Atari's 1972 arcade game Pong allows two players to compete in a standard match.
Pong presents a simple table-tennis simulation: each player controls a vertical paddle and tries to return a moving square ball past the opponent. The original cabinet was designed for two people standing on opposite sides of the screen, with one rotary knob controlling each paddle.
Pong was created by Atari and became one of the first commercially successful arcade video games. Its two-player design made competition immediate and easy to understand, helping attract people who had never played a video game before. The game is sometimes described as a tennis game, but it does not reproduce the full rules or court of tennis; its inspiration was table tennis. Home versions later offered computer opponents, but the classic arcade cabinet centers on a head-to-head match between two human players.