How Pong and the Odyssey Console Launched the Videogame Era

Although there are many inventions that could reasonably make some claim to being the first videogame, there’s no question what the first big hit game was: Atari’s Pong. The iconic table-tennis game became an overnight sensation after a prototype first appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972, and in no time at all videogames went from almost zero to a multi-billion dollar global industry.

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You Can Now Play Oregon Trail Online for Free

The Internet Archive, which is best known for running the world wide web’s time capsule, The Wayback Machine, has put the game that traumatized countless children of the ’80s and ’90s online. That means future generations can feel the oppressive horror of attempting to fight their way across the Oregon Trail on a steady diet of squirrel meat with only an axe, some rope and frequent bouts of dysentery, pausing in their manifest destiny only long enough to etch grandma’s epitaph on a makeshift tombstone on the side of trail.

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Artists Put Rooms on City Streets and Invite You to Play House

Bettman and Eker dismantled their first set—the living room where two children sit on a couch with a typewriter and a goldfish bowl—shortly after the shoot, but then decided to leave them up with a sign that invited pedestrians to snap and post a photo with #setinthestreet.

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