Atari’s ‘Pong’ was anything but the world’s first arcade video game
DESPITE numerous debunkings, the idea that was first persists. A headline in Vanity Fair illustrates this common misconception: “The Origins of the First Arcade Video Game: Atari’s Pong”.
was a huge commercial success, one that helped turn a nascent medium into mass entertainment. But it wasn’t the first arcade game, nor was it the first home video game that you could hook up to your TV. wasn’t even the first video-game version of table tennis – it was just the first one that asked you for 25c to play it.
Like any medium, video games have many antecedents. Most experts point to William Higinbotham’s
a demonstration created for an open house at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958, as the first true video game. was followed by designed by Steve Russell and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. was popular enough among the computer scientists who worked on mainframes that Stewart Brand covered a tournament at Stanford in 1972 for Rolling Stone. Annie Leibovitz took pictures.
And the first home game console was not but Baer’s which went on sale in 1972, three years before Atari’s home version of It had table tennis in it, too.
was not even the first coin-operated arcade game from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. That distinction goes to 1971’s At least since Steven Johnson’s
was published in 2005, video-game players have proudly declared that their hobby may look childish and brutish, but it’s actually changing their brains for the better.