Exploring the Veteran Arcade Game's Evolution: Pong's Journey Over the Years
In the annals of gaming history, the name Pong often stands out as the first video game. However, the roots of this iconic title can be traced back to various inventions and innovations that paved the way for the industry as we know it today.
Let's travel back to 1947, where Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a missile-launching game using an oscilloscope display. This device, a handmade and expensive prototype, featured vector graphics and physical dots on a screen overlay as targets.
Fast forward to the 1950s, and we find Ralph Baer, a young engineer, trying to convince his company to invest in games for TV sets. Although unsuccessful, he went on to build seven prototype games, including the "brown box", between 1966 and 1968. Magnavox later produced a game based on Baer's "brown box" in 1972, called Odyssey, which sold 69,000 units in its first year.
Meanwhile, Magnavox turned to integrated circuits to make their new games more affordable, using Texas Instruments to develop a chip set for its new 1975 games. Around the same time, Nolan Bushnell, who later started Chuck E. Cheese, set out to create electronic games and formed a company to create a game similar to Spacewar called Computer Space in 1970.
The breakthrough came in the form of the AY-3-8500 chip, created by General Instruments in 1972. This single-chip solution could play various games like soccer, squash, and rifle games with the right equipment. Atari started producing Pong arcade games for sale a few months later, but Magnavox sued Atari over the Pong game, and Atari eventually struck a deal to be considered a licensee for $1.5 million and other concessions.
Despite the legal battles, the AY-3-8500 chips were a game-changer. They made it simple and cost-effective to create workable video games, with over 200 products from the era utilizing the IC, including the Odyssey 2000 and 3000, Radio Shack's TV Scoreboard, and Sears' Hockey Pong.
Even competitors like National Semiconductor, MOSTek, and TI entered the market with their own game chips, but none could stand against General Instruments' momentum. Universal Research produced the F4301 in 1976, featuring two tennis-like games and two unique car racing games, but it was still no match for the simple designs possible with the General Instruments devices.
Willy Higginbotham, using an analog computer and an oscilloscope at Brookhaven National Laboratory, allowed two people to play "tennis" against each other in 1958. By 1961, MIT had Spacewar running on a DEC PDP-1. Douglas, a man in the UK, played naughts and crosses on the CRT display of EDSAC in 1952, featuring an algorithm-driven computer player.
Today, the AY-3-8500 chips are still easy to find and use, even on a breadboard, reminding us of the humble beginnings of the video game industry and the innovations that shaped its development. From missile-launching games to Pong, the journey has been nothing short of remarkable.
In the realm of hardware advancements, the 1970s saw the emergence of the AY-3-8500 chip by General Instruments, a game-changing single-chip solution that revolutionized electronics and helped pave the way for affordable gadgets like gaming consoles and various other gadgets in the technology industry. The AY-3-8500 chip pioneered the development of several games, including tennis and racing titles, setting a new standard for the electronics and gaming world.
With the development of the AY-3-8500 chip, the integration of electronics and gadgets into everyday life, such as video games, became more accessible and affordable for the masses. The 1970s marked the dawn of a new era for the technology industry, a time when the roots of modern gaming hardware began to grow and take shape.
