The Grandpappy of Video Games.
"Avoid missing ball for high score."The complete directions for the original arcade game.
Pong is a 1972 video game, the first one released by
Atari. You control a paddle that goes along one line — in the classic version, up and down. Your opponent has another paddle. You bounce a square ball against the paddle. If your opponent misses, you get a point. If you miss, your opponent gets a point. First to reach 21 wins.
Can be played
PvP or against a computer AI (the original arcade machine however, was
PvP only).
In more detail:
Pong, developed by Nolan Bushnell (who would later create the
Chuck E. Cheese franchise
*), is one of the oldest video games. It dates from 1972, making it
Older Than The Apple II. The company that was founded to publish it,
Atari, became synonymous with video games for years afterwards. It was also packed with many first-generation consoles, and Atari made a separate console that only played the game.
Pong is often thought of as "the first video game ever",
but this is untrue — for one, the
Magnavox Odyssey debuted earlier in 1972 (and had been in development since 1968). Before that, it gets pretty complicated and still challenged due to varying opinions of what constitutes a
Video Game — the very first is either
Space War! (1962),
Tennis For Two (1958), or
OXO (1952). It was, however, the game that started the video game industry.
Everything aside,
Pong was the
first game to be successful enough for people outside the (then
extremely small) geek culture to know about its existence.
Pong provides examples of: