First of all, I hope I clearly stated my intentions in the title when I say this isn't a "real" Pongfic. When I read some of the other fics, I noticed some of the inaccuracies contained therein. Someone didn't even know who "owned" Pong! As such, I give you...
The Pongfic That Really Isn't
A Brief History about Pong
Once upon a time, a long time ago...
Aw, the hell with it. The year was 1971 and the place was Silicon Valley. The computer industry was growing, and games had already been invented. Computer Space was the first standalone arcade console. Though it was really a flop, it gave a young man from Clearfield, Utah the idea that games could be big. Computer Space was the first game he made, and his name was Nolan Bushnell.
Bushnell started a company to produce games in 1972. Originally to be called Syzygy, Bushnell and his associates Joe Keenan and Ted Dabney found out that that name was taken by a hippie commune in another part of the state. Bushnell, who was a fan of a Japanese chess-style game called Go, decided that "Atari", which is that game's equivalent of "check", would be the company's name.
Now called Atari Inc, Bushnell hired the company's first employee, an engineer named Al Alcorn, to develop the company's first game. He told Alcorn to develop a video Ping-Pong game.
At the same time, Magnavox released the first home gaming system, called Odyssey. It was extremely primitive and required color overlays to achieve a more realistic gameplay. One of the games included with Odyssey was Table Tennis. This later became a source of contention between Atari and Magnavox.
But that's not the point. Odyssey died a bloody marketing-related death and Pong survived. (For more detailed accounts of Pong and Atari's early days, see the works in "Suggested Reading" section at the end of this piece.) It was the basis of Atari's early success.
Now, I am going to clear up some bits of common confusion. Atari did NOT die in the eighties. Their 2600 sold massively for years and became one of the best-selling consoles ever. After Atari's sales began to slip, Warner Communications sold Atari off. Jack Tramiel took over Atari Corp. and immediately proceeded to take it in a different direction- home computers. (Tramiel is the founder of Commodore Inc., the company that made the PET, the VIC-20, and the Commodore 64.) Atari, with the release of the 7800 ProSystem, hoped to reenter the video game industry. They tried, oh they tried. For almost a decade. But no dice. In the late eighties, they reintroduced the Atari VCS (aka the 2600) in an attempt to make some money. It worked to a limited extent. They introduced the Lynx portable system in 1989 and the Jaguar system in 1993. However, after the failure of both systems, Atari did *sniff* fold in, oh, 1997-ish. Now the company exists only in bits and pieces of properties between Hasbro Interactive and Infogrames Inc. They now release vervions of the arcade and 2600 classics for new systems and have announced new games for the XBox. Again, this is only Hasbro and Infogrames using the Atari name.
There. I hope I could clear things up. I chose mostly to profile Pong, but if you wish to know more about Atari and video games in general, check these out:
Scott Cohen's Zap!: The Rise And Fall of Atari (1983) predicts a new future for the company. An interesting read from the historical aspect.
Steven L. Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games. 'Nuff said. My personal fave.
Van Burnham's Supercade: a visual history of the videogame age 1971-1984. A beautiful book with a lot of mostly coin-op info.
Leonard Herman's Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames and ABC to the VCS. Both comprehensive books; no player's videogame enthusiast's library is complete without them.
JC Herz's Joystick Nation is a bit more scholarly (in my opinion) but still worth reading.