Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong and the Video Game Industry’s Big Bang

A brief history of the title that launched Atari and the video game industry:

“In 1976, Atari took a monetary hit, settling a lawsuit out of court in Chicago with Magnavox. (Alcorn remembers the settlement being $300,000; Bushnell thinks Atari coughed up $500,000; Curt Vendel, who had seen documentation surrounding the suit, notes that $1.5 million in all was paid in installments up to 1983.) The suit concerned a patent held by Baer and Magnavox regarding interaction between machine-controlled and player-controlled elements on the screen, a basic foundation of design ‘that covered just about every game developed between 1971 and the mid-1980s,’ Baer says. He was clear about the lineage of Atari’s product: He told the Computer History Museum in 2006 that ‘Pong is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game,’ and that Bushnell ‘knew he was going to lose and decided to come under contract’ with Magnavox as a licensee.”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Dec 4, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,532 words)
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