King Pong was not written as an academic book. I tell a story versus make an argument. That doesn't mean the story doesn't have an argument, but it's one for a general, non-expert, non-historian audiences. It's written for somebody who knows nothing about PONG, the history of Atari, or the history of video games in the US. Readers can learn something more about this fascinating history, or at least they can be entertained, perhaps.

I think King Pong is a paraquel. That might seem like a very academic literary term, but paraquels are quite exciting. They are a story that runs simultaneously with the main story, but they focus on different characters, events, or perspectives. I’ve placed an emphasis on different parts of a well-known history of PONG and Atari. You can get a sense that I'm not interested in games in the way we typically talk about them. Colleagues often joke that I really don't work on games. That's a compliment! When it comes to coin-operated video games, I'm saying, take your head out of the box, look at all the artwork on the side, look at the cabinet’s form, consider how graphic and industrial design shape the experience of play.  By being a paraquel, I can say, PONG exemplifies technological innovation, but it also exemplifies innovations in marketing strategies…the main focus of the book.

Right place, right time

I'm going to set a scene for you.

It's August 1972, Sunnyvale, California, at a bar called Andy Capp's Tavern. There is this new device that appears. It's set on a barrel, and it has a TV screen and a little wooden cabinet, and two knobs down below. There are also pinball machines. There's also another — this term was not used then, “video game”; they were originally referred to as video skill games. There's another one there, called Computer Space. It has a fiberglass, curvaceous cabinet design. It looks futuristic, sexy, very unlike any pinball machine. PONG, in contrast, is this stumpy little hand-painted orange box.

Imagine this scenario: you walk into this bar in 1972, and you see this phosphorus glow of a television screen set in a wooden cabinet. There's no rabbit ears antenna coming off the top. It's not playing television, but should you put a quarter in, you can actually play a simulation of table tennis, or ping pong, as it's known. Most coin-operated amusements — pinball, for example, electromechanical games — took dimes. This one cost a quarter. So, are you going to play it? You can kind of see from the screen that there's this square ball bouncing across, and there's paddles. Presumably, you can understand this based upon knowledge of table tennis or ping pong. You can bat the ball back and forth.

This story often gets told in Atari’s history. One of the significant things about that moment was — we don't really know exactly, two days, three days, a week later — the machine stopped functioning properly. Allan “Al” Alcorn who was the first engineer hired by Atari, founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972, goes over and is figuring out what's wrong with the machine. This was a very makeshift cabinet. Ted Dabney constructed it over the weekend before they did their playtest. He had — I believe it was either from a kiddie ride, like a mechanical horse ride, or a laundry machine — a cash box on the outside. The game itself wasn’t broken. The coin mechanism failed, because there was such an overflow of the coin-container inside that was holding all the coins. Alcorn races over, to troubleshoot the machine but discovers a surprising problem: the cabinet is jammed packed with quarters. That's a moment. The newly launched small tech start-up had a popular amusement device on its hands!

That's the well-known version of the story. And I love this image — that the billion-dollar global industry was founded by this burly engineer panning silver off a dirty floor of a bar. It's fantastic. What interests me, though, is when that story moves forward. It's often the context of a fun game, a simple game, and also technological innovation. I'm not denying any of those things. But for me, and this is what King Pong focuses on, a vital part of the story is the bar. That might sound a bit odd to say, but the new company, Atari, understood markets very well for coin-op amusements. And this is what King Pong tries to demonstrate — that innovation wasn't just technological, Atari was also innovative in terms of new product category creation, and sublime awareness of market strategies.

Now, one question you might wonder: what were the backgrounds of the three men who placed PONG in Andy Capp’s Tavern? All three of these guys were engineers. They had no background in business whatsoever. How did they market their launch product so well? How did they create a new product category? How did they come to dominate that product category? And how, ultimately, did Atari become successful across two different markets: the coin-operated amusement market, and eventually home consumer electronic market in the mid-70s. These types of questions animate the story.

There's so much serendipity in this story. I mentioned a game called Computer Space that was already in Andy Capp's Tavern. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney developed this game for a company based in Mountain View called Nutting Associates. Nutting had a successfully electromechanical quiz game called Computer Quiz in the late 60s. Bushnell and Dabney saw a game called Spacewar! played at Stanford University. The game was executed on a DEC PDP minicomputer. At that time, any computer game displayed on a screen was primarily located in research laboratories, federal institutions, or at certain businesses. People didn't have computers in the home in this time-period, so only computer engineers, computer scientists — would have access to them. Bushnell sees Spacewar!, and his thought is, how do we put a coin slot on that baby? How can we translate it into a coin-op machine for public amusement and profit?

Here’s another serendipitous moment that I share in King Pong. It's Nolan Bushnell’s annual dental checkup. I try to recreate this scene for my readers.  Bushnell’s declined in a dentist chair and his dentist strikes up a conversation. When able to speak, Bushnell mentions this new after-hours project that he’s working on, a means to control a movable spot on a television screen. Bushnell and Dabney are trying to replicate what they observed at Stanford University when playing Spacewar! But they are trying to execute their version not by using an expensive minicomputer but by assembling the game via television technology and over-the-counter TV monitors. Bushnell shares this story with his dentist, and his dentist says, “I know a guy who works at this coin-op company in Mountain View.” Long story short, Bushnell makes a phone call. He calls Dave Ralston at Nutting Associates, who's the head of their sales and marketing. Eventually, Bushnell brings the kind of hobbyist after-work project that he's doing into Nutting Associates. The company distributes, manufactures, produces, and advertises the first mass-produced coin-operated video game named, Computer Space. These types of stories course through the book. Right place, right time!

Ongoing thread. More from Raiford Guins to follow.