![]() ![]() ![]() Its beauty stemmed from its clarity, easy enough to be explained in a heaving bar after a few beers. Many people have told me that it was how they met their partners.” Bushnell agrees: “It was an ideal icebreaker. “I think its success was because it was so simple and easy to understand. It wasn’t only a game that could be enjoyed by anyone, but also, for the first time, a game that could be enjoyed by people together. Unlike pinball, with its seedy connections to the mob and salacious designs, Pong was free from controversy. Success, off the bat: (l-r) Nolan Bushnell, Fred Marincic and Al Alcorn. We had very little money and no factory so solving those issues was our biggest challenge.” Soon, though, sales picked up, and Pong was officially released by Atari in November 1972. “It was never a marketing problem,” Bushnell says. At first, the duo struggled to entice enough buyers to ensure Pong was a success. To fix things, the coin holder – a coffee cup – was replaced with a larger milk carton, allowing more revenue to be collected. It was too popular: quarters were blocking the mechanism. Alcorn was called out to fix the first machine within a matter of days. The prototype was slotted into local drinking hole Andy Capp’s Tavern, and Pong was officially switched on – a new form of playable, payable game. “The breakthrough was figuring out how to do this without using a computer,” Alcorn explains. “And he said, ‘Gee, if I could put a quarter on Pong, I could make money doing that’.” The key was making it work without the need for anything too expensive. “ understood the economics of pinball machines and coin-operated games,” Alcorn says. Many people have told me over the years that it was how they met their partners Nolan Bushnell After picking up a Hitachi black-and-white TV for $75, Alcorn wired the game, amplified the TV’s built-in tones to create sound effects and housed it in a cabinet, creating an all-in-one system. Pretending that he had commissioned Alcorn to create the game for General Electric, Bushnell inspired the young engineer to aim big. Photograph: Farzad_Owrang/Farzad Owrang/ Stephen Friedmanīushnell started small, briefing Alcorn to create the “very simplest game” possible. Without a paddle … Tom Friedman’s 2017 projection. “We honestly did not expect to see the extent of the results.” “It was so exciting,” Kagan says gleefully. While it wasn’t operating at the level of a human or even a motivated mouse, it did demonstrate a consistent learning path and some form of information processing optimisation. “After a 20-minute session, playing much better than then when they started and much better than chance,” Dr Brett Kagan, Cortical’s chief scientific officer, says. The scientists then measured the DishBrain’s response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball. ![]() Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle “paddle”, moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. This might sound like a low blow, but it’s true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic. P ong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it.
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