Up until that point, Pong came baked into coin-op cabinets or standalone TV console units.
Apple's Pong game came on an audiotape cassette in BASIC source form. You could play the game and modify the source if you wanted. You could even save your modified work to a cassette and give it to someone else.
That was an insanely powerful idea at that time. A TV ad like this obviously doesn't have time to explain it all, but the statement was very correct and very compelling to those that knew what it meant. Apple sold millions of units on this idea.
Writing your own video game was the hook that got me tinkering with the ][, bless it's little beige-boxed heart, and I have my whole career to thank because of it.
Still tricky for me to understand, but the generation above me almost seemed to consider “Pong” a genre(?), or a unit of gaming. Somehow more like “Make your own XBox game”. Pong was the example, but it was also the only one - so it seemed to be what the average person called a video game. The Nintendo NES was “Pong that could play other games”.
Yes, Pong was virtually a genre. Space Invaders was a year away and the second wave coin-op video game boom hadn't really taken off yet. Even the beloved Atari 2600 wasn't on the market.
Almost every game out there was some form of "block moving around the screen with player-controlled widgets hitting or missing it". The Apple ][ also came with a Breakout game, another block-on-block thing (Wozniak codesigned the Atari coin-op version, the Apple ][ was his logical next-step of turning Breakout from a fixed hardware design into a generic game-playing machine)
Take a look at the Odyssey 1 (1973) and you'll see what I'm talking about.
"After you've learned the basics of the game, you can increase the challenge of Odyssey Tennis by increasing or decreasing the speed of the tennis ball with the special speed control on the back of the master unit. And when you want to razzle-dazzle your opponent into submission, a special English control that fits inside the horizontal knob will make that tennis ball do everything but stand up and talk!" [Zany razzle-dazzle music and happy kid wearing razzle-dazzle shirt.]
That is awesome. And in fairness, it does show a clear variant, not vanilla Pong, so I'll fess up to being a bit trolly. Agree on the power of sharing tools rather than products, or products that are also tools.
Different numbers and sizes and layouts of paddles, different goal areas, different sport metaphors, ball speed angle and size, etc. But all essentially pong. Also there were a lot of breakout variants, too.
Wonder Wizard 7702, Television Sports Games: Tennis, Hockey, Handball.
In 1977, TI copied the Executive Games Television Tennis circuits and integrated them into a new chip: the SN76410N. David Winter asked Glen Dash (who designed the Television Tennis) how this came to his attention. His reply was crystal clear: "The Tennis game was absolutely same, so much that it had the same bugs as my original design". The chip added two more games and additional ball english. But 1977 was already too late for releasing a new Ball & Paddle chip except for a very successful company such as General Instruments who could afford the risk and propose new devices to existing clients. Moreover, two much more advanced microprocessor based systems appeared in 1976 and clearly indicated how the home video game would rapidly change: Fairchild's Channel-F and RCA's Studio II. For all thease reasons, the new SN76410N chip was so unsuccessfull that very few systems used it: Tele-Match 3300R, Ricochet Super Pro (model MT-4A), and Venture Electronics Video Sports VS-5.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-Kas1KuiYUo2OIMHxp1z-a8JGj...