How many pong consoles are there

Players use the paddles to hit a ball back and forth. The aim is for a player to earn more points than the opponent; points are earned when one fails to return the ball to the other.

Pong consistently earned four times more revenue than other coin-operated machines, which resulted in an increase in the number of orders Atari received. This provided Atari with a steady source of income; the company sold the machines at three times the cost of production. By , the company had filled 2, orders, and, at the end of , sold more than 8, units. Atari eventually sold more than 35, units, however, many more imitations were produced by competitors.

The success of Pong as an arcade game resulted in Bushnell pushing his employees to create new products. The system began development under the codename Darlene, named after an attractive female employee at Atari. Alcorn worked with Lee to develop the designs and prototype, and based them on the same digital technology used in their arcade games. Home Pong was an instant success following its limited release through Sears; around , units were sold that holiday season.

Similar to the arcade version, several companies released clones to capitalize on the home console's success, many of which continued to produce new consoles and video games. This was a feature found in the arcade version, and helped to produce varied play.

In both the Odyssey and PONG, when the ball hit the top or bottom of the screen it bounced back in, a feature more like squash than tennis. The player gained a point when the opposing player failed to return the ball. Since domestic televisions in the s lacked audiovisual inputs, the pong console was connected to the television set by converting its output to a radio frequency signal that was fed in through the antenna socket.

Pong console clones Cloned versions often named 'TV Sports' or 'Tele Games' of the original pong console by Atari soon appeared, and by the market was saturated with cloned Pong consoles and demand was in decline. Seeking a quick exit from the industry, many companies sold off their games at discount prices.

The result was the first crash in the video game market, an event later echoed by the Video game crash of By this time more sophisticated games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man had become available, and the sound and graphics capabilities of Pong consoles were seen as old-fashioned.

Pong consoles - remember them? After Atari launched its famous Pong in , the world was flooded with imitations. There must have been several hundred different models across the continents. The designs varied widely. The first models had only four options, just like the first console from Atari: tennis, hockey, squash and practice, for the lonely players. Subsequent pong consoles had extra options and in many cases even a light gun. On this page you can take a look at several pong consoles from my collection.