Pong

This is the story of the one.

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and this animal

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, feed a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik, and I'll be booping the beach tonight, but I'll need some sprightly fellows to fill the screen.

First up, podcasting's Waluigi and Wario, Cecil, and Tom.

Hey, as long as they get to be the tall, thin one, I support this analogy.

Nope, sorry, Tom.

Like us, they are both down with the thickness.

And also joining us tonight, two guys whose jokes would make Conker blush, Noah and he.

All right, if squirrels don't want to get murdered by liberal elites, fucking get good.

Oh, God.

Now we're, we're all sad again, Heath.

We just got

recovered.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons.

Patrons, it's episode 400, and I've spent every free waking moment of my life playing Deep Rock Survivor to celebrate.

I'm probably playing it while you listen to this episode.

Just statistically speaking, that's probably what's happening right now.

But I I wouldn't be able to play that, nay, any video game without your money.

So, if you think about it, you already got me a Christmas present.

It's Deep Rock Survivor, and I'm really enjoying it.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event we would be talking about today.

Today, we'll be talking about Pong.

And Noah, correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't you already told us the story of Pong?

Okay, so I yeah, yes, technically.

We talked about this back on episode 188 when we talked about the Atari video game burial and a little bit on episode 253 about Coleco.

And it was sort of mentioned tangentially on episode 347 about the Large Hadron Collider, but I've never really gotten into the details.

And it's actually a pretty cool song.

It sounds like the forest gump of history.

Yeah.

Well, it always comes back, right?

It always bounces back.

Well, then here on episode 400, why don't you tell us the story of Pong for the fourth time?

All right.

So one of the weird things about video game history is that it seems like no matter how far back you go,

video games already kind of existed.

Yeah, actually, the Etruscans made video games so video game-y, they haven't been recreated to this day.

A lot of people don't know that because it's not true.

But thank you anyway.

So, but like in the 20 years or so that I've been interested in this subject, the title of earliest video game has changed several times.

And there's actually considerable disagreement about which video game deserves that title amongst video game historians.

The correct answer is Space War, and people who disagree with me are wrong for various reasons, but a lot of people disagree with me.

including people who know a lot more about the subject than me.

That last couple of sentences feels like a comment section becoming self-aware, man.

Sort of what it is, Cecil.

Sort of what it is.

I'm pretty sure it's Mario 3.

I hate to correct you.

Yeah.

Star Fox.

So when I first started reading about video game history, it wasn't uncommon to find sources that claimed the first video game ever made was Pong.

Now, to be clear, nobody who is remotely informed on the subject thinks that now.

And if you do, you're a piece of shit.

Thank you.

I wasn't going to say it, Eli, but I'm not going to deny it.

Now, there are a couple other contenders other than Space War, but Pong isn't one of them.

It wasn't even the first tennis-based video game.

Kill yourself.

It wasn't even

the first video game made by the guy who made Pong.

But it was the first successful video game.

It was the game that kicked off the video game revolution and turned it into the kind of thing a person could later be interested in the history of, right?

So one of the reasons why the question of primacy is so hotly debated is that the concept of video games seems to predate their existence in a sense.

Like, long before the technology allowed for it, we already kind of had an idea in our heads of what video games could be at like a species-wide level.

So, pretty much the instant each piece of the video game technological puzzle came into existence, somebody would make the closest thing to a video game that you could then make, right?

So, the question of the first video game, it's not a question of did this come out before that, it's a question of what counts as a video game.

Interesting.

I'd say the first game was when somebody wrote boobs or asshole by typing numbers on a calculator and turning it upside down.

Sure, okay.

All right, I believe that would have been 1966.

I think there were games before that.

I think somebody wrote boobs on an abacus even before that.

It was just two on the top row.

You could write testicles the same.

So, one of the earliest players in the the world of proto-video games was a guy named Ralph H.

Bayer.

He was born in Germany in 1922, which is a terrible time to be born in Germany, especially if you're being born into a Jewish family, which Bayer was.

