ROMchip Presents: Raiford Guins on King Pong: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions

**Tickets serve as calendar reminders for the event; they are not required to attend. Head to https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal to join the talk on Feb 6**

Join us Friday, February 6, as ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories hosts scholar Raiford Guins for a talk about his most recent book King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions. The event will be at 2PM ET on the ROMchip Twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal. Sign up for our newsletter to never miss an update.

This event supports ROMchip's annual fundraising season. Explore our full line-up of speakers and streamers, including our 12-hour Twitch fundraiser on Saturday, February 21st, at https://donate.romchip.org/.

About the Book
PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.

The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever.

About the Speaker
Raiford Guins is a Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. His scholarship is devoted to the critical study of technological artifacts and their complex material lives. This commitment is expressed through unique areas of research such as life cycles of artifacts, preservation and conservation of games, the museology of games, and design histories of games. Guins is the author of five books including the forthcoming, King Pong: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions (MIT Press, 2026). He has also co-edited five collections including, Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023). Guins co-founded the field defining journal, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, and co-edits MIT Press's Game Histories book series.

Upcoming Events this Fundraiser Season!
February 13 @ 2PM ET: ROMchip Presents: Carlin Wing on Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play

February 21 @ 11AM-11PM ET: ROMchip Twitch Fundraiser Stream, ft Marie Foulston, Jason Scott, Naomi Clark, Chad Toprak, Kendra Albert and more! Come through for 12 hours of games, prizes, and historical hijinks. Learn more HERE.

About ROMchip
ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is a free, online scholarly journal for game history. ROMchip develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced. ROMchip is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).