The First Successful Video Game in Apple ‘Pong’
Exactly 40 years ago on November 29, 1972, Atari – the company in which a scruffy, young Steve Jobs worked before he founded Apple – announced the release of what is the first successful video game. It was the success of Pong that triggered the start of the video game industry, which is now bigger than Hollywood.
Although it wasn’t the first company to make video games, Atari was the first to make a lasting impression on an entire generation. Today’s younger gamers might not remember how Pong, that simple, two-dimensional riff on Ping-Pong, swept across living rooms and arcades in the 1970s. But they might recognise elements of it in easy-to-learn, hard-to-master games based on simple physics.
Pong was in some ways the very first social video game, one designed to play in bars, at home or at an arcade, while spectators crowded around to watch the action.
