Why and how Atari’s first video game Pong established an industry that shapes consumers’ relationships to technology to this day.
PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.
The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever.
Raiford Guins is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. A few of his books include Atari Design and Game After (MIT Press). Guins also coedits the MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood.
“King PONG is a well written, entertaining exploration of PONG’s early history and faithfully tells the story about how it revolutionized the beginning of video games.” —Al Alcorn, Creator of PONG
“I thought I knew everything about PONG, but Guins’s book proved I knew almost nothing. This is the definitive story of PONG—the coin-op that started the video game revolution.” —Ian Bogost, author of Play Anything and How to Do Things with Videogames
Why and how Atari’s first video game Pong established an industry that shapes consumers’ relationships to technology to this day.
PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.
The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever.
Creators
Raiford Guins is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. A few of his books include Atari Design and Game After (MIT Press). Guins also coedits the MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood.
“King PONG is a well written, entertaining exploration of PONG’s early history and faithfully tells the story about how it revolutionized the beginning of video games.” —Al Alcorn, Creator of PONG
“I thought I knew everything about PONG, but Guins’s book proved I knew almost nothing. This is the definitive story of PONG—the coin-op that started the video game revolution.” —Ian Bogost, author of Play Anything and How to Do Things with Videogames
