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Grand Theft Auto and the biggest moments in video game history

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) made headlines as the biggest video game release of all time, selling more than $1 billion worth of copies in three days. But GTA V didn't get to this landmark moment by itself. Find out more moments that changed the course of video game history in this list, from most recent to the beginning of (video game) time.

12. Pong: the first video game hit

Drexel
Frank Lee, a professor at Drexel’s College of Engineering, uses the side of the Cira Centre in Philadelphia for a giant game of Pong.

Visitors to Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1972 would have been greeted with the usual bar arcade with one notable exception: a tabletop video game called Pong. Originally invented as a training exercise by Al Alcorn for Atari, patrons could sip their drinks while moving a white rectangle back and forth to repel a white ball to their opponent, like ping-pong but digital. This wasn’t the first video game ever created, but this was the first hit: The game quickly broke down due to being overstuffed with quarters.

From there, it’s history. Atari began marketing it to a wider audience, and by 1975, more than 150,000 units of the tabletop version of Pong were sold from the Sears Christmas catalog. This created a rush of competitors, including Nintendo and Telstar, which jump-started the video game business and created an industry that would thrive for decades to come.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

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