On November 29, 1972, Pong—the groundbreaking electronic video game—was released by the American game manufacturer Atari Inc., essentially launching what is now the $200+ billion home video game industry.
The seeds for Pong began decades earlier, when, in 1958, German-born American engineer Ralph Baer proposed creating simple video games that could be played on home television sets.
In the years following Baer’s original idea, several lesser-known video game precursors would be developed. Then, in June of 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in Sunnyvale, California, sending the future of gaming into hyperdrive.
On the same day that Atari was incorporated, the duo hired Allan Alcorn, a local computer scientist and engineer. The duo had a more serious task planned for their new hire, but first wanted to have him complete a kind of unimportant ‘warm-up’ exercise. At a gaming trade show, Bushnell spied a gaming prototype of ping-pong. Unimpressed at what he saw, he returned to the Atari headquarters and asked Alcorn to build a better, arcade version of the game.
Within weeks Alcorn developed a refined version of what Bushnell had described, making it more tactical and challenging and adding a scoreboard. Pong had been born.
Soon, to test the prototype, Atari had Pong installed at Andy Capps, a local video game store in Sunnyvale, where it quickly became a huge hit. At Andy Capps, games in the store made on average $10 a day. Pong made $40.
Within a year, Atari began shipping Pong game consoles to video stores across the country. Eventually, in 1977, the company released its own branded version of Pong to help popularize the company's 2600 gaming console.
Bolstered by Pong’s popularity, the console became the most popular home gaming machine of its era, selling more than 30 million units before being discontinued in 1992.
