The year was 1972 and Atari stepped on the scene like never before. The godfather of all video games was mesmerizing everyone with its little bouncing ball and paddles. 1972 was the year of Pong and nothing would ever be the same.

Now Pong is up for a commemorative star on the Walk of Game in San Francisco. Pong is competeting against Frogger, Space Invaders, Street Fighter II, Castlevania, Civilization, Donkey Kong, Doom, Double Dragon, EverQuest, Final Fantasy, Fox McCloud (Star Fox), Grand Theft Auto, Half-Life, Lara Croft (Tomb Raider), Madden NFL, Myst, Pac-Man, Pitfall Harry, Quake, Resident Evil, Samus Aran (Metroid), StarCraft, Tetris and The Sims.

For all of October voters can vote daily at www.walkofgame.com. Six of the above mentioned nominees will win for 2006. The six 2005 winners include: Halo, Link from the Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, Nolan Bushnell, and Shigeru Miyamoto. I’d just like to point out that Nolan and Shigeru aren’t even video games. You can’t even play them, but they did do a lot for games so I guess that’s cool.

Now to me it’s not even a question of whether Pong should have a star. It should. Case closed. I’d just like to say many people reading this article might not be here today if it wasn’t for pong. The 70s were a crazy time. I know my father could have been out doing drugs instead of growing tired of having that stupid bouncing ball get past him every time and finally pushing aside the paddles to conceive me.

If they really want to honor Pong they need to put 2 stars up. One on each end of the walk of game so that visitors can walk back and forth looking at them over and over all day long.