When I was a kid, we played ...


Every generation of adults seems doomed to think that their kids have been born into a poorer culture (when it comes to music, of course, in my case that's undoubtedly true, but that's a different story). I'm old enough to be able to tell my kids that we really played outside (or read books) rather than devoted most of our time to computer games. But the day doesn't seem particularly far off when even the oldest people around will have to shake their heads in dismay and exclaim - in my day we played Break-Out and Tetris, not these second rate computer games that kids play today. And in honor of that inevitable feeling that today's youth live in culturally deprived times, this month's date tie-ie is devoted to the release of the first commercially successful video game - Pong.

It was on this day, in 1972, that one of the founders of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, placed the first Pong console inside a Sunnyvale, California bar named Andy Capp's Tavern. Was Pong really as addictive as stories tell us? I'm a bit too old to know, though I admit that I remember devoting considerably more time that I had available to me to a Break-Out clone that was on my first PC.



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