pong, Bushnell was able to play a Magnavox game at a trade show held in San Francisco. However, Bushnell himself assures that he was not at any exhibition and did not play any game. It is fair to say that the only "witnesses" that Bushnell still played this game at the exhibition are only employees of Magnavox itself. Anyway, Pong's success forced Magnavox to sue Atari for violating their patents. It is important to note that there were earlier versions of electronic table tennis on the market, which were released earlier than the Magnavox game and were played by Bushnell (while still a college student). Many believed that Atati could win this trial (although some time later Nintendo tried to sue Magnavox on the same grounds, but lost the court). However, this was not the case before the court, because Atari had no money to defend itself (according to the estimates of the time, this would have cost the company $ 1.5 million). Realizing the senselessness of the trial, Magnavox decided to offer Atari a very peaceful way of extrajudicial proceedings - Atari pays them 700 thousand dollars, and Magnavox forgets about this case. Magnavox nevertheless decided to sue the companies that produce the Pong clones. Unlike Atari, which has no money left after paying 700 thousand dollars to settle this conflict, the wallets of its competitors, who produced copies of Pong, were full;
- Another item that was specified in the decision between Magnavox and Atari was that Magnavox transferred all rights to all new commercial products that will be released during the next calendar year. To avoid such punishment, Atari decided not to release any consumer products for a year, while retaining all of its planned products in development. Interestingly, this agreement was signed a week before the largest annual international exhibition of electronics Consumer Electronics Show. Atari could produce new products, but could not release them until the next CES. During this time, Magnavox literally pushed its lawyers into the Atari office, so that those from time to time checked what Bushnell’s company was doing during this imposed ban;
- Ralph Baer, the creator of the electronic version of table tennis from Magnavox - a game around which the company sued Atari - also created the first game-shooting range for a light gun. Later, this idea will be used by Nintendo in its Duck Hunt game. In addition, Baer is the creator of the popular in the 80s electronic game "Simon" for memory training;
- The reason Bushnell thought that Pong would not be a commercially viable product was that, in his opinion, the game was too simple to entertain the individual. This is a very interesting note. Before becoming a co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell (and Dabney) developed a game called “Computer Space”, which became the first commercially available video game in the world that required a coin from a player to work with. The task of the player in it was to fly on a spaceship and destroy other spaceships. The game was very unpopular with public testing. Players complained about its excessive complexity and in general misunderstanding of what is wanted of them in it. However, in the circle of university dormitories, the game really liked. She was particularly interested in future electrical engineers. Despite all this, Bushnell never learned from his mistakes. Alcorn once said:
“Nolan gave it to me because, in his opinion, it was the easiest game in the world. He simply did not see in her play value. He believed that the future game, which will bring him success, should be much more complicated than the same Computer Space. Nolan did not want me to talk about it, because such words would certainly not motivate me to work on Pong. He just wanted to get rid of her somehow. ”
In other words, Bushnell essentially became the “father of video games,” even without knowing it;
- The project of the home game console Pong had the working title "Darlene". It turns out that Darlene is the name of one very attractive girl who worked at Atari at that time;
- In the original idea, Bushnell and Ted Dabni wanted Alcorn to add sounds of whistles and whistles to Pong that were played every time the score was changed or lost. Fortunately (because Pong would have become really annoying then), Alcorn did not know how to create such sounds at that moment, and the PCB already had many other parts. Instead, Alcorn found another solution for sound effects in Pong:
“I was just a little busy with the sync pulse generator to find the right frequency and pitch. As a result, all sounds were created in half a day. In fact, all the necessary sounds were contained in the machine itself ";
- Shortly after the release, Pong Atari created a new independent company, Kee Games, which allegedly worked as their competitor. The connection between Atari and Kee Games was kept secret. The Kee Games office was handled by Bushnell’s neighbor, Joe Keenan. The meaning of this venture was to obtain from distributors "exclusive" contracts for the development of new games. At the same time, the games produced by these two companies would be practically exact copies of each other and would differ only in small details that would help the distributors not to notice the trick. A year later, this conspiracy was still revealed. When the public learned that Kee Games was created and more or less controlled by Atari itself, it was closed. However, in view of the phenomenal work done at Kee Games, Joe Keenan was appointed president of Atari;
- The Atari 2600 is the first Atari gaming system to support multiple games. At the moment, this game console still holds the record "consoles with the largest life cycle." He is fourteen years and two months old. Production of the console was decided to stop in 1992;
- In the early stages, the Atari 2600 gaming console was not very popular due to the fact that many people simply did not understand that you could play other games on it, and not just different versions of Pong, whose popularity began to slowly decline. In the first year of their release, only 250 thousand Atari 2600 game consoles were sold. However, sales of the console increased sharply in 1982. As a result, Atari sold 10 million game consoles and nearly as many copies of its most popular video games, including Space Invaders and Pacman. All this has allowed Atari to earn $ 2 billion;
- For its time, the Atari 2600 had a very powerful hardware and was one of the most powerful home gaming systems based on CPU. Its processor was a special version of the crystal MOS Technology 6507, which worked at an impressive frequency of 1.19 MHz. At the same time, the “cropped” version of the chip could handle 4 KB of memory, and 128 bytes of RAM were installed in the console itself;
- The Atari 2700 game console, which never went on sale, had a wireless control with a radius of up to 304 meters (!). The problem with the console, or rather, its wireless control, was that any other Atari console within a radius of 304 meters could be exposed to waves of wireless controllers. In addition, the controllers of this console had touch, rather than the usual buttons. Unfortunately, problems with the system itself, its interface and the huge range of wireless controllers did not allow the console to appear on the market;
- Just four years after Atari was founded and the upcoming release of the Atari 2600 gaming console, Bushnell sold his company to Warner Communications for about 30 million (120 million by today's standards) dollars. After only nine years, Warner Communications sold Atari to Jack Tramel, founder of Commodore International, who later left her, for $ 240 million in securities, which is about half a billion dollars by modern standards;
- A prototype of the original Pong arcade machine was built on the basis of the Hitachi black and white TV, which Alcorn bought for $ 75 at the Payless store, located next to the Atari office. A carton pack for milk was added to the finished machine, which served as a collector of trivia for the game. The only instruction on how to play the game, was the phrase: "Do not miss the ball";
- Interestingly enough, the breakthrough Magnavox Odyssey game console could not become a popular home game console to a greater extent because people did not understand that the console could work perfectly with any TV. Most people thought that the console only worked in conjunction with Magnavox TVs. It is this fact, as well as the miscalculations of Magnavox’s marketing department, that allowed companies like Atari and Nintendo to take leading positions in the market;
- Nintendo entered the home video game business in 1977, when it released its console Color TV Game 6. This console allowed you to play six different versions of ping-pong. After that, the Japanese company released the prefix Color TV Game 15, which, as you can guess, allowed people to play 15 different versions of this game. It is worth noting that all these clones of Pong from Nintendo were indeed successful and sold over one million copies. This allowed Nintendo, whose business in the consoles market was not very good at that time, to stay afloat.
The article is based on materials .
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