Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson.

This week, a brief history of games, including the creation of the controversial video game Grand Theft

Auto.

It's not an awful lot of fun playing as the good guy. Eventually the consensus

that came out of the design meeting was, well, I don't want to let you play the bad guy.

Also, the Soviet origins of the addictive game Tetris.

As soon as I have some computer in my possession,

I start to entertain myself, write my own puzzles and games as well and that was just one of them.

Plus the invention of LEGO and the true story of Monopoly.

Well I discovered that actually Monopoly had been invented by a lady to teach people about

the evil of land ownership.

It's all fun fun history this week.

And we start in 1972 with a game which helped to launch what is today a multi-billion

dollar video game industry. This first iteration was called Pong and was to the modern mind a very basic version of a digital tennis game.

As a stranger side my first encounter with any computer game anywhere was playing Pong at Wimbledon

while competing in a tennis tournament. Of course not that tennis tournament obviously.

Pong was made by Atari and initially it was only played on big machines in video arcades or in my case the rest area of the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

But soon that changed.

Louise Hidalgo has spoken to Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, which started in a garage

in California.

In fact it was meant as a training project for one of my engineers and we kept fiddling with it and

doing slight improvements and one of the improvements all of a sudden

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