It All Started With Pong
By Stephen

It all started with Pong. In 1958, William Higinbotham, then head of BNL's Instrumentation Division, designed what may have been one of the first video games. Back then, Brookhaven had visitors days in the fall, and thousands of people came to tour the Lab and see exhibits set up in the gymnasium. Higinbotham's game was an illustration of what the Instrumentation Division could design and build.

"I knew from past visitors days that people were not much interested in static exhibits," said Higinbotham, "so for that year. I came up with an idea for a hands-on display - a video tennis game."

The game was run by an analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope. "It was simple to design," remembered Higinbotham. "Back then, analog computers were used to work out all kinds of mechanical problems. They didn't have the accuracy of digital computers, which were very crude at the time, but then you didn't need a great deal of precision to play TV games."

Higinbotham's time was a simple time, technology was newly introduced and the people of the era were simple folk, living life and not worrying about the difficulties of the modern world that we have grown accustomed to. To the people of the late 1950s, the introduction of the first hands-on interactive TV game was a huge advancement and although by modern standards the technology is infantile at best, people of Pong's day grew to love and honor what they thought to be the greatest invention of the day. It truly was the climax of the 50s.

Of course with every invention comes competition, and as a market begins for a certain product, everyone wants their share of the profit. With the invention of Pong came the introduction of video games. First Pong, then Space Invaders, next Star Castle. Video games have mesmerized children of all ages across the country and around the world. Companies such as Atari, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega swept the nation, coming out with trademark games that swept the nation and hooked consumers everywhere.

With the spread of producers, the video game industry becomes much fiercer and as competition rises, the need for more profit increases and quality decreases. In a never ending battle to sell the most games, some of the top video game companies, such as Nintendo, Sony, and the newly assembled Microsoft with the release of the X-box, are more concerned with releasing the most variety of merchandise as opposed to the quality of their merchandise. Video games today lack that special something that Pong had, that all video games of those days had. With the ever-growing video industry, it's hard to find a truly awe inspiring game that people of the 50s found in Pong. One of the greatest examples of the impact Pong had to its populous is that even today adults will watch their young playing games full of bloody action and deafening thrills, yet reminisce of the days that they played Pong rather than join in and play the games of today.

Rarely will games of today be carried on in legacy through the generations as Pong and other games of the 50s have been carried on by older generations. That's because as competition and greed take over the industries, games stop becoming one of a kind forms of entertainment and start becoming bulk forms of mass media that may contain different characters and settings, but more often than not will have similar game play, plot, and animations, resulting in a blend of colors and sounds that keep consumers entertained for few hours at a time, yet quickly deter them and drive them into boredom much quicker than early video games. As long as companies are more worried about their profit than the quality of merchandise and the satisfaction of consumers, today's generation as well as future generations will never know the true joy of being introduced to Pong, or the thrill that comes from loving a game so much that you can sit in front of it and play for hours on end without wanting more.