Luckily for him, though, and the entire future of video games, his family managed to flee the country about two months before Kristallnacht.

They came to New York, citing the well-known superiority of the pizza there and became American citizens.

Yeah, and like video games, there are a lot of people that disagree with Noah about pizza, and also those people people know a lot more about the subject than him.

I gave 10 years of my life to pizza, Cecil.

No one knows more about pizza.

Cecil Baer would have gone to Michigan, but he was trying to escape the Nazis, not kidnap the governor.

So

for example.

So now ultimately, Ralph gets drafted.

He works in intelligence, and then he uses the GI Bill to get a degree as a TV technician.

And on his first job working for a TV company, he's looking at this gridded test pattern on a cathode ray tube screen.

And he thinks to himself, man, it'd be really cool if you could like play chess on this thing.

That was 1951.

He's way ahead of the game there, literally.

But that idea germinated for about a decade and a half.

And in 1966, he started the effort that would ultimately lead to one of the contenders for the first commercial video game, a thing called the Magnavox Odyssey.

Nice.

Magnavox Odyssey.

I heard those are really hard to find, right?

Only a true connoisseur who who knows about video games and pizza would have one of those things, right?

It takes a large penis to own a Magnavox odyssey.

Yes,

I got Noah Dusty thing a couple years ago.

He didn't like it.

Imagine looking at an enormous gee oldie television and thinking, wow, this will save me from having to have both a 300-pound television and a chess set.

Yeah,

right.

No, so Bear started working on this thing in 1966, and Magnavox wouldn't get involved for years.

So at first, it was known as Bears Brown Box.

Not great.

And it's no, no, but back then they did.

It's going to get worse, man.

It's going to get way worse.

So it is impossible to overstate how basic the first couple of iterations of this thing were.

Like, here's one of the games.

The screen is half red and it's half blue.

And the red is slowly taking over the blue half.

But you, with your single button, if you press your single button fast enough, the blue will take over the red.

When I say that, people are like, blah, blah, blah.

That's voter fraud.

You're not supposed to vote that time.

Yes, you are.

So that's the game, though.

You could play a rousing game of make the screen blue.

I feel like.

This game walked so Power Washer Simulator could run.

I was going to say, my wife has spent more hours in Stardew Valley than most actual farmers spend on their farm.

Let's not knock a business opportunity here, man.

They win somewhere.

So now the company though that Bear's working for at this time, Sanders Associates, they recognize that even if you can't sell kids a fucking Make the Screen Blue 5,000, the work Bear is doing is invaluable as long as he's gobbling up patents along the way.

So the work on Bears Brown Box was less about creating the first video game and more about making sure that when the first video game was created, they would have to license patents from Sanders Associates.

Pin in that, because that's going to get important before this is over.

Meanwhile, there's another dude kind of working on a parallel track named Nolan Bushnell.

Spoiler alert, he's going to make a lot more money and get a lot more famous.

Also, he'll be directly involved with the invention of Pong.

So yes, we're on the right track.

We're eventually going to get to the subject that is the title.

So Bushnell, he was born in 1943 in Utah.

So yes, Mormon.

Yeah, right.

He went to Utah State University where he bounced back and forth between business and engineering in terms of his focus.

Get it bounced because point.

Ultimately, though, he would settle on electrical engineering and transfer to the University of Utah College of Engineering.

And crucially, while he was in school, in between semesters, he would earn money as a carnival barker at a boardwalk.

Step right up and touch the...

hair of a genuine Lamanite at the Mormon Carnival.

Charles without temple garments right through this dog.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Stop.

It's like a vehicle.

so while he's through these amazing glasses

right

called lehonai

so while he's at university he comes across this amazing thing called a video game the aforementioned first video game which i declare for reasons that are as arbitrary as they are adamant space war now space war was a video game by any reasonable definition, but it wasn't something that was commercially available, right?

So you could only play this thing on digital equipment systems PDP-1 microcomputer.

