While the PlayStation 2 shipped with composite cables, even it had a coaxial adapter available for tuning to channel 2 or 3.
The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those larger components were already available off-the-shelf. Common families of these chips, such as the venerable 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear on the market in the mid-1960's.
Edit just to add another bit of nuance. If it still seems like an extremely difficult task without much precedent, I think the lineage of these early arcade games can be traced back through their older arcade siblings: pinball machines. People had been building more and more sophisticated pinball machines over the decades since their inception in the early 1930s. For a look into pinball machines, some of their history, and an amazingly deep dive into the workings of a 1970's model, check out Alec's pinball series on Technology Connections [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...
A very simplistic and non-general purpose computer, but a computer nonetheless?
It's about an arcade game from the 70's called Sega JET ROCKET:
It looks complicated but it’s really not if you break it down into small bits and think of it like you would with a piece of software I.e. abstractions.
It covers some things that are rather counterintuitive, especially if you come from a modern programming background.
Now is it complicated? No not really, I read the answer and immediately understood what was going on.
But no modern programmer would ever come up with the solution of addressing x and y positions by setting timers to wake at the times when the point in the scan-line or the scan-line in the frame was reached (although sleep-sort does exist).
If anything, the point of the post is the fact that it's very easy to understand, despite how counterintuitive it may be.
But TVs then didn't have composite video inputs, so you also needed an RF modulator.
The first time I saw that episode was at a friend's house. I felt so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod software with a soldering iron. Then his dad poked his head out from the kitchen and told me Pong didn't have software.
Turns out the only impossible part of that episode is the idea of it taking a few hours. Changing the paddle size was a mod already supported by the hardware and the manual gave details on how to do it. Though it wasn't necessarily intended as a difficulty setting, it was intended to support different sizes of TVs. iirc, all you need to do is solder 1 jumper.
BLIP video game by Tomy commercial 1979:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPA7SQbwDOQ
Blip - 1977 Mechanical Pong:
https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-so...