Weekly Written Analysis 5
Hum 341-E1WW
Vivian Martin
Assignment 5-1
The Rise And Fall Of Atari’s Pong
Nolan Busnell founded Atari, in 1972 and it became a hit in 1975 as Pong, a two dimensional sports simulate game of table tennis game came into existence as the first video game.(Miral Saltar, 2010 “Game Consoles”. ) To a generation of gamers accustomed to 64-bit graphics and blazing processor power, Pong now looks absurdly low-tech. A tiny “ball” floats back and forth across a “net” bisecting a dark screen., the object of the game was to avoid missing the ball for a high score. The game was fun and popular and brought millions of players to the TV screen and the industry never looked back.
The success of Pong and other video games by Atari was shortlived, because Atari became complacent and they made many negative business decisions, even
though they may have seemed correct at the time, that cost them their position in the industry. There was also a failure in the courts as Atari lost a 150-million dollar law suit againist Nintendo for domination of the industry: (PC History, “The Rise and Fall of Atari”, 2008.)
Busnell also became complacent when Atari was thriving in the market and
did not move forward in the creative process and failed to get new products in the
hands of developers discouraging many companies developers from writing for them.
Today new computers must be put into the hand of software developers as soon as possible and companies like apple are not only innovative but employ sales personnel to encourage this.
In some strange way some might say the game Pong was the rise of Atari into the video gaming world and also its fall, which is a lesson in marketing and what makes a good business succeed as well, as companies cannot lean on one product as the market is is very unpredictable, and staying innovative, as well as
keeping up with consumer demand is a must in today’s business world. .
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