How To Look At PONG

My most recent book, King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, shows how Atari established not one but two massive consumer technology categories by adopting innovative product positioning and market development strategies. I conclude the short book with a chapter that briefly explains how PONG is continuing to lead in the development of new markets, namely the cultural heritage market experienced at museums. When I wrote the book’s conclusion, I envisioned it as a bridge to Museum Games. I felt impatient. I couldn’t wait to start this next journey.

PONG – whether in its coin-op form, home version, or facsimile – makes an appearance at every museum that I’ve visited—and I’ve visited many. Its presence speaks to a number of narratives pertinent to exhibiting game history: an origin story for the US games industry, a face for a legendary games company, a product that succeeded in two separate industries (coin-op amusement and consumer electronics), a controversy vis a vis Magnavox Odyssey, and an incredibly vast number of derivative ball-n-paddle games produced globally in the 1970s. PONG’s image is the symbol of game history, a requisite object for museums devoted to video games.

This installment to Museum Games neither celebrates PONG’s iconic status at museums, nor questions whether its pervasiveness is warranted. Of course it is! Its prominence intrigues me but that’s not all it does. Precisely because I see it everywhere, it has grown banal, anticipated, unavoidable. “There it is, AGAIN,” I say to myself. PONG-fatigue deep in my bones. I suppose it’s worth noting that I’m no average visitor to video game museums. If you’ve been following my travels, you already know that it’s my mission to visit as many video game museums as possible. PONG-fatigue is entirely self-inflicted. I want desperately to shake it off. I cannot do so by pretending to forget what I already know about PONG. I cannot un-think it. That deep knowledge travels with me, shapes, and informs my understanding of all things PONG. It’s not coat checked upon entry to a museum.

Taking a page (or multiple) out of art historian, James Elkins’ voluminous works, I’ve instead made my looking at PONG the object of study. Elkins’ emphasis on patient, concerted looking isn’t just directed towards works by Mondrian but also banal things like a twig or the pavement. PONG’s ubiquitous, everyday status expired decades ago. It’s no longer an ordinary thing like a postage stamp.

To encounter an original coin-op or console version of PONG, a journey to a museum is most likely required. The journey itself plucks PONG out of the one-time-familiar to alight in the space of museums the world over. There I want PONG to captivate me, as I commit my full attention to it. This after all is what museums do well—they show us things, focus our looking at things shown. Here is where I want my looking at PONG to surprise me.

So, I went a step farther and immersed myself in the museum contexts of PONG. That’s no typo. There are a lot of different museum contexts in my travels. Looking at PONG in Shanghai is different than looking at PONG in Rochester. At both museums, I strive to see what I’m being shown while considering my own looking. I embrace slow looking. I slow down to look at the process of displaying PONG, where and how it is displayed in a museum, and what objects are nearby as well as the thing itself – its physical details – and the museum that exhibits it.

I convince myself to stop rushing past yet another PONG exhibit. Slowing down allows me to look longer, closer, more carefully.

I’ve jotted down directives that I exercise to look at PONG. My efforts in compiling this list, a self-imposed assignment, helps to alleviate the tedious encounters with PONG. Fatigue gives way to a new and delicious patience for PONG. What details and discoveries might this patient, prolonged looking reveal?

Look at PONG from a distance.

Chances are you’ll see it soon after entering a museum, or even off in the distance when purchasing your tickets. It’s that prominent. When you spy it from afar, notice what other objects are nearby as you advance. Even in museums objects don’t exist in isolation. They reside in rooms with people, signage, lighting, entry ways; they are placed behind other objects (e.g. glass, stanchion), or upon other objects (e.g. shelving, flooring). Museums fill the eye with both obvious (e.g. objects on display) and obscure stuff (e.g. seating, power outlets, toilet signs).

Looking from a distance, you will probably observe a Computer Space cabinet produced by Nutting Associates. The Nexon Computer Museum in Jeju, South Korea displays a replica of the prototype to PONG about one foot away from Nutting’s machine.

The same is true in Frisco, Texas and Zagreb, Croatia, among other places. The pairing is commonplace. We are shown that the industry begins here, with these two machines. Title cards are universal on this subject. Computer Space wears the crown of the first mass produced coin-op video game, but its sales and production numbers underwhelmed the industry. PONG succeeded where Computer Space failed. This pairing also places Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell at the developmental helm for Computer Space when employed by Nutting Associates and soon after leading their own company along with Al Alcorn who engineered Atari’s first product. PONG in this exhibition context is an ur-object. It displays when electronic games left the research institution to become productized for commercial usage and general public consumption.

Observe PONG as a museum object.

How is it displayed to visitors? What statement does PONG’s curation make about it? In Berlin, PONG is displayed behind red stanchion. What does this barrier say about the object it sequesters? It distinguishes it from other objects not bestowed such treatment. PONG is made singular, elevated from the surrounding array of other objects (the only other artifact given such treatment is the requisite, Computer Space).

Visitors are given a polite, “Please don’t touch.” PONG is not a game to play, but an object to admire at a distance. The intimacy of touch is verboten. Contemplation is the only game to play at this exhibit. Like paintings displayed in an art museum, we stand in PONG’s presence. Its screen does not display its game. We stare at a blank screen, at a wooden cabinet with minimal decor. Other visitors may join in this act of staring. Others may stare at visitors gathered around the display staring at PONG. It captures and commands attention. This attention affords an honorific, edifying status.

This honorific status does not require stanchion when PONG is displayed as an early inductee in the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong Museum. Its mere presence in this gallery is enough. This space is reserved for only those games voted into this Hall of Fame space. Only members are included.

At the Nationaal Videogame Museum in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands the stanchion is abandoned. PONG becomes a testament to a moment, the 1970s. It’s a prop in a period room.

It rests on brown wall-to-wall carpeting. Stands next to a brown and orange plaid sofa. A wooden coffee table and wooden television cabinet add more realistic touches to the scene. Vintage objects, PONG included, stage a bygone era. It’s a domestic scene where a coin-op version of PONG wouldn’t have featured. Its inclusion evidences the time period while motioning to the beginning of electronic video games entering the home. Its meaning here is less honorific like in Berlin or Rochester than indicative of a growing and changing industry with both public and domestic spaces increasingly inundated with video games.

Observe PONG as a material object.

Walk right up to the stanchion in Berlin or place your body directly against PONG in Zoetermeer after sitting on the nearby sofa. Compare your body’s size to that of the coin-op machine. Are you taller? Shorter? Do you stoop down to see the cabinet’s screen? Or do you find yourself on tiptoes to reach the control panel and see the screen? Unless you are a kid, the former is the case. PONG is short in stature. The reason is due to finances. Atari lacked capital to produce its launch product. Longer cuts of wood for the cabinet cost more. Its size came down to money, or lack thereof. Push the phrase “video game” out of your immediate awareness to see a small television in a wooden cabinet. Observe how the television is obscured by the yellow bezel with matte black interior giving the impression of a much larger screen than 13-inches. Ask yourself: would you know what this thing is in 1972?

Now, look at PONG as a functional wooden cabinet.

It’s a container to house electronic components to run a… “video skill game,” the term preferred on Atari’s marketing materials as the phrase “video game” wasn’t prevalent in 1972. Its electronic components are not accessible to users from the front or either side. Our relation to PONG is external. Access to its power supply, monitor, and circuit board are removed from the user. They are safeguarded inside with service access located at the back of the cabinet. This layout accords with other electromechanical machines of the era: they are intentionally designed to have their backs against a wall, with all attention afforded to their front and sides. Those are the only spaces presented to users. We are placed on the outside of the cabinet, given limited access as a user of the machine. Our engagement is limited, physically defined. Only operators can go inside the cabinet. They can enter the internal world of a new medium. Functionality is for service, and to support the safe and enjoyable use of a product. I nearly forgot, there is another space open to users: the coin-slot, located directly on the front panel. From Atari’s point-of-view it’s the most important function of the cabinet.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed to attract customers, people willing to drop a coin in that coin-slot.

What is optically available to you? Its façade is yellow. Highly visible from afar and in low levels of light. Why might that be an important ingredient to attract a player? Does it speak to where one would’ve played PONG in the early 1970s? If you answered at a bar, you are correct! The prototype to PONG was field tested at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Does the game’s name attract customers? What do you notice about it? The type is black, a stark contrast to its yellow façade. The type isn’t script. It’s a sans serif font: easy to read from distance, not ornate. It doesn’t illustrate the cabinet’s contents other than displaying a name. It’s discreet. Humble yet bold. Mysterious.

How does the name, “PONG,” feel in your mouth? Repeat it a few times. It’s easy to pronounce due to its monosyllabic sound. Do you say it loudly as the all-caps suggest? Is it fun to pronounce? POOOONNNGGG! POOONG! PONG! PONG! PONG! Do you try to imitate the sound that you imagine –a hollow “PUCK” sound bursting out of your mouth? Like The Chordettes’s song “Lollipop” mimicked in the film Stand By Me when the gang of boys replicate the POP sound of the song by flicking their finger quickly out of their mouth. Or think of Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” if you know that tune. Similar fun effect. Why do you think Atari named its first product, PONG? Nolan Bushnell loves telling the story of the word “Pong’s” meaning in British English—it connotes a rancid odor as in, “the rubbish pongs.” Not exactly the best name to attract British players! Still, it’s short. Only one half of the more common Ping-Pong. Sans “Ping,” PONG intrigues. And that phosphorous TV screen with two paddles, net, score, and bouncing ball shows what it is.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed for various environments.

A video game may be fun to play, challenging, a genuine sucker of quarters but it’s none of this without gaining acceptance at locations. It’s designed to attract users, but also to win the approval of location owners. This was PONG’s greatest success: it gained access to locations where pinball and large electromechanical games were not welcomed in the early 1970s. The common phrase “arcade game” only accounts for game rooms and spaces devoted exclusively to coin-op games. It doesn’t capture everyday locations where people could play PONG. It wasn’t an eye sore. No gaudy graphic. Walk around the cabinet and you’ll notice its wood-grain side panels. This touch made PONG stylish, far less obtrusive than other coin-op machines that could wreck the ambiance of a cocktail lounge, hotel lobby, or restaurant. As I’ve written in King PONG, “more places, more profits.” The buzzword at Atari was “sophistication:” design products to look good across different public environments.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed for interaction.

PONG simulates table tennis, or Ping Pong. Two players compete. How does physical interaction with the game shape the experience of play? The game itself is an electronic circuit displayed on a television screen housed within the wooden cabinet. The cabinet is what we interact with directly to control actions displayed on the screen. The cabinet shapes our experience of the game. It enables the play. Would you stand back from the cabinet to interact with its controls? Or would you press your body close to it? Would your stance remain the same across a game, or change with the pulse of play? Think about this when you play alongside another person. Is it crowded at the control panel? Do you know the person you play with or do you share space with the body of a stranger? Do you find playing PONG intimate or intimidating? How often do you stand that close to a stranger in public? Before you even touch a controller, does it look comfortable to play? Do you understand how to play just by looking at the knob controllers? What information do they convey? Where would your non-playing hand rest? Would you place it on top of the cabinet? Would you imagine a beer on top of that short cabinet? Although Bushnell declared PONG “easy to learn, difficult to master,” you would not encounter such difficulty in the interaction afforded by the cabinet and its control panel. In your close examination be aware that in 1972 you would tap buttons on the side of a pinball machine to control the game’s flippers, or you’d pull a trigger, twist a periscope, turn a steering wheel on the control panel of an electromechanical game. Our hands had to learn to interact differently on a video game. Our eyes had to learn to look at a screen instead of down a pinball playfield or at objects reflected in a half-silver mirror common on electromechanical games. PONG’s control panel only houses its two knobs for two to play. Simple. Minimal, so that all attention can be directed at the screen, not at our hands. A new template for interacting with an electronic game is introduced. A new posture for play emerges.

What do you see when you look at a reproduction of PONG?

An unusual experience for me was to encounter not one, but two identical coin-op PONGs at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. They are displayed together. Side by side with about two feet separating them.

They look creepy like those kids from The Shining. They are, in fact, shiny. Their wood grain appears more reddish than brown. Their bright yellow bezels show no sign of age. The cabinets appear new without signs of wear typically observed on a coin-op PONG in a museum. When you think about it, it’s amazing that so many PONG coin-ops are in museums. Atari only manufactured around 7,000 units. Many of those were “kits,” the electronic components minus cabinetry for non-US markets. In Shanghai I look at two facsimiles of PONG, surrogates for a history not experienced in China. PONG debuted in the US in 1972 with sales to follow in 1973 in other parts of the world, China not being one. You’d think that during an era of US-China relations touted as “Ping Pong Diplomacy” that PONG could’ve served an ambassadorial role in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s Beijing visit to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong in early 1972. The surrogates in Shanghai are stand-ins to evidence a general history of games, one not yet experienced first-hand in the People’s Republic of China until later in the 1980s. Their presence at the museum in Shanghai also connects China to this general, world history of games when, today, it’s the major market and boasts the largest population of game players. The pair of surrogate PONGs also sparked an unexpected connection for me. Although PONG didn’t grace the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s, today the Unis Technology Co. (headquartered in Guangdong, China) is the most prolific producer of the popular Atari Pong Table game. It’s a reimagined version of the original game that swaps its screen for a mechanically engineered playfield populated by pulleys, magnets, rails, and motors for two-player fun. Unit Tech’s take on PONG is equally at home in game rooms and at museums in Malaga and Vienna.

What do you see when you look at Home PONG?

Like the coin-op version, you will see a lot of home consoles that play PONG, or other ball-and-paddle types of games at museums. Some are displayed on shelves or in a case behind glass so that we can observe them as an object of game history. Others appear in the context of a recreated domestic scene where they sit upon a coffee table (a common indicator of domestic gaming I’ve come to appreciate at museums). This type of scene interests me the most. I encourage you to take it all in. Recreations of domestic spaces, typically a living room space, convey scenes of when video games became part of the everyday home environment. I’ve observed such recreations situate a new consumer technology within the lives and lifestyles of people in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Spain, and the US. Consider that a room had to house these new consumer devices. A kitchen might be too risky, and a bedroom would limit which members of the family had access.

The living room coffee table becomes a democratizing object, granting access to all in front of the television. But don’t fixate your looking on the game console alone. All of the objects assembled, displayed, constitutive of the recreation communicate meaning collectively. They are common things. Installed as objects in a recreation due to their banality. Their lesson is in their ability to extend their commonality to the new object now occupying the shared space. They made space for it. The assembly of recognizable furnishings – throw rugs, patterned period wallpaper, wooden furniture like coffee tables, storage consoles, book shelves for that “lived in” touch, upholstered sofas, lamps, radios, record players, cathode-ray televisions, and other assorted decorative knick-knacks usually of a 1970s kitschy variety with regional connections – installed to create the scene of domestic game play naturalize the then new experience. It’s easy to overlook or forget this today since we’ve now lived with video games for over 50 years. But sometime in the 1970s, specific years differ depending on which country you lived in during that period, the ability to play PONG or a ball-and-paddle derivative in the home was indeed a new experience. What’s on display is less the physical object of a home PONG console in this domestic scene, than the perceivable moment when the familiar living room with its habitual objects rearranged and recentered itself. A public gaming practice in the form of coin-op machine was now at arm’s reach from that ever-present sofa, common as that coffee-table.

What do you see when you look at PONG clones?

Berlin, Wroclaw, and Zagreb’s exhibits on the subject of PONG derivatives tell us that they are referred to as clones. Riga’s Video Spelu Muzejs taught me to appreciate this incredible legion of PONG clones.

There are simply too many on display not to feel awed. The sheer volume functions as a testament to their value. In US game history, the term “clone” is a pejorative label that dismisses efforts to capitalize on PONG’s migration to the home in the mid-1970s. Atari utilized a proprietary custom microchip for its home version of the wildly popular coin-op machine, but once ball-and-paddle integrated circuits could be acquired by any manufacturer, the global market quickly became flooded with PONG variations. In Riga I look at Atari’s line of Tele-Games PONG consoles produced for Sears alongside its own consumer line of products. I also see familiar product lines from Coleco Telstar and Magnavox. That’s where my familiarity with PONG derivatives ends, seen from my small corner of the world. Riga shatters that view. My eyes drink in products from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, the UK. I’m schooled by product names like “Grandstand,” “Soundic,” “Palson,” “TeleFlip,” “Miragama,” “Videomaster,” “Optim Sport,” “Telegioca” “Video Match,” and “TV8 Sports.” Slapping the label “clones” onto these products only serves a US centric narrative for the history of games. It positions the US as originator with the world as copier. It denies the legitimacy of regional histories, of regionally unique experiences. For many outside the US a game called “PONG” wasn’t the first encounter with a video game. Many only know PONG through their own regional iterations. That new device in the home, may have been called, “Турнир” or “Video Mate TV Jack 1200.” What I observe in Riga isn’t display cases loaded with “knock-offs” or “clones,” but an entirely altered perspective on video games as a global phenomenon and how little I know of it.

Pull back from your close examination to revisit the coin-op version. I find returning to exhibits after prolonged time in a museum a healthy encounter teeming with renewed interests and refreshed eyes. This time around, observe other visitors looking at PONG.

What do they look at? How closely do they look? If it’s an interactive display, do visitors play PONG? Do they quickly pick up on how to play? Can you tell if they’ve played before?

Are they having fun playing a game over 50 years old, one regarded as “ancient” compared to the likes of Red Dead Redemption? Are you close enough to hear what they say about PONG? How long do they play if they play at all? There is pleasure to be had in not playing PONG as well. Looking can be its own form of play. Watching others play is rewarding.

Since you are primed to look at others play, turn your gaze onto yourself. Observe yourself playing in a museum.

Do you play differently than, say, in an arcade? What about when a museum like in Berlin, Zoetermeer, Frisco, Rochester, or Tampere recreate an arcade space within the museum—a space sectioned off from the museum, with its lights a little lower, and machines placed right next to one another like an arcade? Do you talk while you play? Are you still or animated? Do you play hard, mashing buttons aggressively, or is your touch much gentler? Are you aware of museum staff observing your actions with their interactive display? Does this different style of ambiance change your play compared to playing an exhibition with its title card, bright illumination, surrounded by other curated objects, and in a space not demarcated from the surrounding museum? Do you feel like you are on display – a human prop in an interactive exhibition – when you play in a museum? Are you playing a video game or a museum object? Perhaps both simultaneously? Ever think about when a video game becomes a museum object? And how? What does that mean to you?

By looking longer, staying with PONG for a sustained duration, practicing patience in my museum encounters, and not fretting about its prevalence, I’ve come to observe details and experience a familiar object in new ways. PONG for the win.