How a Simple Video Game Turned Smoky Bars into the Birthplace of a Billion-Dollar Industry

It was the 1970s. The bars were crowded. The noise from grouped voices was loud. And the Ping Pong was electric.

Before Gaming Was Personal, It Was Public

Come with me on a journey back in time.

No internet. No smartphones. No gaming consoles in your bedroom. If you wanted to play a video game in the 1970s, you went somewhere public. And more often than not, that place reeked of beer, ashtrays, and the impossibly deep voice of Barry White.

This was the golden era of bars with pinball machines. Of jukeboxes and jukers. Of public places where old teenagers and young men crowded around a black-and-white screen to play a video game so simple it could be drawn on a napkin: Pong.

Just Two Joysticks and One Pixel

No music. No upgrades. No storyline. Just you, your reflexes, and that satisfying blip as the ball bounced off your paddle. And yeah—I was there. Always there 😉

Late teens. Just old enough to hold a beer and pretend I was older still. One eye on the screen, the other on the girl in the corner with feathered hair and too much eyeliner. But mostly? I was watching that ball. Waiting. Reacting. Winning. Losing. Playing again. Forgive me for saying, “Those were the days.”

So Where Did Pong Actually Come From?

The big idea came from Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari. He’d seen a simple tennis game on the Magnavox Odyssey and thought it had potential—but it was clunky. Bushnell handed the idea to Allan Alcorn, a fresh engineering grad, and told him to build a better version as a training exercise.

Alcorn took it seriously. He tweaked everything—the ball movement, paddle response, even fake crowd noise pulled from a TV signal. The result? Pong. Simple. Addictive. Brilliant.

Bushnell and fellow Atari co-founder Ted Dabney knew they had something. Dabney built the cabinet hardware. They installed the first unit in a bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern. It broke within days—not from failure, but because the coin box was overflowing. 😆

The Legal Curveball

Magnavox eventually sued Atari for copying their idea. Atari didn’t fight it. They paid around $700,000 to license the patent and kept selling Pong like hotcakes. No fuss. Just old-school litigation and a check.

More Than a Game—A Glimpse of What Was Coming

This was more than a game. It was a moment. The beginning of something. Nobody knew it at the time, but Pong quietly opened a portal. A door into a world where code would become culture. Where pixels would become passion. Where digital life would one day rival—even replace—some parts of real life.

But back in the 70s, it was just something cool to do while the bar staff poured your next beer. A blip on the screen. A moment in time. And I was right there, joystick in hand.

- Mike

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