In August 1972 a strange wooden cabinet in a Sunnyvale bar stopped working, and the engineer who opened it found the coin mechanism jammed with quarters. This episode traces the history of Pong from Nolan Bushnell’s fake General Electric contract, a training exercise handed to new Atari hire Alan Alcorn, through the hardwired logic Alcorn built into a $75 television, the ball that sped up during rallies, segmented paddles, sound tapped from the video sync generator, and a wiring defect that became the game’s most important feature.

The story continues with the Andy Capp’s Tavern test, the decision to manufacture in a converted roller rink, the Home Pong chip that Harold Lee and Alcorn compressed onto a single piece of silicon, the Sears Tower demonstration that nearly failed due to antenna interference, and the 150,000-unit order that required venture capital to fulfill. It closes with the clone makers Bushnell called jackals, the Magnavox lawsuit backed by a guest book proving Bushnell had played the Odyssey, the $1.5 million settlement, and Pong’s ripple effects from Chuck E. Cheese to Nintendo’s Color TV Game series.

• Why Bushnell invented a fake client to train a rookie engineer
• How Alcorn generated the iconic beeps without a dedicated audio chip
• Why the paddle dead zone guaranteed player turnover at the cabinet
• How Sears, Tom Quinn and Don Valentine turned Home Pong into a 1975 hit
• What the Magnavox settlement forced Atari to hide before the 2600