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Writer's pictureThomas Bennedetto

November 29th

Today is the birthday of a video game a lot of people wrongly believe to be the first, Pong.

Now Pong wasn't the first video game, it wasn't even original, being a dedicated arcade cabinet bootleg of the Magnavox Odyssey game Table Tennis.It was a blatant enough of a ripoff that Magnavox got a million dollars from Atari in an out of court settlement after threatening a lawsuit. The actual first true video game comes down to an argument about semantics, but there's a number of early computer systems from the 1940s and 1950's deserving of the title. And if you want the first commercial home video game system, the aforementioned Magnavox Odyssey does hold that title.


And while I'm talking about video game timeline misconceptions, Adventure on the Atari wasn't the first video game with an easter egg, it was just the first well known video game with a well known easter egg. There's dozens of known easter eggs that predate Adventure's 1980 release, but the oldest verified easter egg as of writing is considered to be in Moonlander for the DEC GT40 from 1973. This early graphical game had an egg where you could find a crude digital illusion of a McDonald's. If you landed correctly your astronaut would order some to go, or you could crash into the only McDonald's on the moon and get called a Clod by the game.


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