50 years have passed since the famous ‘Pong’, and Alicante is waiting to receive the original machine from 1972

Simple was the design of the well-known Pong: two bars acting as rackets and a point, a ball. As simple is, precisely, the name they gave it: it was the sound of hitting the ball with the racket and so the legend began. In 1972, this arcade video game was such a commercial success that it surprised its creator. “I was going to repair a breakdown, but it was really the coin box that was full,” says Juan Carlos Pastor, a technician at the Ibi Arcade and Vintage Video Game Museum.

Pong thus celebrates 50 years of legend, now a collector’s item coveted by museums like this one. “We have two post pong licenses, and we have been behind an original machine that is in the US for years. They are repairing it and it will arrive this year”, Joaquín Litarte, manager of the Arcade Video Game Museum and Vintage Ibi, explained to laSexta. It will be together with other mythical games such as Tetris or Street Fighter.

In this museum they do training, they keep games unknown to many. And for the nostalgic, it is an arcade where you can play like in the old days: “It was the social network we had then.”, has secured a visitor. “This is like going back 30 years. They come and ask if they have to pay five dollars. But I tell them that it is no longer necessary,” Liarte highlighted. The ‘boom’ of these machines lasted two decades, until the first consoles arrived in the 90s and with them, the fall.

Vicente Zaragoza, president of the Association of Pinball Arcade Machines and Collectors, is from the few technicians who continue to repair them: “In the 1980s there would be a thousand salons in the province of Valencia. Currently there will be five salons left”. He and Julio Liarte have been buying and collecting machines for years, especially Pinballs. They have 120, many ‘made in Spain’. Because Spain was the second largest manufacturer of Pinballs.

“Franco did not allow machines to be imported from other countries until the end of the 70s,” Julio Vicario, Spanish Pinball champion, explained to laSexta. 13 years ago, they founded the first association of Pinball arcade machines and collectors in Spain. “The important thing is to preserve them so that this can continue for many years,” Vicario pointed out. And it is that they believe that the old has not lost the game.