Raiford Guins on "King Pong"

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Why and how Atari’s first video game PONG established an industry that shapes consumers’ relationships to technology to this day.
PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.
The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever.

ABOUT RAIFORD GUINS:

Raiford Guins is a Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of five books. His most recent is, King Pong: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions (MIT Press, 2026). He has also co-edited five collections including, Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023). Guins co-founded the field defining journal, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, and co-edits MIT Press's Game Histories book series.

ABOUT RACHEL PLOTNICK:

Rachel Plotnick is associate professor of cinema and media studies in The Media School at Indiana University. She is the author of two books with The MIT Press, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (2018) and License to Spill: Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives (2025). Her work has been featured across many popular media outlets, including NPR, The BBC, The Verge Science, the Wall Street Journal, and IEEE Spectrum. Learn more here: www.rachelplotnick.com

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