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Games Entertainment

The History of Pong 73

Posted by michael from the I-prefer-Breakthrough-myself dept.
sn0wdude writes "Who hasn't played PONG? Everything on PONG! Has pictures from all systems it was available on, even systems schematics (to make your own). The 'Make-It-Yourself Systems' (kid adverts), etc..." You see, Pong was the evil twin brother of the little duckling called Ping... oh, wait, wrong story. Seriously, this site has everything you never wanted to know about Pong.
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The History of Pong More

The History of Pong

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  • It was new. It was different.

    Wondering why there hasn't been a "breakthrough" game lately? The publishing houses just play copy cat - there's 15 rips within 9 months of a new break out title.

    Ah... the days before the industry was about money... The big houses (and be honest - they control the industry because they buy the shelf space) are afraid to allow their people to try new things - new ideas. It's most annoying for us. When senior guys get antsy - they're cut loose to "prototype" for a year - but then they're pulled back into the fold like clockwork. Grrr.

  • I think I've seen #3 - but it was a long time ago if I did. my spidy sense just tingled when I read that.

  • Pong is not a myth.. I remember playing the first Pong game, and it was unbelievably cool at the time. It was soon blown away by the Atari 2600, but it was definately ground breaking in its day. It's kinda sad to see the kids these days laughing at it. Without Pong you wouldn't be playing your Super Mario game or whatever it is you play these days.

    ---

  • I don't think you'll ever confuse CmdrTaco and maturity. Have you read an interview with him lately? All of his interviews read like an IRC log with a couple of adolescent haX0rs mouthing off.
  • One of the best ways to annoy people in the school computer lab is sit at the most powerful computer and use it to play pong for hours and hours on end. ;-)

    Even now adays, I still get out my Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle DOS game by ID Software released in 1991. And I don't play the actual game. I just use Keen's computer wristwatch to play pong against the computer. The game still hasn't lost its charm...elegant and simple.

    O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:

  • From the article:

    Unfortunately, Willy Higinbotham did not find any interest in his game, and did not patent it. What a pitty, when we see all the money involved in video games !

    Somewhat sad that when someone comes up with a way to entertain people, one that has irreversibly transformed our society, the only thing certain people can think of is "Ooh! Get a patent! No one else can play!"

    Imagine for a minute if someone had patented "an electronic device for projecting imaginary scenes onto a television screen, which the user interacts with for entertainment". Without competition, video games likely would have stagnated. Atari ended up mismanaging themselves rather badly; imagine if they had had a monopoly on video games.

    I understand patents in principle, but I think humans are generally too stupid and greedy for them to work.

    --

  • Actually, it was Breakout that helped sever the link between the two Steves. Jobs received a big bonus for cutting components from the game; WOz was promised half. Woz got $350, while Stevie J pocketed a cool $5K.

    Full details are available at Woz's website [woz.org].

  • I heard Excel has a flight simulator hidden somewhere, but I've never seen it...
  • You know how some geeks try to be more elite by using old school hardware? I can just picture it now, someone trying to port Linux to a vaccuum tube computer, and having trouble writing drivers for their oscilloscope commandline display. Anyway, vaccuum tools do look cool.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 10, 2001 @09:55PM (#371592)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They don't mention Pong Kombat [neu.edu], which is (as it sounds) a combination of Mortal Komabt and pong. It's only available for windows (as far as i remember), but it's hilarious. Make sure you read the FAQ's on the site.

  • there is also a macintosh version

  • I wrote a version [primenet.com] that I embedded into my game, 4-Tris. This heart of this version was about 430 words of assembly code. I hadn't bothered to optimize for size. I'm sure you could get it somewhat smaller. Anyone?

    --Joe
    --
  • no Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell invented pong... Al Gore just invented everything else. Now he has to worry each day about inventing himself some Lunch.
  • Although not a video game, Willy Higinbotham built in 1958 the very first game based around a computer and a CRT at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, New-York, USA). The game was shown to the public during two years in the labs, used an oscilloscope to generate the picture, and a vaccuum tube analog computer to calculate the trajectory of the ball. The game consisted in a little tennis court shown in front view: a reversed 'T' as a net, and a bouncing point as the ball (you can read a very interesting article about the story of this game). Unfortunately, Willy Higinbotham did not find any interest in his game, and did not patent it. What a pitty, when we see all the money involved in video games ! This was the short story of the first game.

    How typical. A guy who deserves the money that would have come from patenting the very idea of video games does not even bother,

    And then all the greedy jerks who do not deserve it wind up patenting all kinds of trivial junk....

    feh

  • just a question: what in the blazing fuck does that picture have to do with pong?
  • According to www.eeggs.com [eeggs.com], Excel has quite a few [eeggs.com] easter eggs.

    Check out the rest of the website, too. Neat stuff.

