After battling imps and cacodemons on the surface of Mars and confronting gangsters on the streets of Liberty City, David Kushner is ready for his greatest challenge… two paddles and a small dot that represents the ball.
That’s right, the latest book from the author of Masters of Doom and Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto is all about Pong.
Unlike those earlier stories, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game is presented as a graphic history as it details the epic feud that flared up between Ralph Baer, the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey and the “Father of the Video Game,” and Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari:
A deep, nostalgic dive into the advent of gaming, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master returns us to the emerging culture of Silicon Valley. At the center of this graphic history, dynamically drawn in colors inspired by old computer screens, is the epic feud that raged between Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and inventor Ralph Baer for the title of “Father of the Video Game.”
While Baer, a Jewish immigrant whose family fled Germany for America, developed the first TV video-game console and ping-pong game in the 1960s, Bushnell, a self-taught whiz kid from Utah, put out Atari’s pioneering table-tennis arcade game, Pong, in 1972. Thus, a prolonged battle began over who truly spearheaded the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, and around it a sweeping narrative about invention, inspiration, and the seeds of digital revolution.
Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game was illustrated by Kushner’s constant collaborator, Koren Shadmi, and the graphic history was published by Bold Type Books. It’s now available in stores as a paperback or an ebook.