Pong was created as a demo for his boss, and the Atari game sparked a $322 billion supernova

stuff.co.nz:

Ralph H Baer, a German-American inventor, conceived of playing games on a television screen in 1966. His vision resulted in the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey.

Four years earlier, Stephen Russell and a team of computer scientists at MIT had used their newly acquired US$120,000 PDP-1 computer to make a game called Spacewar!

Earlier still, there was Tennis for Two, produced by American physicist William Higinbotham using an oscilloscope in 1958.

There even exists a design and patent for a “cathode-ray tube amusement device” that dates back to 1947.

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But the origin story of the commercial video game industry, today valued at US$200 billion (NZ$322 billion) and growing fast, is much easier to pinpoint.

November 29, 1972. The day Atari released their first video game, Pong.

Pong designer Allan Alcorn unwittingly found himself at the nexus of the technology and entertainment industries.

Alcorn thought the first assignment he was given by the fledgling video game company Atari would simply be practice for engineering the next big thing. That assignment – a simple ball and paddle game – turned out to be the next big thing.

“This is insane. I’ll go along with the gag, but we’ll see how long it takes to blow up and I’ll go back and work at Ampex,” he said.

Alcorn would soon become chief engineer at Atari, where he recruited several notable employees, including an 18-year-old tech called Steve Jobs. But that’s another