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Professor Raiford Guins’ book “King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions” explores the rise of the video game Pong and the business strategies behind its success at Atari.

Guins has written 10 published books before “King PONG,” including edited collections and monographs. He said it typically takes him about six years to finish one book, but this one took him only about nine months to research and write. He said researching and writing for this book was a quicker process than usual because he had built a foundation about his knowledge of Atari through his two previous books, and he knew the story he wanted to tell.

Guins wanted to show that Pong was not only a major technological innovation in the game industry, but that Atari’s strategy and savviness in marketing the game within a new product category were equally as innovative. To make his argument, Guins read a variety of books on business strategy and drew on much of his previous research and knowledge of Atari’s origin story.

Guins has taught the Advertising and Consumer Culture course at IU for several years, which he said informed his research when examining the advertising around Pong. He said he had never written a business history before, and the reading surrounding the course was instrumental for his writing process.

“This was new, and I think I got really excited about branding and the course I teach,” he said. “I got really interested in looking at the history of advertising, trying to understand product development, and all the reading I do around that course really drove me into this project.”

Guins interviewed several valuable sources for the project, including Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and Pong developer Allan Alcorn, both of whom he had previously interviewed for other projects. Their input provided him with new angles to explore within the book.

A main focus Guins had when writing “King PONG” was to explore the widespread prominence of Pong and to make its story accessible to a wide variety of readers, not just academics. In contrast to his denser works, he wanted this book to feel digestible to readers in casual settings.

“There’s so much visibility around this game, even today,” he said. “I felt the story exceeds academic circles, and I wanted to adopt a tone and a way of telling a story that would appeal widely to non-specialist audiences.”

Since the book’s release, Guins said he has received positive feedback from academic peers, colleagues, and strangers. Recently, he received feedback from a reader who said he read the entire book on an airplane, which he felt validated his efforts to make the story accessible.

Guins is currently working on several projects, including a series of works on Substack that explore the video game museums he has visited.

The book was published Feb. 10 by The MIT Press.