And this thing was only micro compared to the fucking room-sized computers they had in like 1959.

The only place that you were likely to find a PDP-1 at the time was on a college campus.

And the only people likely to find one were electronics nerds like Nolan Bushnell.

So right away, the carnival barker in Bushnell, he sees this game and he sees huge financial potential.

He can just imagine people dropping quarters into this thing on the boardwalk and him fucking filling a pool with those quarters later and swimming around like discount Scrooge McDuck style.

So after he graduated, he set about trying to make that happen.

First, he goes to a company called Nutting Associates.

Nutting Associates, for when friends with benefits is too formal.

Right.

Nice.

So he gets himself hired.

Bill Nutting, he's had some success with a coin-operated trivia machine called Computer quiz and and he was looking for the next big thing and bushnell convinced him that that next big thing was going to be a coin operated version of space okay i'm sorry he took button mashing bears brown box to nutting industries and you want me to believe this story is about video games this is okay it's about it's about whatever you want

Once I give you this story, it's yours to do with as you choose.

So now the only problem, of course, is that Nolan Bushnell has no fucking clue how he's going to actually make this work.

Right.

Like you can't, you could just get a PDP-1 and put a coin slot on it, but those things are way too expensive for that to be a profitable idea.

Now, they considered running like eight or 10 terminals off the same PDP-1, and the machine actually could theoretically do that, but it would still be a money loser unless you could find a place where like eight or 10 people at a time wanted to play Space War for 15 hours a day.

Yeah, that's tough.

Women weren't lying about gaming journalism yet.

So like that sad angry group of dude bros is really hard to find it's a cap 22 because you have to like invent gaming first right yeah

now so so bushnell uh he gets with this other engineer named ted dabney and they set about trying to find a way to bring bushnell's vision to life now dabney gets frustrated after a while he says look man we've tried everything there's no way to move an object around on a tv screen but bushnell points out that you actually do that all the time As old folks like myself might remember, old cathode ray tube televisions had a thing called horizontal hold that allows you to swing the picture left and right to center it.

Well, apparently, that was the key insight using that same mechanism.

That's what was going to allow them to make this thing work.

And I have to emphasize this so you have an idea how impressed to be.

They did this without a computer.

This is a game where you fly a spaceship around trying to shoot another spaceship on a TV screen and they did it mechanically.

So, tennis in the physical world with Narya Computron in sight?

What will they think of next?

Okay, Tom.

Noah doesn't take away the joy of when the guys in your essays freeze to death.

Please let him have this.

Thank you, Eli.

That dude is cold.

So they worked night and day on this thing.

And lest that seem selfless, I want to point out that they did it in Ted Dabney's daughter's bedroom.

When it came time for somebody to sacrifice their living space for this project, they chose Ted's kid.

But they did manage to make it work.

Or Or was she the first kid to get to play PlayStation and bad?

She was.

She was.

So they bring it to Bill Nutting and he green lights it.

And so they've got to come up with a name.

Now, the logical thing would be to call it Space War.

Nobody had any kind of copyright on the existing game and what few people knew about it knew it by that name.

But this was 1971.

And there was no way in hell you were going to sell something to young people in 1971 that had the word war in the name.

So in an effort to tie his new product to the already successful computer quiz, they called it computer space.

I know people will later shit on game companies for spending too much on marketing, but maybe spend just a little on marketing.

Just a dish.

Just a little.

They should have called it Metaphor Refantasia.

Now, I wish this was a visual medium so I could show you guys what a bizarre and sexy cabinet they came up with for computer space.

Yeah, it looks like something you'd order food out of in fallout or something.

But as pretty as it was, it wasn't very successful.

The cabinet sold only about a thousand units in its first year, and that was not enough to convince nothing to pursue the video game concept any further.

Why did they make it all like expressionist?

It's fucking weird.

It was so expensive.

It was so expensive to do that.

They had to make it like a fucking surfboard company had to make those cabinets for them, especially.

I'd rub my dick on it, right?

That's a separate issue.

