Email: Citation

Malstrom,

I was wondering if you had a source for the following anecdote from your blog:

When Nolan Bushnell first set up PONG and sat back to watch people play it, one woman was astonished. “How did the signal get to the TV station and back so fast?” It never occurred to her that the signal was being generated inside the machine. The reader may laugh at the woman, but if you had never seen or played a video game you would think the same.

I found that particular story put the significance of early video games into perspective and it’d be great to be able to cite it.

It was from the video interview of Nolan Bushnell that was bouncing around the Internet. He was on a show that was about the history of gaming. Miyamoto was also interviewed in the show where he talked about Donkey Kong.

I did do a search for the video and didn’t see it. The problem with the Internet is that the videos may disappear, but I think in this case it got buried underneath the new Bushnell and Miyamoto interviews that have appeared over the half decade. It’s probably out there somewhere.

Bushnell specifically recalls a woman playing PONG for the first time and wondering how the signal got to the TV station and back again so fast. The idea that the signal was being generated there locally was alien to her (and Bushnell starts laughing).

PONG was not just a video game. PONG was the first time the public interacted with computers. Video games are the computer revolution.