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Video game enthusiasts of today gripping their perfectly contoured 12 function controllers and viewing ultra-realistic images on their home television sets may find it hard to believe that at one time, not so long ago, people entertained themselves with simple dials and a few white squares on a black television screen. ... Ever since those early days of video gaming one thing has remained true, video game creators and fans have always wanted more. More games, more colors, more control, and perhaps most of all, more realism. Through constant technological improvement, today’s video games have advanced immensely from the first one’s introduced 30 years ago.
The first commercially successful video game was introduced to the public in the fall of 1972. The instructions on how to play Pong, as the game was called, were very simple: “1. ... ” Customer’s at the California tavern in which the Pong machine had been placed were intrigued by the game, and began to deposit their quarters. Late one night the game’s creator received a call informing him that the machine had stopped working, expecting to find a technical problem with the machine itself upon arriving at the tavern he instead found the coin box stuffed with quarters and jammed; and thus the world’s fascination with video games had begun. (Montfort 116)
The men responsible for creating Pong and placing it in that California tavern were Nolan Bushnell, the founder of a new company called Atari, and Al Alcorn, the first Atari engineer. Bushnell had assigned the project to Alcorn to give him practice designing games, and never intended to market the result. ... After it’s huge initial success the thinking on Pong changed, Atari began to manufacture full size arcade units and 3 years later teamed up with Sears & Roebuck to create a home version of Pong, they called it the Sears Tele-Games System. “Pong for the home sold for about $100. And was a phenomenal seller for Sears during the 1975 Christmas season” (Demaria 26) It should be mentioned however, that while Pong may have been the first truly successful home video game, it was not the first one ever made.
In 1966 an engineer by the name of Ralph Baer convinced his bosses at a military contracting company to let him develop a system that could be connected to any television and allow people to play sports, strategy, and target-shooting games. Baer had first pondered the idea of a home gaming system way back in 1951, but his bosses where he worked at the time failed to realize how successful such a system could be. ... The Odyssey failed to sell many units for a variety of reasons, mainly because of it’s rudimentary technology (players had to place plastic overlays on their screen in order to play games), but also because of poor marketing which led people to believe the system worked only with Magnavox televisions. ... (Technology Review 96)
Many home game systems appeared on a store shelves immediately following the release of the Magnavox Odyssey and the Sears Tele-Star System, a large percentage of them being merely clones of the original Pong unit manufactured by other companies, which did not sit well with Bushnell and the rest of the Atari Company, Bushnell recalled his feelings when asked about these clones in a recent interview. He had been present at a convention titled “The Future of the Video-game Business” and was not asked to be a part of an “expert” panel that had been assembled. ... However, there were a couple of non Pong-clone consoles, in 1976 a company by the name of Fairchild released the Fairchild Channel F and RCA released the Studio II. Both systems involved cartridges that could be switched out allowing players to partake in a wider variety of games such as “Blackjack” and “Space War.
Approximate Word count = 3221
Approximate Pages = 12.9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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