Plan B Forum

BEFORE Super Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Lara Croft and World of Warcraft, there was Pong.




The arcade game batting a ball between two paddles on either side of the screen was launched 40 years ago last week. It wasn't the first video game, but it was the first commercial success.

In 1972, people began queueing outside the bar in California where the game first appeared until one day the machine broke down. Pong's designer, engineer Al Alcorn, arrived and quickly diagnosed the problem as coin overload.

Three years later, the company Atari began selling Pong - with its minimal instructions such as ''avoid missing ball for high score'' - into homes as a console game connected to the television, and a fledgling industry took flight.

''Pong is a small game that has had a big impact,'' Conrad Bodman, curator of international projects at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) museum, said.

''It established the sports game genre. It used sound to create tension and excitement in the game and it also introduced a two-player format and the notion of competitive one-on-one play.''

Last year, Australian consumers spent $1.5 billion on interactive gaming PricewaterhouseCoopers said. Worldwide, $54.7 billion was spent on console, handset, computer, online and wireless games, with this figure predicted to reach almost $77 billion by 2016.

The rules established by Pong, including the one-on-one or ''versus'' play using the language of today's generation, apply for modern developers such as Mark Boulton, who worked at Australian video game company Blue Tongue Entertainment before it folded last year.

''Most game developers strive to create a product with high replay value, hoping the player will find it addictive,'' Mr Boulton says.

Pong's influence can be seen in any game where friends' high scores are used to spur players competitive instincts.

But the paddle game nearly didn't happen, with the creators at Atari fearing the project was too expensive.

''The integrated circuit boards by themselves cost almost $200, so that was clearly never a consumer product,'' Atari boss Nolan Bushnell said at the time.

The issue of the cost of gaming technology hasn't gone away.

Boulton also welcomed the federal government's announcement last month of a $20 million Australia Interactive Games Fund to assist local developers, saying the high dollar has made it difficult to compete in an industry already shaken by the global financial crisis due to its reliance on discretionary spending.

This year's Entertainment & Media Outlook released by PwC predicted the future of the game industry is in mobile devices. While established gamers would continue to invest in traditional consoles and home computers, the report estimated Australians would spend $400 million on games for smartphones and tablets this year, and that this would increase by more than 11 per cent annually up to 2016.

Melbourne University academic Daniel Golding, who writes and lectures on video games, says games for mobile devices require a huge amount of downloads to turn a profit.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/techno ... z2Dqi47NW7