10 Video Game Crazes You Forgot Were A Thing
3. Pong Variants
The first video game created for home consoles to achieve widespread success, Pong, released in 1972 over a decade before Super Mario Bros was even a thing, was a massive commercial hit and put Atari on the map as the first video game colossus. Though the gameplay was as simplistic as you'd as expect from the early '70s, Pong was, and still is, genuinely fun to play.
Proving that developers repurposing popular ideas to cash in on a current craze is as old as console gaming itself, a wealth of Pong-clones hit the market in the years that followed both in arcades, and on home consoles.
The most ironic part about all of this is that Pong wasn't even an original idea, with Atari being taken to court due to the game's similarities to Table Tennis, a game released on the Magnavox Odyssey that predated Pong, but somehow escaping with only having to pay a one-time licensing fee.