The Atari 2600 used paddles for several of its games, as did early home computers such as the Commodore VIC-20.  Some famous video games using paddles are Pong, Breakout, and Night Driver. The reason for the name paddle for this type of game controller is that the first game that used it, Pong, was a video game simulation of table tennis, whose racquets are commonly called paddles. Even though the simulated paddles appeared on-screen (as small line segments), it was the hand controllers used to move the line segments that actually came to bear the name.