Is it just coincidence that one of the first true gaming sensations was the Table Tennis- based PONG? William Higinbotham (pictured) , a staffer at the Brookhaven National  Laboratory was the pioneer.  But he made the mistake of originally naming the game “Tennis for Two.” Tennis aficionados, a stiff, plodding bunch at the best of times, would not come near the game.  Ralph Baer at Magnavox tweaked the platform to create “TV Ping Pong,” a masterwork that perfectly displayed the power of early computers: simple mathematical formulations leading to endless possibility and variation.  Enter Nolan Bushnell, founder of a young company.  Atari.  Their first game, Computer Space, had been a bust.  Bushnell wanted a bar game that was accessible and approachable.  He had seen Baer’s program and marveled at its simplicity, truncating the name and launching PONG.  The popularity of its game spawned a thousand imitators, including Barrel Pong and Puppy Pong.  As well as launching Bushnell’s golden rule: “The best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”