You cannot go on gaming without recognizing where everything comes from and while there have been an immense gaming community in the early ages of modern computing, by the 1970’s Atari was a BIG PLAYER in those days and one of its famous creations was Pong.

Created in 1972, Pong was installed on an arcade machine and was actually one of the original arcades in history, created by Allan Alcorn and Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and it was actually a product of Bushnell challenging Alcorn on his onboarding training on Atari.

It was then that Bushnell and the other Atari co-founder Ted Dabney, knew there was an opportunity as they were impressed by the first build of Pong by Alcorn that they decided to mass produce it.

The mechanic of the game simulated a tennis match where players needed to avoid missing the ball in a 2D screen and basically the player that avoided missing the ball the most was the winner and as simple as its sound, it was a GREAT DEAL back in the day.

Of course the game was NOT free of controversy as in his first years, Atari was sued by American company Magnabox as the electronic maker believed that Alcorn was motivated and used most of the concept seen on the built-in ping pong game included on the Magnavox Odyssey, the first official home console.

Early estimates say that at a 25 cent rate, Pong managed to have $35 to $40 of income per day and more than 8,000 cabinets were sold to businesses that included gaming entertainment in 1974.

Taking into account inflation, it means that daily, Pong could amaze up to $241.79 daily in today’s dollar value.

It took 3 years for Atari to bring Pong to houses as the console version of the game was released on 1975 as Home Pong console sold exclusively on Sears, selling 150,000 units on 1975 holiday season and awarded the Sears Quality Excellence Award after becoming the Sears’s most sold device at the time

Outside Atari’s hardware, Pong has also been included in several Atari compilations on many different platforms, such as Arcade Classics on the Sega Genesis, Atari Classics Evolved on the PlayStation Portable, Retro Atari Classics on the Nintendo DS, and Atari: 80 Classic Games in One! for personal computers.