1st gen

Hey it's almost 2008 so I better get a post in or two. Took an extended week off from the blog to do some first hand beer research and plug Stella Artois. If I ever do a series on wine I have a bit of leg work completed too.

When I first looked at the video game "thing" I was a little surprised at how far back it all started. Like many, PONG was the game I thought was the first. Since it came out as a coin op arcade game, I was too young to actually get into bars to play it, but I did get a glimpse at the local pool hall where it was a sensation. Really odd to see the pool hall cool guys getting their licks down on this thing.

Atari came out with the arcade version in November 1972, a year after Computer Space. But it did something that all the other games didn't: it became a hit. As goofy as it seems nowadays to slide a white bar up and down, it was serious fun 40 years ago. The very first ping pong type game, Tennis for Two by William Hinginbotham, came out in 1958, but was played on a tiny oscilloscope screen. Few homes had TV's let alone electronics test equipment. What were they thinking?

Anyway, along came the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console with a version of ping pong on it in 1971. So Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had a legal fight on their hands. No matter, the profits from Pong would more than settle it up. Bushnell's concept was brilliant: devise a game that everyone already knows how to play. He had discovered from his release of Computer Space that consumers didn't read the written instructions provided with the game. But everyone can play pong.Pong's instructions were "Avoid missing ball for high score".

The game was tested at 2 bars and became a huge instant hit. One major reason was that almost all arcade games were for one player at a time, you took turns if you were playing against a foe, but Pong allowed two players to go head to head. Both machines were played till they broke down.

The lawsuit mentioned above was launched in 1974 by Magnavox and they won on all counts, but in one of the gaming industries first dramatic twists, Magnavox discontinued the Odyssey a year later and never went into the video game fray again. Atari did, and released the home version of Pong in 1975.

Say goodbye to 2007, see you in 2008.