My First Video Game: Pong, Christmas 1975

My first video game was Atari’s Pong. I received it for Christmas in 1975, when I was twelve years old. It was the first generation of home video games, and I’ve been playing video games ever since.

Back in those days, we didn’t have smartphones, internet gaming, or sophisticated graphics. As young teenagers, we would meet classmates at department stores like Sears and Roebuck, where some of the latest electronic games were sold.

A couple of years later, I had one of those early electronic football games. I remember playing against my classmates, and I was pretty good at it. In fact, I was the best!

By 1977, handheld electronic games were becoming popular, and home video gaming was developing into an entirely new entertainment industry.

I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1981. By then, I had already experienced six years of the earliest home video games.

Today, video gaming is a multibillion-dollar global industry with technology we couldn’t have imagined in 1975.