A closer look
Pong was never originally intended to be released to the public, as Atari founder Nolan Bushnell only assigned the table tennis project to new employee Allan Alcorn as a basic training exercise to test his programming skills. Bushnell lied and told Alcorn that they had a lucrative contract with General Electric to build it, purely to motivate him to finish the code. The resulting prototype was so surprisingly fun that they installed it in a local California tavern, where it became so popular that the machine literally broke down because the coin mechanism was overflowing with quarters. The entire video game industry essentially owes its massive global existence to a blatant lie told by a manipulative boss who just wanted to keep his new intern busy with pointless busywork!
