The most beloved show in television history about daytime drinking, Mad Men, just wrapped up its eight-year run, with Don Draper and his ad-pitching peers marching boldly into the 1970s. For past Mad Men seasons, Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame has helped us debunk some persistent myths from the 1950s and the 1960s so we've asked him to keep on truckin' and do us a solid by debunking some "Me Decade" misinformation as well. It turns out that a lot of what we think we know about the seventies is pretty "far out."
The Debunker: Was Pong the First Video Game?
In 1972, an Atari engineer named Allan Alcorn soldered a black-and-white Hitachi TV and some simple circuits into a wooden cabinet and placed the device in a local tavern in Sunnyvale, California. On the TV, patrons who put in a quarter could play an exceedingly simple tennis-like electronic game that Atari called Pong. The game was such a hit that technical problems hit almost immediately: within days, the coin mechanism was overflowing with coins. By the end of the decade, Atari wound up shipping 19,000 Pong games to arcades worldwide, and sold 150,000 home versions during Christmas 1975 alone. The video game industry was born.
Because Pong was the first video game to become a mass-market success, it's widely assumed today that it was the first video game, period. In fact, it wasn't even the first ping-pong simulator game! The history of electronic games actually goes back, if you can believe it, to 1948, when two inventors at DuMont Laboratories patented a "cathode ray tube amusement device," an airplane-shooting game based on World War II-era radar screens. You might quibble that this game shouldn't count as a video game because (a) the controls were analog, not digital, (b) the airplane graphics were on-screen overlays, and (c) the game was never commercially released. But over the following decades, the modern video game gradually took shape. The obvious milestones were 1962's Spacewar!, a shooter game written at MIT for the DEC PDP-1, and the Magnavox Odyssey, a 1966 home video console with a table tennis game so similar to Pong that Magnavox later sued Atari and settled out of court for millions.
Why do we assume Pong was the very first video game when it missed that boat by decades? Partly because none of its ancestors made much of a sales splash. But let's be honest: the main reason is that Pong looks so primitive by today's standards that it's hard to believe it actually represented the culmination of 25 years of progress in the field! But take my word for it, modern gamers: there were years' worth of games even lamer than Pong!
Quick Quiz: Though the iconic three-line Atari logo was inspired by Pong gameplay, it became widely known by the nickname of what world landmark?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.