(thanks, pongmuseum!)
What do you mean you FORGOT? Well, good thing for you it’s Black Friday, huh? Yeah, you just got back in from 12 hours of spending too much money you don’t have, but I say you need to get your leftover turkey eating behind BACK outside and work off some more calories before you’re tempted by the fridge to open it up and dive into that cold stuffing (again!). What should you buy PONG? Oh, use your imagination, people. Just don’t go writing any songs, now. That’s already been done and done so well that it’s the final word on this irrefutable classic. Eh, you’ll figure something out – just stay away from linens and towels as a gift choice, as they tend to be marked up during this time of year just to lure you into thinking you’re getting a good deal with that $2 coffeemaker and $50 TV you bought earlier…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!"
Smashing System Bias Since 1972…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 
No, today is the day it was just advertised nationally. It was already being sold in the beginning of November.
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Hey Marty!
Thanks for the reply! I figured as much (I vaguely recall playing the game at a cousin’s place earlier in the month back in ’72) , but since the rest of the media coverage I’d seen or heard has mentioned 11/29 (for a few years now), I figured I’d jump on that wagon and ride it for a bit, as people tend to live by advertising and not actual dates out of convenience. Do you know the actual date the game went on sale in North America?
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How would you have had played it at a cousin’s house in ’72? This was the arcade game, the home PONG didn’t come out until Fall ’75. Unless you mean you played the Magnavox Odyssey?
The arcade game started being sold to distributors and operators in the first half of November. There’s no exact date, games were not “released” or “launched” during this time. That sort of thing didn’t start until much later.
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Yup, it WAS the Odyssey (oops!). I still recall he never even used those overlays and other stuff in that huge box – just had the console set up and ready to run. I tend to call anything PONG-like PONG just because it gets confusing with all the different variants and cash-ins that popped up afterwards. I didn’t play the arcade game until a few years later.
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Understood, but I think it can get just as confusing calling everything else PONG as well as you can see. LOL. Especially when you start retrofitting it to the Odyssey when it came out before PONG. Odyssey was a full console as well, tennis was just one of the games on it. The others, including PONG were stinted and just played a specific subset of games. You could go the caps route I guess – PONG is the spelling of that actual game, while Pong is the genre of bat and ball (or ball and paddle) tennis games.
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Heh. I had a grade school friend whose dad was OBSESSED with PONG and Pong-like variants to the point where I recall him having something like a dozen or so different TV games and his wife was always wondering what the heck he was thinking in buying what she saw as the same games over and over. He used to look at her, shake his head and say something like “You just don’t see how DIFFERENT they all are, is all…”, which made me laugh because in a small way they were both right. Hmmm… I wonder what happened to those games? He had most of them boxed up and either in a hall closet or in the living room near the TV and I recall only one at a time was in use.
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pong-story.com
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Wow – thanks for that link. My friend’s dad had a few of those in the pics including a Heathkit or two that I think ticked his wife off because she thought he was going to blow up their apartment putting one together!
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