So Bushnell and Dabney, they decided, though, this was proof of concept.

They thought something was there.

So they left Nutting Associates and they formed their own company, which they called Syzygy, until they found out that somebody else already owned that name in California.

So they changed it to Atari.

Somebody already owned a name assembled from randomly pulled tiles from a scrabble bag.

Fun fact, the owner of that name was actually a magician, and Syzygy was the name of his mentalism magazine.

So while I rub my nerddom in my cohort's faces, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing.

Yeah, it was a roughing company.

No,

I linked a thing on Eli's lying to you again, everybody.

Eli's lying to you again.

Okay, he does it every episode.

You have to pick, you have to find the lie that Eli lies to every episode.

It's like a game we play on this show.

Yeah.

It's a game.

Eli, what does Syzygy mean?

Syzygy.

I left it out of the essay because I didn't talk about the third guy in the

astronomy thing, right?

It's like sun and moon distance.

It's Syzygy is when three different bodies line up together.

So, oh, it's like an Achilles.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And there were three guys in the company at first.

And then you have a nutting associate.

That makes sense.

Okay, exactly.

Thank you for coming in, Mr.

Robertson.

No problem, Charles.

I'm excited to see about these new video games you're so excited about.

I'm telling you, sir, these things are going to be the future.

This first one is called the Space Collective.

All right, then, what's it about?

Right, so the year is 2300 and a super intelligent AI has risen up against mankind.

You play a rogue AI trying to fight back for human freedom without being detected.

I see.

And how do you play it?

Well, you push this button right here.

Mm-hmm.

And

it turns the screen from red to blue.

And then that's the

AI.

Yeah, because the AI is red.

Yeah, it's got it, but...

Well, it does seem a little obtuse.

Right.

Yeah, obtuse.

Sure.

Well, how about Super Bowl?

Ah, you've got a football game.

I sure do.

All the thrills and chills of the gridiron from the comfort of your home.

All right.

Well, then, how do you play that one?

Well,

you push this button here.

I see.

Yeah, and you see this square?

Yes.

Well, that's your football guy.

I go into the

touchdown.

I'm not sure I see it.

Look, Charles, I want this to happen as much as you do, but it doesn't seem like this technology is ready.

Ah, please, Mr.

Robinson.

I got one more for you.

It's not for the kids, but it's called A Night of Pleasure.

Night of Pleasure, you say.

Yes, you see these two squares?

Yes.

They are fucking.

I'll take a thousand.

All right.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

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And we're back.

When we left off, two guys were building something in their basement in the 70s, and it wasn't a bomb.

Congratulations, everybody.

Tell us, Noah, what happened next?

So, okay, it's 1972 now, and video games are about to explode into the market.

The marketing guy quietly correcting Noah to say emerge instead of explode.

And then the nutting industry guy correcting it back.

Yeah, right?

They're right watching in the corner.

So

so far.

Why not both?

All right.

So now at this point, the video game market includes computer space, a clone of computer space called Star Trek, which does not have Gene Roddenberry's permission.

And a game called Galaxy Game, which is basically, it's the idea that Bushnell and Dabney rejected where you just run a bunch of Space War terminals off of the same computer.

But the whole time that this shit's going on with Nutting Associates and Galaxy Game and shit, Ralph Baer is quietly collecting patents and iterating his brown box until it's actually got a few genuinely fun uses.

Yeah, you could kick it back and forth like a ball.

Fun, fun games.

So, okay, so at this point, the brown box had grown into the Magnavox Odyssey, which would become the first video game console ever sold in September of 1972.

But Nolan Bushnell would get a sneak peek during a private demonstration in Burlingame, California.

And that happened in May of that year when Bushnell was still working for Bill Nutting.

Now, this matters because among the games that was on display at that time was a game that you could play on the Odyssey, where a pixelated ball bounces back and forth on a screen, and each player has a paddle they can use to hit it and maintain the volley.

Hey, what if ping-pong was a game finally not only reserved for athletes and jocks?

