Ep of the original cartoon with the Turtles playing Pong
 

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God this is a deep cut. Pong was obsolete by the late 80's when the NES was out but it makes sense the Turtles would find some old thrown out Pong machine in the sewers or garbage dumps somewhere and get it to work.

This is amazing. I don't even know what ep this is from.

The Grybyx.

It was probably a lot cheaper to reference than say Donkey Kong Jr. or Legend of Zelda.

Not obsolete to those that still love the old classics of things, and many still do.

The episode was written by Michael Reaves, born 14 September 1950. He was 22 years old when Pong hit the video game arcades in late November 1972 as one of the first commercially successful video games ever.

There were still a lot of pong machines around in late 80s and early 90s.

Really? I was born in the mid-80's and had an NES as a kid but I never saw Pong anywhere. I knew what an Atari was since my father had one, but not Pong.

Where? Maybe in the attics, where they'd been since the 1983 Video Game Crash.

Do you know that Pong can be played on the Sega Genesis which was a 16-bit system? There is a game where it's kind of a bonus feature. The dreaded Action 52 Genesis edition which is only slightly better than the infamously terrible NES version. There were also a lot of Pong consoles throughout the 70s and 80s. Mortal Kombat 2 (iirc) had Pong as a bonus (or either it was UMKIII or MK Trilogy...can't remember which)...so no, just because a game is older, doesn't mean that it's still not appreciated and played, especially the 80s. Pong wasn't that old...kinda, by the time the 80s show rolled around with the Pong consoles that came out during that decade. In the 90s, in arcades, I still liked playing freakin' pinball. That's about as old as you can get. If there wasn't a market for older games, you wouldn't have those who collect and play them or pull out their old systems and have a nostalgic playthrough of a beloved game.

As for why they used Pong for this episode, it was probably because the game is famous and recognizable and wouldn't resort in lawsuits. Even those who don't play video games know what Pong is more than likely. Space Invaders and Galaga are a couple of others that come to mind along with Pacman and Ms. Pacman. Well-known arcade games with some form of a home port. 70s and early (and maybe even slightly later) 80s babies would recognize these games more than likely, too.

Of course no adult person was seriously playing with them after like 1985 but you have to consider that after their golden days pong machines kept having some life as little kids toys. If you had a child back then you would bring your pong back from the attic and give it to him. Also, I'm speaking as an European. In Italy we got the NES only in late 1987.

Here is a Turtlepedia category, attempting to collect all in-universe video games

https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/...s_(in-universe)

Yes, back in the 80s and the 90s, companies didn't pay TV shows to advertise their products yet. Shows had to pay the company of said product to mention it/advertise it on their show.

We only got the NES in 1990 here in Portugal. The 80s were dominated by the ZX Spectrum. The early 90s by the Mega Drive.

In 1990? Wow. Now I understand why Sega was so popular over there... and in Brazil.

Brazil
 

The NES and the Super NES weren't released in Brazil until 1993 according to Wikipedia.