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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
King Pong: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions

King Pong: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions

Guins, Raiford

Paperback

Series: Game Histories

Business GeneralGames & Activities GeneralGeneral Sociology

Publisher Price: $19.95

ISBN10: 0262051338
ISBN13: 9780262051330
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Feb 10 2026
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
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.

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