“An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”

I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently, a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey, released earlier in 1972: This is a 34-minute video by FrameRater walking through the console and all of its strange games: I found it a very interesting case study. The Odyssey had a version of Pong before Pong – but it also had many other games that could be charitably described as “Pongs in disguise.” It all feels very, very convoluted for such a simple concept. You have to insert the right cart, tape an overlay to your TV of a certain size (the roll of tape is included), and understand the complex and poorly written instructions in the manual. Then, during the play time, you’d have to master the very strange controllers (left dial – horizontal movement, right dial – vertical movement), often do a lot of work that the console didn’t do (keeping track of collisions, or even…