Video Game Hall of Fame: All 24 Inductees Ranked - Part I (24-13)

#19 Pong (inducted in 2015)

People need to be eased into new concepts. When Nolan Bushnell and his friends turned Spacewar! into Computer Space and put it out in the world, it gained some interest at first. But, soon the novelty wore off and for a public not yet used to the concept of video games, it was a little too involved for a quick game down at the local watering hole.

In 1972, Atari's Al Alcorn put together a tech exercise based on a tennis game found in Ralph Baer's Maganox Odyssey home console (which, by the way, should already be in this Hall of Fame). That tech demo was so polished that Bushnell and her fellow Atari founder, the late Ted Dabney, decided to use it to replace Computer Space.

The rest is history.

Pong became the game industry's first major commercial success and it helped turn Atari from a business run out of a garage into the most profitable business in the world (at the time, anyway). It not only spurred on the popularity of arcades, but the desire to play the game on televisions created the demand for the first successful home consoles.

Basically, if it weren't for Pong, there'd be no PlayStation or Xbox today.

Even today, Pong is almost a perfect game - and we mean "game" in the most specific definition: "a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck." Thanks, dictionary! The fact that it's so simple also makes it such a perfect starting point for the evolution of games that game after it.

And a perfect example of this is...