You're listening to 20,000 Hertz,

the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

This is the story about how a primitive sound technology started a cultural phenomenon.

Think about summers when you were a kid.

The tick of a sprinkler,

the creak of a swing, children

laughing, the vaguely maudlin music of an ice cream truck. Or, if you're like me, and a child

of the 80s, maybe you spent your summers indoors, fighting aliens, chasing ghosts, or stomping turtles.

In the 1950s, computer programmers developed the first video games. They lived just in the labs,

and not a lot of people had access to them. They were also incredibly simple, like almost

not even related to the video games we have today's simple.

The earliest computer games were a simulation of chess, tick-tac-toe, and table tennis.

And that table tennis game eventually led its way to Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

It was developed by Atari and released into arcades in the early 70s.

Shortly after, it made its way into the home. It had incredibly simple graphics and sound effects.

These sounds were called 8-bit,

named for the 8-bit processors used in early video game systems.

These systems produce the sound with computer chips.

And one of the reasons 8-bit sounds are so distinctive is because they were limited to the sounds that were built into that chip.

Composers and programmers only had that small palette to work with.

And from such simple technology, some of the most iconic generation-defining

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