
Elton John?
Pinball Wizard was by The Who, matey boots. Elton John just did the cover version.
(Paris, because she too is famous for goings on under the covers.)
The phrase "Once you're lucky, twice you're good" should be applied to Allan "Al" Alcorn, the engineer behind Pong, the world's first successful computer arcade game which celebrates its 40th birthday this year. It is Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, the buccaneering entrepreneur with a flashy grin, who attracts headlines for …
Bullshit. I have a board game version of Tetris I found at a yard sale for $5--it's a bit like 'Connect Four' where you put the pieces at the top and let them drop. Even plays Korobeiniki while flashing lights to let you know what piece to use next.
http://www.amazon.com/I4033-Tetris-Tower-3D/dp/B0001NDZCQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1330986076&sr=8-7
Great fun while drinking.
Pong was the first Arcade Video game, but not the first Coin Operated Video game, which was Galaxy Game (Computer Space clone) which ran on PDP-11, it easy to be successful when your competition cost over $20,000 in 1971 dollars. Galaxy Game is available for MAME as a free download, but not on MAME's web site yet. Also it the only game in MAME that has the source code available, since it the source listing is convert to make the code that runs the game.
Here is the Google code page for Galaxy Game
http://code.google.com/p/galaxygamepdp11/
Great! I'll have to remember that one.
Seriously, though, Pong was just a rip-off of Odyssey, and the article actually says that. Bushnell and Alcorn weren't visionaries just because they got in on the action a few months before everyone else who ripped it off.
I played ping-pong on Odyssey (once) in November '72, in San Francisco, and it was probably the first time I'd ever seen (or heard of) a computer. I was 13. I still remember it clearly, and it was life-changing - my first computer was in the shops less than 10 years later.