  • I'm not surprised that a person like Baer, with a strong vested interest, would write such a biased history. Baer suggests that Higginbotham's demo wasn't a video game because it didn't immediately become a commercial product. Clearly, it couldn't become a product because it was too expensive to produce (and maintain) systems at the time. To Baer, it wasn't a game because it wasn't commercial. To me, it was a game, because you could play it.

    Baer seems to use the same sort of warped reasoning to make his points that folks like the government spooks use when they try to restrict encryption, or that the music biz suits use when they try to dump napster, or that microsoft uses when they try to explain that Linux is unamerican, and we'd all really be better off with single-use software that goes stale like a loaf of bread. An oven-fresh version of Outlook, every time you read your mail! Gee, thanks. I just find Baer's reasoning to be severely twisted.

    It's useful for participants to tell their own stories, but beware when they describe the work of their adversaries.

  • www.publicvoid.com [publicvoid.com]

    Click your mouse to position the paddle, drag it to slide the paddle.

  • can be found on Telus/Clearnet's website. It's called Quong and requires flash, but it's quite fun. Check it out here [clearnet.com].
  • This guy thinks he is the father of home video games? As if he decides the rules for who is the father of anything. His logic for determining that he is the father is pretty messed, but hey it works for him. Did this guy even design a game or did he just do the hardware to hook up to a home TV? According to him you can not just build something to be the father. You must design, build, and bring it to market. Yeah, okay, whatever. Sounds like he just wants another 15 mins of fame.
  • Breakout, not Pong. It was only in System 7.5, 7.5.1, and 7.5.2

    The significance of Breakout and Apple? Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked at Atari and, as partners, created Breakout.

    ----
  • Ive written pong clones many times. One time a friend bet me I couldnt write it in 1 class period (in qbasic), it was fun.

    Ehh anyways, I'd like to see the smallest pong source code (not cramming multiple lines onto one line). Just think it'd be cool after seeing that (was it) 15 line perl script to deCSS.

  • "from the I-prefer-Breakthrough-myself dept."
    I've never heard of a game called Breakthrough. Is he referring to Breakout?
  • He lives a few blocks down, but he's actually not all that bad. It's hemos you have to watch out for. ;p~
    Just be sure to lock up the livestock at night.

    "The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."

  • Your asking a lot. Hmmm. My parents bought me and my brother a Pong set top from Sears around 1977 or 1978 (?). I'm guessing it was around US$60 or so. Too long ago so I'm probably way off.
  • I remember that when I was very young, my family
    found one of those Pong-only systems at Goodwill.
    It was pretty cool. Except, eventually my brother
    tricked me into cutting random wires for an
    experiment. Oh well, at least I didn't wreck
    the Timex Sinclair or the PCjr. I can sleep
    at night knowing that it's not a huge collector's
    item, since this one [ebay.com] is only selling for 30 bucks on eBay.
  • Cool Edit Pro. Even has a multiball mode and spin modelling.
  • This reminds me of the Neuromancer game on the C64/Amiga/AppleIIGS a loooong time ago. One of the tricks was getting an original Atari joystick and taking it to a worshipper of Pong so he could play the game again. He gave you a piece of psychological software called Zen that would keep you from flatlining. Damn it's scary how much I remember from that old-tyme game, would like to play it again sometime.

  • Did you watch the same special as me on A&E tonight?
  • A Pong faq. Funny, sure.
    An existential pong faq? Heeeee-larious.
    Here [dencity.com]
    check out my band. Bratwurst Orange [mp3.com] we play pong on an Odyssy^2.
  • 1)I remember seeing the pictures of developers from the firmware back on my old Mac SE.

    2)Excel just has a little first-person maze thing that has the names of all the developers in a difficult to reach room.

    3)Breakout from the Mac About box is pretty fun. I haven't seen any other Breakouts or Pong... Although that would be pretty neat.
  • I play PONG on my Kurzweil K2600 Workstation Synthesizer...
    http://www.hyperindex.com/k2/k_pong.htm
    ...describes how to access this hidden function. When the ball bounces off the walls, it plays whatever instrument is assigned to the drum channel. And then another sound for the paddle...Personally, I prefer a more traditional approach:
    Timpani and snare for my PONG sessions.
    If you get a score of 76, you can access the FM algorithm that Kurzweil had to remove for fear of a lawsuit from Yamaha for FM synthesis.
    Its in there, but you have to learn how to PONG first.
    If you don't know about the best synthesizer and PONG system EVER MADE made, then:
    http://www.kurzweilmusicsystems.com/html/k2600.h tm l
    Besides PONG, it also makes for a great Blue nightlight!
  • I have an old Odyssey 300 system which is based on the AY-3-8500 'Pong in a chip' chip, described here [pong-story.com].

