Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

telly we share what we've been watching

Cladie Aide.

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of Witness History from the BBC World Service.

All this week we're taking a festive look at the history of toys and games.

We're starting right back at the beginning of the computer gaming industry, with a report

by Louise Hidalgo on the exciting world of Pong.

The year is 1972 and from a garage in California the video game that is to launch a multi

billion dollar industry is about to be unveiled to the world. In fact it was

meant as a training project for one of my engineers and we kept

fiddling with it and doing slight improvements. One of the improvements all of a sudden made the game completely fun.

And we said, gee, maybe we've got something here. The game was Pong, basically a simplified video version of table tennis.

Nolan Bushnell and his friend Ted Dabney had just set up a computer game company which they called

Atari.

Hong was a game that was sort of loosely based on tennis if you would. I mean there was

a ball that went back and forth and then there was a

paddle and it was just literally a white rectangle that when you turn the knob it would

move from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen.

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