Pong Trivia

1. How many zones are in the game?

From Quiz Pong

Answer: 8

There are six zones with two to four levels each, Zone 7 is the large Atari logo, and Zone 8 is the original Pong game from the Atari days.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: A black and white television

Alcorn was impressed that there was no computer in "Computer Space" and that the video screen was a television. Alcorn went to the local Wintergreen store and purchase a 75 dollar Hitachi black and white television and enclosed the screen in a a bright orange console to hide the Hitachi logo and the electronics needed to convert a television screen into a video game.

From Quiz Pong

Answer: 6

Within each level, there are three sub-levels. The first level gives you three gold bars, the second will give you two, and the third level gives you one.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: It didn't have one

What Dabney and Bushnell had done with "Computer Space" was tweak the dedicated logic circuits within the wiring of the television so that they could produce the same effects as the time-sharing computer. "A very, very clever trick," Alcorn called it. "Without a computer, without software, without a frame buffer, a microprocessor, or even memory chips beyond a few flip-flops". Bushnell and Dabney had created a dot to appear and move on the screen. Alcorn was able to meet Bushnell's game requirements using the television circuitry with some transistor-transistor logic circuits chips. But no CPU was required.

From Quiz Pong

Answer: 12

You only need to win the first sub-level of each stage to move on, as each first sub-level wins three gold bars. There are four stages in Zone 1, so 3 x 4 = 12.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: Straight up and down

The paddles moved up and down to stop the ball from passing. What Alcorn did was to invisibly segment the panels, so depending on which portion of the paddle you hit the ball, determined what angle the ball moved towards your opponent. A fault was the paddles did not cover the whole height of the screen was deliberately left unfixed to keep the length of rallies minimal. Alcorn was able to make the ball speed up if it was in play for an extended rally.

From Quiz Pong

Answer: 120

In the first six zones, there are a total of twenty stages. With each stage giving six gold bars (three for level 1, two for 2, and one for 3), 120 is the maximum.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: Two knobs, one for each player

These were very early days in video game development. Players were enthralled with the novelty of interacting with a television screen. Hi-tech consoles were a long way from availability. Even joysticks had not been used, commercially at least. Players had a simple knob to move the paddles up and down the screen. Behind the TV screen was a series of 76 transistor-transistor logic circuits that controlled the on-screen components consisting of the two paddles, the ball, and the score counter above the play area and the sound (which was restricted to two tones).

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: The coin box was overflowing internally, stopping the starting mechanism

Alcorn went over to the tavern and found the coin box was overflowing with quarters. There were so many coins they spilled out into the mechanics of the operation stopping the start switch from activating. There had to be $100 in quarters from 2-3 days play. (A pinball machine took roughly 30-40 dollars per week in the same venue). "Pong" had not been starting because the coin box was too full to trip the start mechanism. The coins were removed and the machine started again. Future models had bigger coin holders. Bushnell had trouble attracting financial backers to provide funding to manufacture the game. Most banks saw the game as a pinball derivative. The public had a poor perception of the pinball industry associating it with both delinquency and organised crime. Manufacturing was slow at first: Ten units a day but within a year Atari was exporting the game overseas.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: Magnavox Odyssey

When Bushnell had given specific instructions to Alcorn on how he wanted "Pong" to look, was because Bushnell had already seen a similar game on the Magnavox Odyssey, an in home console that connected to your TV set and played a number of limited games, table tennis being one of them. Alcorn had produced a much superior game with additional functionality but there was no doubting that the parentage of "Pong" came from the Magnavox game. In April 1974 Magnavox filed suit against Atari. Atari settled out of court (for a disputed figure somewhere between $300 000 and $1.5 million) and were free to keep manufacturing. Magnavox continued to successfully sue other companies that had copied "Pong" but it was argues, they had copied Magnavox.

From Quiz Straight Up and Down

Answer: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

To capitalise on the commercial success of "Pong", new games were required. Alcorn asked a 20-year-old San Francisco college dropout to design a new game called "Breakout". This game went on to become one of Atari's biggest, enduring hits. The new developer was Steve Jobs, who asked asked another college dropout from Hewlett-Packard, to join him and help him out. The second guy was Steve Wozniak. In 1976, Warner Communications, which had merged with Time Inc. in 1990, bought Atari for $28 million. This gave Busnell $15 million and Alcorn, a fair bit less. (Dabney had been paid out earlier). Video games had hit the big time. In the second decade of the 21st century, the video game industry had overtaken the motion picture industry in turnover. And it all started here, with "Pong" as a start up in the Silicon Valley in 1972.

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