King Pong

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, most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as an app from Google Play or Apple App Store, 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 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.
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 from the perspective of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days first 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 & 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 MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood.