Pong Spreads

As Pong was raking in quarters at Andy Capp’s Tavern, Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, and Al Alcorn were not the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes.
Alcorn noticed a group of the same people stopped by to play the game every morning. It turned out they were a group of engineers at a nearby CRT company, and they decided they could probably build their own video arcade game. Teaming up with Tom Adams, a co-owner of Andy Capp’s, they came up with Volly, one of the earliest Pong clones.

John Metzler, unknown others

Bushnell and Dabney had been caught completely unprepared for Pong’s success, and demand for the game was quickly outpacing supply. So competitors quickly appeared to fill that demand, reverse-engineering the machinery to create TV Ping Pong, Pro Tennis, Paddle Battle, and Winner, and a countless number of others.
But Bushnell and Dabney were expanding Atari as fast as possible. They established an international subsidiary, preparing to move into Europe and Asia, and moved their headquarters from Sunnyvale to Los Gatos, California.
The group still had a contract to deal with, and for this they came up with Asteroid, a two-player racing game with a space theme. With a very similar look to Pong and cars reminiscent of Computer Space, players avoided hazardous lines to reach the top of the screen as quickly as possible.
As the arcades were filling up with Pong, Bushnell and Dabney could feel they made the right decision giving Asteroid to Bally instead of Pong.
And then they decided to release the game themselves anyway. They changed its name to Space Race, and didn't change much else.
They immediately got into legal trouble from Bally for violating contract law. Luckily for Atari, they were let off relatively easy, settling merely to forfeit their royalties from sales of Asteroid. While these were the first racing video arcade games, Bushnell still felt the quick development time was not enough to live up to his Speedway conversion, and the company soon began working on another racing game with a larger scope.

Ted Dabney, Al Alcorn
Meanwhile, video games had made their way to Japan, where they fit neatly into the region’s established arcade industry. After a couple engineers had finished reverse-engineering Pong, the clones Pong-tron and Ele-Pong became the first video games created in the region.
Tomohiro Nishikado (Ele-Pong), unknown (Pong-tron)

Of the new video game start-ups beginning to pop-up, a notable one was Kee Games, founded by Joe Keenan. They were advertised as a fierce competitor to Atari, and several ex-employees of Atari, labeled as "defectors", were hired to work at Kee Games.
Their first two games were Elimination and Spike; they were Pong variations, but even so, suspiciously similar to Atari’s Quadrapong and Rebound.
That’s because in reality, Joe Keenan was Nolan Bushnell’s next-door neighbor. The entire company was a front, put on by Bushnell to give the illusion of competition to clients. They could then give “exclusive” deals to arcade owners without having to sacrifice actual profits.

Unknown (Quadrapong & Rebound)
Around the same time, the company got a new president, John Wakefield, a corporate psychologist- who also happened to be Nolan Bushnell’s brother-in-law.
And he drove Ted Dabney up the wall.
Dabney found the new hires incompetent, so much so he sat down with Bushnell at a pizza parlor to have a serious talk about the direction the company was going.
But Bushnell saw the new hires as his friends, and suggested Dabney leave the company instead.
Al Alcorn’s next non-Pong game was Gotcha, a simplistic game of cat-and-mouse vaguely similar to a game from the Odyssey.
At first glance, the most notable thing about the game seems to be its strange control method, resembling the female breast, which contributed to its off-putting undertones of molestation.
Though, in addition to its typical black-and-white release, its limited-release second version is most likely the first video game played in color.

Al Alcorn
Over in Japan, the engineer behind Ele-Pong, Tomohiro Nishikado, saw potential in the video screen format for new creations drawing from earlier arcade gameplay.
His next games were Davis Cup, a clone of Pong altered to play doubles, and Soccer, a multiplayer game which gave both players control over a forward and a goalkeeper.

Tomohiro Nishikado
Around the same time, TV Hockey came out from the same company behind Pong-tron, who have never credited the games' actual developers. These were the first original video games created in Japan.

Unknown
Not long after came TV Basketball, the first arcade video game to be based on the sport, and also the first Japanese game to be released overseas. Perhaps more importantly, the game eschewed the crude diode array images of earlier games like Computer Space and Space Race with fully digital sprite graphics, the first game to do so.

Tomohiro Nishikado
Back in Sunnyvale, the Pong clones had made an important leap: they had become single-player. Clean Sweep replaced the opponent player of Pong (or perhaps of its Rebound variation) with a grid of dots.
Instead of getting the ball past the goalie, the goal instead was simply to shoot the ball through every dot without losing it at the bottom of the screen. Unlike future brick-breaker type games like Breakout and Arkanoid, there was no collision on the dots; the ball shot straight through instead of bouncing back.
The gameplay of eradicating these dots scratched a particular itch that nothing had really managed to take advantage of before. It was like popping bubble wrap. It’s unlikely anyone really appreciated how much of a leap this was, but it formed the foundation of a huge number of single-player games in the following years lasting into the modern day.

Howell Ivy
But Atari was not doing well. Their various ventures were bleeding the company dry of money, and their big racing game had to stop production and be redesigned due to various manufacturing issues.
It finally released as Gran Trak 10, or, Formula K, when Kee Games released it. After Asteroid and Space Race, this was the first racing game with cars that could turn, allowing them to complete laps around the track similar to slotcar racing.

Larry Emmons, Steve Mayer, Ron Milner, Al Alcorn

But due to a communication error, they were sold at a cheaper price than what it cost to actually manufacture them, meaning they were losing immense amounts of money on what should have been turning things around.
At the same time, Nolan Bushnell was pressuring Ted Dabney to leave the company. Even though Dabney’s role was basically nominal by this point, he was still a board member, and he had a 40% stake of ownership in the company- which seemed to be what Bushnell was really after. He threatened Dabney with the prospect of transferring all of Atari’s assets to another corporation, leaving Dabney with nothing, unless he sold out all his shares.
Dabney was never entirely specific about what happened next. He was apparently tricked into sharing confidential information about Kee Games with parties who were never meant to hear about it, which put the whole ruse of Kee in jeopardy.
Fed up, he decided to leave the company entirely. He felt that preserving his friendship with Bushnell is more important than fighting for the company.
But meanwhile, with the phenomenon Pong had become, it was impossible for it to fly under the radar.
It was really only a matter of time until the legal consequences hit, but now it was time to pay the piper. Magnavox filed suit for patent infringement in US district court in the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
They weren’t just going after Atari. They were going after everyone. There is evidence the company chose to wait before filing suit, even after they knew of the infringing games, to let the industry grow. And now that it had, they could go after every single large video game company there was.
With such financial problems and a court case looming, Atari began to downsize. When John Wakefield was removed as company president, Bushnell was left the last man standing, serving as both the company's new president and the chairman.
Atari’s Japanese branch was doing perhaps even worse. After the branch president decided to simply stop showing up to work, the branch was sold to none other than Masaya Nakamura, of Nakamura Manufacturing, the man behind Torpedo Launcher of so many years before.
Atari gave up on the ruse of Kee Games as well, and folded the company Atari as a subsidiary, essentially a second-party studio, putting its role as a “competitor” came to an end.
Their next game was the uncomfortably-named Touch Me, which wasn’t even a video game at all. Instead, it used a row of lit-up buttons in lieu of a screen. The lights flashed in a random order which the player would need to memorize and then re-input correctly, abstractly similar to the playground game Simon Says.

Unknown
What kept them afloat happened to come from Kee Games, where Steve Bristow and Lyle Rains created a game to rival Pong in popularity. Bristow had been friends with Dabney & Bushnell far back enough to help with manufacture of Computer Space, but he’d always found its control scheme too difficult. He liked the idea of simplifying things, changing the ships to tanks and getting rid of the gravity mechanics. Introducing some obstacles and making the game multiplayer gave them Tank.

Steve Bristow, Lyle Rains

Ironically, the “Tank controls” he came up with, intended to be simpler and easier-to-understand, eventually came to be known as slow and confusing.

The unintuitive default controls in this later version of Tank use E/D to move the tank's left tread, U/J for the right tread, and the left CTRL key to shoot.
Tomohiro Nishikado's next game was Speed Race, the first racing video game out of Japan, inspired by Gran Trak and modeled after the older arcade racing game Super Road 7. But instead of fitting the track on a single screen, Nishikado introduced vertical scrolling graphics, letting the track be bigger and the car functionally move far faster.

Tomohiro Nishikado
Video arcade games had become popular enough in Japan for the “TV Game-ki Zenkoku Contest”, a nationwide competition of TV Hockey, the first large-scale video game competition.

Congratulations to Osamu Kuroda, the winner of the tournament.
Nishikado also came up with Western Gun, which soon became one of the most popular games of this period worldwide. It was originally an adaptation of the earlier Gun Fight to video game form, turning its light gun gameplay into a multiplayer showdown. The playfield was set up horizontally, like Pong, but with the cactus obstacles of Gun Fight adding a bit of complexity, which could actually respond to being shot by being destroyed.
Of course, shooting had been around in games all the way back in Spacewar, but with Nishikado's sprite graphics, this was the first example of human beings visibly shooting and killing each other.

Tomohiro Nishikado

In this recreation of the game's North American release, press 5 to insert a coin, and use the arrow keys and left CTRL for player 1. Player 2 uses RDFG for movement and A to shoot.
But by now, the Pong craze was in decline in American arcades. There wasn't quite as much demand for arcade video games as there used to be, but outside the arcades, the Pong clones were increasingly found in home console form.
It had become apparent that a large portion of people were buying the Odyssey just for its Pong-esque tennis game. So, the Odyssey 100 came out to fill that demand, stripping out all the other games and only leaving behind Tennis and Hockey (although, this version did also introduce sound). It was soon followed up with the Odyssey 200, 300, 400, 500, 2000, 2001, 2100, 3000, 4000, and 4305.
Atari released their own “home Pong” through a different brand the same month.
Countless imitators were popping up all over. These were the first dedicated consoles, or “Plug & Play”. Without the Odyssey’s Game Card system, they could only play games that were physically built into the hardware, typically a single game with minor variations.
But by now, court proceedings were about to be underway.