MARK COLVIN: In the age of the immersive videogame, in which the player can wander for days in an imagined city or landscape, it's extraordinary to think that the first commercially successful screen game was just over four decades ago.

It was Atari's 'Pong', a minimalist tennis game that people mostly played in pubs at first.

Atari went on to be a huge influence on home gaming, and its co-founder Nolan Bushnell is often labelled the "godfather of gaming".