You hear that?

Eith Tom thinks you're an athlete.

Yeah, there you go.

Sam?

So

Bushnell and Dabney, they leave nothing.

They start Atari, and they hire a friend of Dabney's named Al Alcorn.

Hey, that dude should kill his fucking parents.

That's a great.

That's a great book.

It's a superhero.

Superhero name is a book.

I hope his middle name is Korn.

Yeah.

Alcorn, Alcorn.

I wouldn't have bothered to bully that kid in school.

He would have been like, my name's Al Alcorn.

I'll just dump my name.

And I would have been thank you.

you.

Have a nice house.

Alcorn, Alcorn, Boutros, Boutros, guys.

All right, so fucking Al Alcorn is going to make a bazillion dollars before this is over.

Damn it.

He deserves it, all this shit that you guys are giving him.

Carmically.

So speaking.

So they tell Alcorn when they hire him that they want him to like, they want him to help work on a driving simulator that they're going to make.

And they even, they tell him they've got a contract with a big company that wants to buy a bunch of these driving simulators.

This is not true, but it's a good carrot to dangle in front of a new hire who's unsure about committing his future to this fledgling company that, at least to this point, hasn't actually made anything yet.

Alcorn's watching all these pixelated things collide and he's like, am I making a Caitlin Jenner driving game?

What's going on here?

So Bushnell tells Alcorn that as a test before he can work on the driving simulator, he wants him to make a game where, I don't know, maybe a pixelated ball bounces back and forth on the screen and each player has a paddle that they can hit it with to maintain the volley.

Now, Bushnell would tell you that seeing the very Pong-like game that Bayer had created had nothing to do with his inspiration, which apparently came right around the same time for other reasons.

I feel like he's lying.

Right?

Yeah, well, so, but

ultimately, so Bushnell decided that the reason the computer space had failed was that it was too damn complicated for the average person.

So he was going for a simpler concept that would strip the new technology down to its most basic.

And this paddle game that he saw/slash had a spontaneous idea for was intuitive in a way that Space War would would never be.

So, okay, so Alcorn makes this thing that Bushnell describes to him, but he notices a problem with it that Ralph, maybe the kids want to make the screen blue bay or seems to have missed.

The game was boring, right?

This is the dirty little secret that often gets left out of this story.

I own a Magnavox Odyssey, and on the rare occasions when I've been able to coax the fucker to life, I've played the pre-Pong version of Pong, and it kind of sucks.

The ball is too predictable, and the paddles are too small.

So it's both too easy and too hard somehow.

Now, they did recognize.

Do you have a Magnavox knob?

I believe that's a very large penis.

Get the fuck out of here.

Dusty other thing, too.

I forgot.

So

they did recognize the problem.

They added an English knob that would curve the ball a bit, but that hardly saved the game.

It just made it more frustrating to lose at.

Okay, so this is like primitive digital air hockey.

Yes.

Like the game that seems like it's going to be fun, but 15 minutes later, you've listed your table on Marketplace as free.

You must pick up.

Oh, I would so pick up your air hockey table, dude.

I love air hockey.

So I have nowhere to put it, but I'd put it in the backyard if I had to.

Always free on Marketplace.

So now what Alcorn did, though, when he realized the game was too boring, he started changing shit around.

And what he came up with was ingenious.

So he made the paddles out of little segments.

such that when the ball hit him, it would bounce back at a different angle based on where on the paddle it hit.

He also also added a mechanic where the ball would get faster as you rallied longer, which was an ideal addition for a coin-operated game.

His was also more sophisticated than Bear's game because it was not intended for home use, right?

You didn't have to keep the cost down to where everybody could buy one for his living room.

So, unlike the Odyssey version, Pong was able to keep score, and it also had the iconic Pong sound effects where Bayer's game was silent.

Yeah, and little did they know, Gen X wouldn't be able to come without those sounds.

This is not until decades later, ahead of their time.

So, okay, so the Magnavox Odyssey hits the market in September of 1972,

and it doesn't do very well.

