The history of paddle games is a long one, at least in terms of video games. It started with the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video
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gaming system, which was released back in 1972. With it, came a table tennis game. This was the world's first paddle game. That same year Atari released the arcade version of PONG (the first arcade version was all in caps...so you should yell it in your mind as your read it!). The Odyssey
sunk in the market due to marketing issues but PONG was a hit with
friends challenging each other to hours of ping-pong fun. And with PONG began the paddle game phenomenon. A couple of years later, Atari released a different type of paddle game called Breakout. In Breakout, instead of having an opponent hitting the ball back to you, you had to clear blocks from the screen by hitting them with the ball. Both Pong and Breakout had huge followings, and have been copied time and time again over the years for almost every major console, and hand-held game platform. Mindjolt feature all kinds of paddle
games on Facebook. Some copy Pong, others Breakout, some are fun, some are not.
