SV Staff

Pong, one of the earliest arcade video games, had an inauspicious start 45 years ago this week when gaming pioneer/Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and game designer Allan Alcorn wheeled a prototype of their first coin-operated game machine into Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California to see how the bar’s patrons would react. It was an instant hit.

Back in April of 1973 when Martin Cooper made the first public call on a handheld cellular phone while walking down a New York City street, few could have imagined that the Motorola DynaTAC “brick” phone (shown here in prototype form) would evolve into a super-slim, do-everything pocket computer—a.k.a. the smartphone we take for granted today.

Forty years ago today Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a tale about UFOs and the ultimate alien encounter, opened in a limited number of theaters before hitting “theaters everywhere” in December 1977.

Whether or not you’re old to enough to have lived through the Sixties and Seventies, here’s a momentous occasion in the history of electronic entertainment that takes us back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president: Pac-Man makes its debut in U.S. arcades and goes on to become not only the first mega-hit video game in history but an icon in pop culture.