Bear would spend the rest of his life complaining that they marketed it wrong, and the consumers were led to believe it would only work on Magnavox TVs.

But anybody who has seen the utter cacophony of extra cards and tokens and play money and screen clings and shit that come with the Odyssey suspects that there may have been more wrong with this consumer product than just the marketing.

Just package it in this old monopoly box.

Problem solved.

Can I nutting this thing or not?

I'm

hey, once you buy it, they can't stop you.

You're like, so meanwhile,

Bushnell and Dabney.

It is important to buy it first, though.

It's awkward in the store.

It is, yeah.

You sound like the security guard at Target.

Can I tell you that, Tom?

But you're less screaming.

Yeah.

So, meanwhile, Bushnell and Davne, they see this thing that Alcorn has made and they're like, holy fuck, this is way better than a driving simulator.

And they rush it into production.

It would debut in November of 1972, about two months after the Odyssey.

And hey, it had no marketing issues whatsoever.

Pretty much immediately, it just blew the fuck up.

Yeah, how bad was the proposed driving simulator, though, that this was way better?

Right.

Well, I think a lot of it was that this was like actually doable and maybe the other one wasn't.

So it was better in the sense that it could exist.

Yeah.

It existed in the universe of things.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like that Tesla show.

Right, yeah.

Now,

I've actually told the story of Pong's debut on a previous episode, but the story is too iconic not to repeat it a little bit here.

So

they put their prototype in a nearby bar to see how it works.

Within a few hours, the bar calls and they say, hey, it's not working.

So Al Alcorn rushes over to fix it.

He gets there.

He realizes that the problem is that there's too much fucking money in it, and you couldn't shove another quarter in it to get it to work again.

Guys, stop blowing on the quarter through your shirt.

That's not any rest of the thing.

No, now you're jamming two quarters at the same time to push it.

Don't do that.

So now, there are some reason to doubt the veracity of this story, but suffice to say, Pong was a huge hit everywhere it went.

Okay, if that story is true, that does not say much for the bar owner's problem-solving skills.

Like,

maybe we're bottled drinks and don't think too much about what's growing in that guy's tapline.

Oh, I know, right?

Probably quarters.

Yeah, right.

So needless to say, Bear's a little pissed about Bushnell's success with his idea.

And it gets even worse in 1974 when Atari decides to make a home version of Pong to directly compete with the project that Bear has devoted almost a decade of his life to at this point.

So in 1974, Bear and Magnavox sue Atari, along with a handful of other companies, because at this point, everybody's making a clone of Pong.

Well, ours is actually called Ping, and we were obviously first.

I don't know if anybody tried that one.

Now, at first, Bushnell pretends that he'd never seen the Odyssey, but Bear brought receipts in the form of a guest book that Bushnell had to sign on his way into the hotel room where they were demonstrating the thing.

Now, to be honest, the merits of the lawsuit are debatable.

Some people consider Bayer to be the father of video games.

Some people consider him to be the father of patent trolling.

Okay.

We're splitting hairs here.

Suffice to say, though, he presented a good enough case for Bushnell to settle the lawsuit.

Now, in Bushnell's telling of this story, it was one of those lawsuits where, like, he couldn't even afford to win it.

And if you look at the size difference between Magnavox and the Atari of 1974, that's a believable claim.

But suffice to say, he did settle the lawsuit and he agreed to license a few of Bayer's patents for the continued production of Atari games.

But that outcome wasn't enough for Bayer, who still had to watch Bushnell go on to to be the face of this burgeoning billion-dollar industry.

So he decided that turnabout being fair play and all, he was going to steal back.

See, one of Atari's early non-Pong arcade ventures was a mechanical game called Touch Me.

And now the Catholic Church is suing him for copyright infringement.

So now that game consisted of four buttons with lights over the top of them, and the lights would light up in a random order, and then your job as the player was to remember the order and push the buttons in the same order once it was done.

And the name they came up with was

Touch Me?

