Pong is Atari's 1972 arcade table-tennis game, a simple two-paddle contest that became the first major commercial breakthrough for video games.
Developed and published by Atari, Inc. in 1972, Pong turns table tennis into a black-and-white arcade duel. Players move vertical paddles at opposite sides of the screen, batting a square ball across the playfield and scoring when the opponent misses. Its rules are immediate, its controls are minimal, and its pace depends almost entirely on two people reacting to each other.
Engineer Allan Alcorn designed Pong as an internal training project after Nolan Bushnell assigned him a simple video-game exercise. The result was strong enough that Atari tested a prototype at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, where the cabinet became a local hit and convinced the company to manufacture the game itself.
Pong helped move video games out of laboratories and trade-show curiosities into bars, arcades, and public entertainment spaces. Its success established Atari as a force in coin-operated games, inspired a wave of imitators, and made the basic language of video play legible to a mass audience.