- Highlight
- #1
Pong is the purest distillation of human competition. Two independent agents and a free entity between them, both knowing only one can prevail. Pong is not one game, but endless permutations of this core concept. My favorite version is Game 4 of Atari Super Pong, a variation actor and director James Rolfe creatively dubbed “asshole pong.”
This Is an absurdly unfair variant wherein one player controls a wall with a hole in it that the other player, who controls a paddle, must bounce a ball through to score points, and the wall player can change the angle of the ball’s trajectory by moving the wall they control when it hits, meaning it is even more difficult to predict the ball’s movement. I love playing as the paddle side. It is the E4M1 of Pong.
This essay sets out to capture the full scope of two paddle, one ball: Who cares? What is a Pong? Where did it come? When did it matter? Why was Pong the first video game to be a Video Game?
I care about Pong. I love pong. Only on a Pong console, with analog controls, your movements are precisely mirrored on the screen. No modern joystick gives you the precision control of a Pong paddle, it’s as close as we get to a direct control of the pixel color on your television this side of an electrician.
A wise jerk once said “Good artists’ make, great artists’ steal.” The idea of an electronic game representing a friendly or not-so-friendly rendition of the King’s Game had been kicking around since the waning days of WW2, when engineers looked to find ways to use their huge idle computers to relieve boredom. The next huge innovation came in the form of the brown box, WW2 veteran Ralph Baer’s first prototype for what became the Odyssey.
Magnavox’s Odyssey is a boldly strange creature, with controllers shaped like pencil sharpeners and wires as thick as overhanging electric cables. It was more like a toy than any other video games consoles, apart from the sporting titles. Most of which, were some variation of a ‘ping-pong’ gameplay loop.
Except the gun games. The gun games were their own kind of innovation, the first video game light gun which two generations later would be a staple of every console for every generation thereafter that. But the story of the light gun is a story for another day.
The Odyssey was a moderate success, and its inventor, the aforementioned Ralph Baer, did a few public demonstrations. One of the people who signed the guest book for these was an American named Nolan Bushnell. Soon, he would take what he saw and found a company called ‘Atari’. He called it that, because California said he wasn’t allowed to call it ‘Syzygy’ (Nolan stated“Atari” also came before “Commodore” in the phone book as a stated motive) and he wanted a name related to the board game Go.
Their first title was a rip-off of Spacewar! Which Nolan had seen on computer mainframes in college. It had a weird space age cabinet that would have made 1970’s barflies question their masculinity if they had bothered playing it at all. So it was, Atari’s sophomore effort was destined to became its most iconic title.
Andy Capp’s tavern was where the seed was planted. A simple instruction was all it needed by way of introduction: “Insert Quarter. Ball will serve automatically. Avoid missing ball for high score.”
Things picked up quickly from there. More and more bars wanted the game. Soon, Sears would take a rat’s nest of silicon chips and use it to sell the home game. Once everyone saw how much money they were making, they decided it was a good time to get a cut of the action.
When Pong was everywhere, it was nowhere. An oversaturated fad that could have marked another false start on the path towards credibility for a burgeoning video games industry.
Pong is a landmark title for both technology and brand design… but also for how video games were treated by law. Magnavox sued Atari, won, and collected insanely lucrative royalties by bilking every video game company for decades after that until Nintendo took them down. But that is also the story for another day.
So it was that Pong blended into the misty days of history. But curiously, since it was released and with only perfunctory debate after, it is known in aggregate cultural memory as the “first video game.” It penetrated the veil and showed us, for the first time on a large scale, how good it feels to talk back to the screen and win.
Citations
Rolfe, J. (2011, July 11). Angry Videogame Nerd Episode 89. Retrieved February 19, 2021, from cinemassacre.com
Kent, S. L. (2002). The ultimate history of video games: From Pong to Pokémon and beyond ; the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world. Roseville, CA: Prima Publ.
