‘No one had seen anything like it’: how video game Pong changed the world

Pong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it's true - last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic.

The game - a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle "paddle", moving it up and down to rally a ball - ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain's response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball."After a 20-minute session, [the DishBrain was] playing much better than then when they started and much better than chance," Dr Brett Kagan, Cortical's chief scientific officer, says. While it wasn't operating at the level of a human or even a motivated mouse, it did demonstrate a consistent learning path and some form of information processing optimisation. "It was so exciting," Kagan says gleefully. "We honestly did not expect to see the extent of the results."

Rewind 50 years and the world was strikingly different; computers were the size of coffee shops and pinball ruled the arcades. Following his success with early arcade game Computer Space, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell tricked 24-year-old computer engineer Al Alcorn into creating Pong. "He wanted me to get some practice designing video games," Alcorn, who at the time had no experience making video games, remembers.

Bushnell started small, briefing Alcorn to create the "very simplest game" possible. Pretending that he had commissioned Alcorn to create the game for General Electric, Bushnell inspired the young engineer to aim big. After picking up a Hitachi black-and-white TV for $75, Alcorn wired the game, amplified the TV's built-in tones to create sound effects and housed it in a cabinet, creating an all-in-one system.

"[Bushnell] understood the economics of pinball machines and coin-operated games," Alcorn says. "And he said, 'Gee, if I could put a quarter on Pong, I could make money doing that'." The key was making it work without the need for anything too expensive. "The breakthrough was figuring out how to do this without using a computer," Alcorn explains. The prototype was slotted into local drinking hole Andy Capp's Tavern, and Pong was officially switched on - a new form of playable, payable game.

It quickly struck gold. Alcorn was called out to fix the first machine within a matter of days. It was too popular: quarters were blocking the mechanism. To fix things, the coin holder - a coffee cup - was replaced with a larger milk carton, allowing more revenue to be collected. At first, the duo struggled to entice enough buyers to ensure Pong was a success. "It was never a marketing problem," Bushnell says. "It was always a supply issue. We had very little money and no factory so solving those issues was our biggest challenge." Soon, though, sales picked up, and Pong was officially released by Atari in November 1972.

Unlike pinball, with its seedy connections to the mob and salacious designs, Pong was free from controversy. It wasn't only a game that could be enjoyed by anyone, but also, for the first time, a game that could be enjoyed by people together. "I think its success was because it was so simple and easy to understand. There was no one-player version. Anybody could play it," Alcorn says. Bushnell agrees: "It was an ideal icebreaker. Many people have told me that it was how they met their partners."