This is an oversimplified origin story. Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's Odyssey before he assigned Al Acorn with making a ping pong game. Bushnell claims he already h

This is an oversimplified origin story. Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's Odyssey before he assigned Al Acorn with making a ping pong game. Bushnell claims he already had the idea of a tennis game before seeing the Odyssey and that is totally possible but Bushnell was clearly trying to outdo a competitor when he asked Acorn to create Pong and not simply some innocent exercise that turned into a huge success. Bushnell admits this in a 2006 email to Baer: "Your game clearly was on my mind when I gave Alcorn the project. I felt the Odyssey was not very fun and we could make it better. As you remember my tennis game postulated a bouncing ball more like Higgenbothems though I did not know about him at the time." https://thegamescholar.com/2022/06/26/the-final-correspondences-with-nolan-part-1-ralph-baer/ https://thegamescholar.com/2022/06/26/the-final-corresponden...