Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell has said that the secret to making an addictive video game is creating something that’s easy to learn, but impossible to master. That might explain how a concept as simple as “Pong” (announced by Atari 42 years ago on November 29, 1972) managed to become such a hit that it uncorked a lust for gaming in the public that’s never been quenched.

The idea wasn’t even supposed to be a real game, at least according to one story that says Bushnell assigned it as a warm-up exercise to his designer Al Alcorn to help him learn the basics of programming. When the final product came back, Bushnell and Atari were so surprised at the quality they decided to release it. (For his part, Alcorn’s story is a little different. He says Bushnell wanted him to make a similar game to the Magnavox Odyssey’s tennis game, a detail which becomes relevant shortly.)

Whatever its origin, Atari decided to put a prototype of the game in a local dive called Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. (Sunnyvale is part of Silicon Valley today, but even four decades ago it was on the cutting edge of technology.) One key to the game’s replay value: The player’s tennis paddle didn’t go all the way to the top of the screen. This was a bug Alcorn had intended to fix, but decided to leave in place as insurance against two equally-skilled gamers playing forever. (Easy to learn, impossible to master.)

The game was a hit at Andy Capp’s, although there was a technical problem: The coin mechanism would fill up completely, but patrons would still try to jam money in the slot, causing the game to malfunction. Atari started producing more arcade cabinets, and by Christmas 1975 released a home version of “Pong,” which was sold exclusively at Sears. But there was a problem: Magnavox had picked up on the similarities between “Pong” and its tennis game, and took Atari to court. (In truth, the Odyssey game was even less visually interesting than Atari’s. It was nothing more than three dots of light, with a plastic overlay on the TV screen giving the illusion of looking at a tennis court.) But Magnavox had a signed guest book from a demo that proved Bushnell had seen the Odyssey game before developing “Pong,” and a financially shaky Atari decided to settle rather than pile up the legal bills needed to fight.

Atari paid Magnavox $700,000 to become a “licensee” of the tennis game, and agreed to give Magnavox the rights to any games they produced in the next year. Atari then proceeded to stop making games, for exactly one year. (If Atari had ripped off “Pong” from Magnavox, they were repaid in spades as the market now became flooded with “Pong” clones. Atari hadn’t filed the proper patents before rushing the game to market, so they had no recourse.) The “Pong” craze of the ‘70s eventually simmered, but it inspired Atari to create a home console that could actually play different games. The Atari 2600 hit markets in 1977, and the rest is history.

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