The exhibition shows the technical and social historical circumstances under which Pong managed to become a key influencing factor for the emergence of a whole industry. Foremost, this is the story of two business men and inventors who, independently and with different approaches, invented video games as a commercial pastime.

One is Ralph H. Baer (born 1922 in Germany), who was the first to create a playing field out of the domestic television set. As early as 1968, he submitted a simple tennis game as a patent which in 1972 formed the base for the first home video game, Odyssey. The other is Nolan Bushnell (born 1943 in the United States), who founded the first pure video games company Atari in 1972 to produce his adaptation of the simple tennis game as the Pong machine.

 

This is why Pong is such an interesting pop-cultural phenomenon: Because it is located – technically as well as historically – at the interface between the analogue and the digital world. With the Odyssey console this becomes especially apparent, as its digital circuits were still realised with common analogue parts, and it was shipped with coloured overlays for putting on the tv screen to colorise the black-and-white game events.

But Pong is also one of the first digital mass products (most of all, the development represents Atari’s Pong, successfully sold since 1975 as a microchip-based home version). As such the game was a key factor contributing to the growth of the early micro chip industry.

But even back then, questions about copyright in a digital environment played an important role. For instance, even in 1973 Magnavox (the Odyssey's producer) and Atari met in court in a struggle about the intellectual property of the simple but trend-setting tennis game...