[In the first in a series of Gamasutra-exclusive bonus material originally to be included in Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton's forthcoming book Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time, the duo presents a history of Pong, the game that jumpstarted the game business, and some of the innovations it inspired.]Although it wasn't the first, Atari's Pong was the first video game to get the ball rolling -- or bouncing, as it were. Humble even by contemporary standards, Pong was an effort to introduce a video game so intuitive that even a child (or inebriated bar patron) could grasp it instantly.It was in many ways a reaction to the first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space, from 1971, an overly ambitious effort based on Spacewar!, a pioneering mainframe computer-based space combat simulation from the 1960s developed by and for engineers (which will be covered in an upcoming article, "Spacewar! (1962): Th...
