This is going to take us back a seriously long ways; back to a time before even I was alive. We did actually own one of these home consoles that I remember we had hooked up to our 900 lb television later in life but the original machine was created in 1972. Prior to that, video games didn't exist.
You are almost certainly at least aware of what this game is but basically it was two paddles one either side of the screen and a square "ball" would bounce between the two of them. I'm not sure if this was included in the original game but later versions of the game would include certain multi-ball options where you could play with more than one ball at a time - which was a lot more difficult than you might think.
The paddles were controlled by a couple of wheels so that the paddle would stay in place but I bet when people played it they didn't know any better. It's not like joysticks existed or anything. The stand-up units were so successful that the 3 people who made it decided to take a chance on a home version of the game and even though it was considerably smaller than the stand-up units it was still a beast.
Nay-sayers at the time suggested that there was no industry for home gaming and boy were they ever wrong. Demand was so high in 1975 that the manufacturers struggled to keep up with demand and thus, Atari was born. These people who said there was no demand for these machines are likely the same kind of people that said there would be no demand for computers and that the internet was going to be a passing fad. I'd like to go back in time and show them a smartphone and they would likely scoff at it and state that there's no way there would ever be a demand for that! People already have telephones at their houses!
I don't know what my family did with our Pong home console. We likely either threw it out or sold it for peanuts which is a shame because much like my Star Wars collectibles that I sold for nothing or blew up with firecrackers as a teenager, these are potentially worth a lot of money these days to collectors.
Pong started something that the same company, Atari, nearly destroyed less than a decade later. These days the video game industry is worth more than the movie industry is and it all had to begin somewhere I guess.
I don't know how long they have been out but I was in a pub not long ago that sported a modern Pong machine but with real 3-D controls under the glass and even though the game is essentially exactly the same as it ever was, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, even for people that have never played the original.
Without Pong I'm quite certain that the gaming industry would have happened anyway but it's just interesting to see its simple roots 50 years ago. It's crazy that a company was born out of nothing, basically took the world by storm, was the only player in the game, and less than a decade later managed to single-handedly almost destroy the same industry.
