History page 7
Pong made a fortune. The game was a smash success. Where the Odyssey had failed, Pong ruled supreme. Magnavox clearly wanted a piece of that success and since they could clearly find Bushnell’s name in the guest registry of the Magnavox Profit Caravan event, they deemed it would be fairly easy to pursue legal action. Magnavox sued and required Ralph Baer to provide his original 1966 four page document detailing the creation of the Brown Box.
Rather than argue the merits of the copyright issue (one could always bring up a reverse argument that Baer took the tennis idea from William Higinbotham), Nolan Bushnell decided to settle out of court. Atari was now a hugely successful company and could easily afford to pay a licensing fee to Magnavox.
With that out of the way, Atari went on to create many more successful arcade machines, Tank, Asteroids, etc. And after the initial wave of interest in Pong, they tackled the idea of getting the game into homes on a console. The home Pong unit was made and sold incredibly well. Built on the success of that console, Atari turned their efforts to another unit, the Atari VCS (later referred to as the 2600).
In May of 2007, the video game podcast Retronauts had a discussion on the early history of video games, given that an article had announced that 2007 is the 40th anniversary of video games (assuming Ralph Baer's patent from 1967 is to be interpreted as their inception). It is a good, light hearted discussion from today's gamer's point of view. The entire episode can be found on the Retronauts page (look for Episode 24 - 05/17/2007) but if you wish to hear the 12 minute excerpt that contains the early video game talk, it can be downloaded here. WARNING: some foul language is used.
