Trigger Happy
But it was not all plain sailing. When Pong first came out, Atari was immediately sued. Ralph Baer’s home-tennis game had finally been taken up by Magnavox. The first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, had been released six months before Atari’s debut. And it was to all intents and purposes a home Pong avant la lettre. It lacked the hypnotic sonar-blip soundtrack of the arcade game, but there was no doubt that it had got there first, and Atari was forced to pay Magnavox a license fee on every game sold.
Of course, all these Pong-style games were direct descendants of the lost oscilloscope program by Willy Higinbotham, who never made a penny. Rip-offs of home tennis and multi-player arcade versions of “tennis” or “hockey,” as well as the first simplistic shooting and driving games, flourished over the next few years. But, as if punished by the Fates for not honoring its ancestor, the booming videogame industry was soon brought to its knees—and the reason was the very multiplicity of Pongs. By 1977, there were so many rival home machines that stores began dumping them at knockdown prices, and many manufacturers went bust. It looked as if videogames had been a mere fad, a fad which had now burnt itself out. The industry was on the verge of total meltdown.
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