Today in 1972, the newly-founded game developer Atari released their first video game, Pong. With its simple yet addictive gameplay, it became the first commercially successful video game. Along with the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, Pong is often cited as the catalyst for the emergence of the video game industry.
Today in 1889, Nintendo was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi as a Hanafuda-style playing card company. Beginning in 1963, Nintendo began experimenting with several other business ventures, including a taxi service, instant rice distributor, and a foray into "love hotels." All of these ventures eventually failed and it wasn't until the mid 1970's that Nintendo started to find what would become it's most lucrative endeavor: video games. From the Game & Watch system in 1980 all the way to today's Switch, Nintendo has continually shown they are ahead of the gaming curve. Nintendo's Pokémon series is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world (not just in…