Seeing as it's Blog Day, I thought I might as well go and submit this. I had read something about this a few months ago, and HullBreach's blog about it just reminded me!

So this blog will basically cover the topic of the month, as well as being submitted on Blog Day. I don't think there have been any other blogs about the topic of the month, though.

Here's the game: Two white blocks and a white pixel that goes back and forth. The amazing, classic, arcade video game. If you don't know what I'm talking about by now, please do us all a favor and burn all of your video games. (Not really, that would be a waste of fire)

Atari's Pong

Pong, if you don't know, is one of, if not the most successful video game ripoffs known to man. Yes, folks, the game that made Atari one of the most successful tech companies of all time is, indeed, stolen.

Table Tennis by Magnavox Odyssey (the original)


Atari's amazing successful Pong (the fake)

Pong, as you can see from above, was stolen from Magnavox Odyssey's Table Tennis. Both were published in 1972, but Magnavox Odyssey was the first released. And soon other, Atari came out with a very similar game. The only difference is that this one sold millions.

Magnavox did take Atari to court, and they did win. This may sound kind of stupid, but Magnavox did not demand that Atari stopped producing the game. They just demanded a one time fee of $700,000 dollars. As you can obviously tell, that was a great bargain for Atari, because just 10 years later Atari earned $2 billion dollars in 1982 alone.

Not a bad bargain at all, if you ask me.