Atari SuperPong The Atari SuperPong game console was released in 1976, and was the follow-on to Atari's popular PONG game, which was released to arcades in 1972. It used the same casing as the home PONG console, but added three additional variants on the game and a slide selector switch on the front of the unit to choose which of the four games to play. It had the same dual paddles mounted on the top of the unit, with a speaker between them. It plugged directly to a television set and used batteries in the bottom of the unit to power the game, though there is also an A/C adapter jack mounted in the rear of the unit. If game play became erratic, it was generally an indication that the batteries were going dead.

The SuperPong console in my collection is one that my family has owned since it was new. As a kid, I spent many an hour playing it's four games with my brother and sister, listening to it's 'blip' sound as we hit the 'puck' back and forth. A favorite thing was to try and line up the paddles in such a way that the 'puck' was endlessly batted back and forth between them. This was harder to do than it sounds! I recently found out that it is still capable of holding the attention of young children more than 20 years later!

Atari was bought out by disk drive manufacturer JTS Corp. on July 30, 1996, and production of it's computers stopped. On February 23, 1998 JTS sold it's Atari division to Hasbro Inc. for $5 million, forming Atari Interactive Inc. Atari Games, the coin-op division which remained seperate from Atari Corp. and was later known as Time-Warner Interactive, became a subsidiary of Midway Games Inc.

Jeff's Computer Haven Home Page