Nolan Bushnell did not create Pong!

"In May 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey was demonstrated at a trade show in Burlingame, California. Nolan Bushnell attended the event and played the Odyssey's table tennis game. In June 1972, Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a new company which they named Atari, with a starting capital of $250 each. Bushnell was a keen player of the board game Go, and the word Atari in Japanese has a meaning similar to the term check in chess.

"Bushnell was concerned that his pioneering 1971 video arcade game, Computer Space, had been too complicated for some users. In an interview, he said of the game: "You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn't want to read instructions. To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play; something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play." Bushnell envisioned creating a video car driving game for arcades and hired Allan (Al) Alcorn, an electronic engineer who had recently finished college. Concerned that this project would be too complex for his new employee, Bushnell's first request to Alcorn was to create a ping-pong game. The game that Alcorn created was fun to play and since the name Ping-Pong was already trademarked, it was called simply Pong. The dominant arcade game at the time was pinball, and unlike pinball, Pong was conceived as a game for two players. Amusement industry experts were unsure about Pong's potential, and initially there was little interest in the product."

[en.wikipedia.org]

Deozaan

"...it too shall find that there are other ways to play a game"

Really? I mean, really? It too shall find? Tally ho and onward to the next great MMO, fellows! You shall find it in my hot tub!

shini

hahah How could I not see the pong MMO idea not be thrown in this alredy HAHAHA.

...and we all know its gonna be a chuck e cheese MMO :S:S:S

nypad5

He thought of a way to get Dads everywhere to willingly go into a pizza parlor/arcade with hundreds of screaming kids. He can do anything.

Geektique

Pong has already been rendered into an MMO (well pseudo MMO). Can't remember the url, but it was web based (and a bit of a mess if I can vaguely recall).

lharoon

Nolan Bushnell smokes a pipe in a hot tub. Clearly the Hugh Hefner look is in, or is that just me. Atari Bunnies would be an interesting concept nonetheless.

MajorMcMuffin

I wonder what's in the pipe.....

Mr.SithNinja

You go Nolan!

sadkermit

@Leathersoup: Well, that's partially because the Magnavox Odyssey cost almost $300 (about $1500 in today's hyper-inflated money), whereas you could play Pong for a dime.

Doomstalk

Someone needs to call Nolan and get him to fix all the games at Chuck E Cheese cause they are all broken and old! Chuck E Cheese is quite sucky now a days. :'|

SuperNuttendo

@Fadobo: It was a patent dispute, actually. And Alcorn's pretty much innocent of any willful infringement so far as I'm aware. Nolan asked Alcorn to make Pong with no intention of releasing it. I've been re-reading my copy of Steven L. Kent's excellent The Ultimate History of Video Games (if you haven't read it yet, you should!), so this rather fresh in my mind. Bushnell thought that their first big hit would be something complicated like the arcade implementation of Spacewar! he made for his former employer. Bushnell intended Pong to be an excercise just to bring him up to speed, and it wound up turning out so well that they decided to make it their flagship product.

Also, for added irony, Ralph Baer wound up ripping off one of Bushnell's ideas for what eventually became Simon. The only real difference was that Baer had filed a patent, and Bushnell hadn't.

Doomstalk

hmm I wonder exactly how he expects to pull this off? Does he plan on coming up with the design himself? Or is he simply going to fund a team?

Or perhaps he'll do exactly what he did with Pong and release World of Warcraft under a different name ;)

Leathersoup

@Fadobo: But! Al Alcorn had not been assigned to make a tennis game like that on the Odyssey. He had merely been assigned to come up with a ping pong game, and he himself was never aware of anything related to the Odyssey, the idea was, as far as he knew, original. The fact that one of the Odyssey's games had a similar table tennis concept was unknown to him, and at the time with games so simple it was much easier to win a court case because of supposed trademark infringement with such new media. That's the kind of case that you'd never see today.

Anyways, the point is, there's a very good reason Pong was a huge success and the Odyssey was not, and to merely brush it aside as being a "copycat", when the reality is much more complex then what you get from a tv documentary, is missing something very important about the origins of video games, and Atari itself.

KevinSetzer

@Biscuitcleaver:

But Ralph Baer designed the game months (or even a few years) ago, and even had a own home console before that. There where a few other games (along with the first lightgun game!!) on it as well. Bushnell was at the presentation of the product, then later he and Alcorn "invented" pong. Baer had copyrights for the concepts, so Atari had to pay. Saw that in a Discovery Channel documentary.

Fadobo

Nolan didn't really invent pong, that distincation goes to a fellow by the name of Al Alcorn. Al was the creator of pong, but he was partners with Nolan who owned Atari.

So, without Nolan there'd be no Al - but Al is an electrical engineer and Nolan wasn't. And it took an electrical engineer to produce the first versions of pong.

Biscuitcleaver

Bushnell sees the success of WoW and Asian MMOs and he wants a peice of the pie (pun intended).

But if we look at his track record he's better off sticking to mediocre product (Chuck E. Cheese) that sells itself.

@Mr. Fap☆Fap!: BEST RESPONSE EVAR11!! :D

dadeisvenm

@MagnusGman:
An 80's Cokehead Party MMO?

Mr. Fap☆Fap!

Sometimes I have to wonder if Bushnell was good, or just lucky. Sente Games and uWink were/are both fairly unremarkable companies.

Doomstalk

haha yeah. i mean it was such an original concept, a ball and 2 bats.. nothing else like it i say

MrSoursop

"As compelling as World of Warcraft" is the term you would have used several years ago to get funding for your MMO. I guess there are still some more rich chumps out there to be had, right Nolan?

Smoke some pipes and steal some ideas, my friend.

Sentientv2

He did not invent pong. He saw a game by ralph baer and just copied that. Its the Saints Row of Pong...just a clone, a pretty good one, but just a clone. He paid Baer a pretty high amount of money later on, to avoid a lawsuit...

Fadobo

Heh, big words, old man. Big words.

This guy may have been the "first", but he's long out of the gaming industry. Betcha he's just a casual now, without any "feel" for what it's like. Well, if he invests too much, he's gonna get fucked.

I called it.

Ashurahori

The Gordon's Fisherman founded Atari???

SolidOni_ds

And so yet another game that would have been fun for 10h gets dragged to infinity by adding levels and mathematical values to anything one does. I wonder if people played the same Halo3 level for 1000h if there was some number above your head and the promise of a different armor skin at the end.

Asbestos_Underwear

I hope he's got a billion dollars to burn...

droopy

World of Pong...

2 teams forever in competition, an Endless war

IN A EPIC STRUGGLE BETWEEN BALLS AND LINES, LINES WILL BE SNAPPED AND BALLS WILL BE BROKEN!

WHO WILL PREVAIL!?

YOU DECIDE, IN WORLD OF PONG!

YOU AND BE A LINE WARRIOR OR A BALL MAGE,

"IM MR.T AND A LUCKY 8 BALL"

"Hi, Im William Shatner and im a Dick"

Junp3i

MMO? Excellent, It's about time that someone develops a massively online and persistent World of Pong. To limit such an intense game to brief matches and two players play is the greatest crime in the history of videogames.

Philonious

I bet it's a game where everyone gets to play as Nolan Bushnell, just so we can get a feel for what it's like...

MagnusGman

stole/created it's the same thing right?????

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denim

Anyone who creates a game where you smack a ball back and forth ad nauseam obviously has the grind portion of an mmo down =)

Nolan, are you really toking in the bathtub?

meandering_drivel