Really?

Yeah, it was supposed to be like Risque somehow.

I don't know.

There was another game.

Yeah, they had a game that had like boobs for joysticks at this time.

A lot of bad decisions at that moment.

Back into me and press the buttons.

Yeah, right, right.

So now that game, Touch Me, was a bit of a flop, but as I was describing,

can you imagine?

But as I was describing it you may have thought to yourself that sounds an awful lot like that classic 80s milton bradley game phenomenon simon

which is played the exact same way it's just the lights are colored and they have tones to them and that game which would go on to sell millions of units continues to sell millions of units and be beloved even to this day was invented by ralph bear

Nice.

And when he was asked if Touch Me had played any role in inspiring his creation, he made no effort to hide it.

He's like, yeah, I took their half-ass idea and I added another half of an ass to it.

His whole ass idea would go on to make him obscenely rich.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

You should know better than anyone that there's no fucking way I'm going to distill shit like this into a single sentence, Eli.

I'm sorry.

All right.

Well, before we hear the story again, are you ready for quit?

That I am.

All right.

What is a fun fact listeners should know about this essay?

A, Noah wrote this when pinched for time.

B, because it was a subject he did not have to research.

C, which means he committed all of this to memory.

D, I couldn't write 2,500 words from memory with this level of specificity on any subject at all.

E.

Noah's memory makes me think I shouldn't attempt to take the man-woman camera TV test.

So, there is so much shit I left out of this.

This could have easily been twice as long.

I smoke weed to keep it fair, Tom.

That's what I do.

Noah, I don't know my children this well.

I think horse is in there.

Okay, Noah, we learned about the Catholic Church's video game Touch Me earlier.

What was their second most famous game?

A

rock and grope, B,

altered, altered beasts.

Entitled goose game or D

pole position.

Oh my gosh.

All right.

Well, I refuse to acknowledge that D was even there.

I love all of those, dude, but entitled Goose Game is one of the 10 funniest of all time.

So I'm going with C, Entitled Goose Game.

It is definitely C.

All right, Noah.

If Paul came out today, it would be different.

A, it wouldn't work at all when it was released.

B, the ball would be DLC.

C,

it would require an online connection to play.

Or D, it would cost $80 goddamn dollars.

Secret answer: E, Nintendo would sue me for this essay.

What do you mean I gotta log into Steam?

Why does I play Pong?

I don't want to make an account for your video game company so we can stay in fucking touch.

What are we going to make?

A yearbook?

Ubisoft?

Get the fuck off my nuts.

All right, no, I got one more for you.

So, as a Mormon, Nolan Bushnell tried to make a bunch of LDS-themed games that got rejected.

I love it.

I love it.

Obviously, which was the best one?

A Missionary Control.

B,

Honkey Kong.

C,

that's fucking genius.

Honky Kong is brilliant.

That's pretty fucking good.

Chef's kiss.

Okay.

C, similar theme.

Neon white and delightsome.

Obviously.

D,

imperfect dark.

E

polygamous.

Yeah.

I still think fucking honky kong is a lot of fun.

Heath is the winner for saying honky kong.

Honky Kong.

We're going to get banned.

That is our work.

Heath wins.

Somebody won next week.

He's going to go next time.

Everybody's going to go.

Oh, I wasn't going to go to Cecil.

I think Cecil's going to go next week.

I thought for sure I was going to lose because of most of that, but let's have Cecil next week.

I think I'm going to pick everybody.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Heath, and Cecil, I'm Ela Bosnik.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, someone will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our podcasts on a Magnavox podcast player or an iPod Touch if you still got one of those.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, I like the Zoom.

And if you'd like to help keep the show going,

you can make a third episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

99-100.

Excellent.

And Charles?

Yes, sir.

When can I expect a sequel?

Same year as Silk Song, sir.

Excellent.

Can't wait.

Yes, the fuck you can.

The Man in the Arena by LifeVac is a new podcast from the founder and CEO of LifeVac, Arthur Lee.

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