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King PONG - Weekly Pull List
Game Histories

King PONG

How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions

Cover of King PONG MIT Press
Cover price $19.95
On shelves Ordering closed
Final order cutoff
January 12, 2026 228 days ago
On sale
February 10, 2026 199 days ago

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Credits

Description

Why and how Atari’s first video game PONG established an industry that shapes consumers’ relationships to technology to this day.PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever.

Details

Format
Trade Paperback
Language
eng
Order requirement
Order All
Distributor
PenguinRandomHouse
ISBN
9780262051330
Product code
9780262051330
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