Table Tennis

Table Tennis IS the game. The first home video game in history. Two white rectangles representing paddles and a white square as a ball, with a center line drawn on the plastic overlay. Rules were simple: hit the ball back and forth, score points counted by hand with included cards. No on-screen score, no sound, no color. Yet millions saw those squares move and understood the television was no longer a passive object. Nolan Bushnell saw a demonstration of this game in May 1972 and months later created Pong — the clone that would become more famous than the original. The Magnavox vs Atari lawsuit established Table Tennis as the mother of all video games.