Goldberg, H. (2011). All your base are belong to us: How fifty years of videogames conquered pop culture. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Written by Harmony B
Copyright Creative Commons 3.0
(Mods or janitors- I am not looking to “spam” these but multiple people requested a second essay and I always deliver)
This Is an absurdly unfair variant wherein one player controls a wall with a hole in it that the other player, who controls a paddle, must bounce a ball through to score points, and the wall player can change the angle of the ball’s trajectory by moving the wall they control when it hits, meaning it is even more difficult to predict the ball’s movement. I love playing as the paddle side. It is the E4M1 of Pong.
This essay sets out to capture the full scope of two paddle, one ball: Who cares? What is a Pong? Where did it come? When did it matter? Why was Pong the first video game to be a Video Game?
I care about Pong. I love pong. Only on a Pong console, with analog controls, your movements are precisely mirrored on the screen. No modern joystick gives you the precision control of a Pong paddle, it’s as close as we get to a direct control of the pixel color on your television this side of an electrician.
A wise jerk once said “Good artists’ make, great artists’ steal.” The idea of an electronic game representing a friendly or not-so-friendly rendition of the King’s Game had been kicking around since the waning days of WW2, when engineers looked to find ways to use their huge idle computers to relieve boredom. The next huge innovation came in the form of the brown box, WW2 veteran Ralph Baer’s first prototype for what became the Odyssey.
Magnavox’s Odyssey is a boldly strange creature, with controllers shaped like pencil sharpeners and wires as thick as overhanging electric cables. It was more like a toy than any other video games consoles, apart from the sporting titles. Most of which, were some variation of a ‘ping-pong’ gameplay loop.
Except the gun games. The gun games were their own kind of innovation, the first video game light gun which two generations later would be a staple of every console for every generation thereafter that. But the story of the light gun is a story for another day.
The Odyssey was a moderate success, and its inventor, the aforementioned Ralph Baer, did a few public demonstrations. One of the people who signed the guest book for these was an American named Nolan Bushnell. Soon, he would take what he saw and found a company called ‘Atari’. He called it that, because California said he wasn’t allowed to call it ‘Syzygy’ (Nolan stated“Atari” also came before “Commodore” in the phone book as a stated motive) and he wanted a name related to the board game Go.
Their first title was a rip-off of Spacewar! Which Nolan had seen on computer mainframes in college. It had a weird space age cabinet that would have made 1970’s barflies question their masculinity if they had bothered playing it at all. So it was, Atari’s sophomore effort was destined to became its most iconic title.
Andy Capp’s tavern was where the seed was planted. A simple instruction was all it needed by way of introduction: “Insert Quarter. Ball will serve automatically. Avoid missing ball for high score.”
Things picked up quickly from there. More and more bars wanted the game. Soon, Sears would take a rat’s nest of silicon chips and use it to sell the home game. Once everyone saw how much money they were making, they decided it was a good time to get a cut of the action.
When Pong was everywhere, it was nowhere. An oversaturated fad that could have marked another false start on the path towards credibility for a burgeoning video games industry.
Pong is a landmark title for both technology and brand design… but also for how video games were treated by law. Magnavox sued Atari, won, and collected insanely lucrative royalties by bilking every video game company for decades after that until Nintendo took them down. But that is also the story for another day.
So it was that Pong blended into the misty days of history. But curiously, since it was released and with only perfunctory debate after, it is known in aggregate cultural memory as the “first video game.” It penetrated the veil and showed us, for the first time on a large scale, how good it feels to talk back to the screen and win.
Citations
Rolfe, J. (2011, July 11). Angry Videogame Nerd Episode 89. Retrieved February 19, 2021, from cinemassacre.com
Kent, S. L. (2002). The ultimate history of video games: From Pong to Pokémon and beyond ; the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world. Roseville, CA: Prima Publ.
Goldberg, H. (2011). All your base are belong to us: How fifty years of videogames conquered pop culture. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Written by Harmony B
Copyright Creative Commons 3.0
(Mods or janitors- I am not looking to “spam” these but multiple people requested a second essay and I always deliver)
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