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Many people think that Pong was the very first video game. It actually was not. What Pong was however was one of the very first video games to hit mainstream popularity and just blow up all around the world. You really can credit Pong with maybe not lighting the fire that started the gaming industry, but it certainly poured a big can of gas on the fire. Pong can be called tennis, table tennis or really what ever your imagination wants, but for the most part Pong is seen as a representation of some form of tennis.

Here we are going to have a look at the earliest Pong system from Atari. Again, in truth it would be near impossible to list every single Pong video game system that was released in the 1970s. If I did review every Pong clone console in this book it would be cluttered with consoles not worthy of collecting.

Atari Home Pong (Sears Tele-Games)

1975

Atari had a huge hit with their arcade Pong and work was started on bringing Pong to people in their homes in 1974. It was a very small team of people who would design and develop the first home Pong console. What is really cool and worth noting is that there was a single chip powering this first Pong console, but at the time it was released there was no other product on the market that used as high performance a chip as the Atari Home Pong did.

Despite the huge popularity of the arcade version of Pong, Atari had a really hard time selling their new console to toy and electronic stores. No one was interested as they felt that it was too expensive and that no one would want one anyway.

By chance someone at Atari saw an advertisement in a Sears Catalogue for the Magnavox Odyssey. What surprised them was that it was in the sporting goods department. So Atari got in touch with the sporting goods department at Sears to see if they would be interested. A gentleman at Sears called Tom Quinn loved the Atari Home Pong console and offered them an exclusive deal right there and then, but Atari, despite having no one else interested felt like they could secure a better financial deal elsewhere.

Atari really wanted a toy retailer to sell their console so they set up a booth at the 1975 Toy Fair in New York. No one was interested except one guy, Tom Quinn.

So, they met Tom Quinn again at the Toy Fair and agreed to have a meeting with him. After showing the console to other Sears executives a deal was struck. Atari told Tom Quinn that for the 1975 Christmas season they could supply 75,000 consoles for Sears to sell. Tom Quinn and the guys at Sears had such faith in this console that they asked for double that amount.

Atari agreed to the terms even though they lacked the manufacturing power to do this. So they went out and bought a huge manufacturing plant to meet the huge demand. Atari were able to meet the demand that was set for them in time for the Christmas 1975 season.

The first units that came off the production line in 1975 were branded with the Sears Tele-Games logo. Atari would re-release the Sears Tele-Games system with their own branding on it, in 1976.