    I began to wonder about possible hardware modifications. The AY-3-8500 chip includes several games that are not available from the Odyssey 300 console, but seemingly could be unlocked with a bit of soldering. I'd love to figure out how to make a light gun that would work with the AY-3-8500's target shooting games.

    Who would've thought my Odyssey 300 console had hardware hack potential?
    It looks like the Pong chip has a lead for the light gun trigger, and another one for the light gun photocell. Has anybody tinkered with this type of system? Does anybody know where I could find more information to get me started?

  • From 'Who did it first? [pong-story.com]

    If this arrangement of hardware still qualifies in anyone?s mind as a video game, then he/she might wish to look into much earlier interactive uses of random access displays such as a scope. During and shortly after WW II both the US and the German army used such displays for missile tracking... definitely an interactive use....but were these video games? Not by any rational definition of that word. Nor is Higginbotham?s demo.

    Well, of course it isn't a video game because it isn't a game! They're tracking real, live missiles. Stupid.

    That whole entire page is the most self serving load of tripe I've ever read. Ralph Baer apparently managed to fool a judge into believing that HigginBotham's work didn't represent prior art and thinks it means something besides more than him retaining his ability to extort money over a long since dead piece of technology.

  • All the info you seek can be found in the comments on this article:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/1424204.shtm l [slashdot.org]


    --=Maj
  • Seriously, this site has everything you never wanted to know about Pong.

    Nope. Where's the new 3D Pong games by Hasbro that stunk up the house? If you're going to include everything you have to include everything.

  • Pong?!? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What is pong?
  • This whole discussion begins with commercial pong machines. Which leaves out the really interesting part.

    This all started out with a real-time minicomputer game called Space War, popular back in the early 70s. (Here's an ancient Rolling Stone piece [wheels.org].) Atari's first project was an embedded version of Space War for pinball arcades and bars. The official Atari story [discovery.com] was that Pong was invented later because users (especially bar patrons) found Space War too complicated to learn. Actually, Pong was released first, in order to test some of the circuitry developed for Space War. The first prototype appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale. The next day, Atari got a phone call complaining that the prototype was broken. Nothing was actually broekn, but the coin mechanism had turned itself off when its receptacle filled up with quarters. The rest, as they say, is history.

    __________________

  • It is the meaning of life grasshopper....... ;-)

  • Wouldn't it be funny if Pong was just a myth made up to convince us all proving the law that:

    1. Hobbyists will build crazy machines
    2. People will build multi-player games
    3. The more simple and pointless something is, someone will always exist to write the history thereof
    4. People will always read that history, thus proving that one man's trash is many people's time waster
  • They didn't even mention the game Gnop! It was a Mac clone of Pong made by Bungie!
  • When I look back on Pong it looks so primitive and antiquated. Yet I can remember being entranced by it for hours. Not too long ago, a friend and I played it against one another and it was a blast.

    I guess that despite all the nice graphics that have occured since then, the most important element in making a game is the gameplay. Some games [quake3arena.com] that look gorgeous seem to have let the gameplay fall to a secondary position, while other games [sierrastudios.com] that are fairly old still get thousands of players a day.

    It will be nice when gameplay and graphics get combined. [bungie.com]

  • Oh no, that can't possibly be correct. I have it from a very reliable source at Microsoft that a great feature of proprietary code is that you can trust the company to not put easter eggs and other backdoors into the software. They run code reviews there, because as they like to say "many eyes make all bugs NOT DEEP". So to think that something as large as a flight simulator would escape their watchful eyes is just ... humerous.

  • Are you For real?!?!?!

    How old are you?
  • The most recent release by Hasbro/Atari...

    I know, it's not REALLY Pong, but it does bare the name, lisencing, and if you do well enough, a replica of the original... Curious they don't even mention it.
  • 3 Sprites and collision detection. The most basic of gaming concepts.

    Who remembers the first 1st person version, also known as Ball Blazer.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

  • Hi, saw this and decided to go across the room and grab Chuck Colby's [picostar.com] antique pong machine and grab a few pictures. I even grabbed a clip from the video out on it through a frame grabber, it actually still works!

    He told me this was one of the very first pong machines ever.
    I am not sure, but thought you might like to check this out. [iomojo.com]

  • I know it's in at least one version of Commander Keen (it's built into Keen's wristwatch), and I embedded a version in my Intellivision game 4-Tris [primenet.com].

    It's such a simple and straightforward game, it's not surprising it's in so many places.

    --Joe
    --
  • sorta....

    you don't really fly, per say...just kinda spin & stuff...

    still, it looks kinda cool

  • Build your own! (Score:5)

    by Klowner ( 145731 ) on Saturday March 10, 2001 @09:24PM (#371633) Homepage
    Don't tell me this isnt totally cool :)
    make your own pong game with a little soldering and a PIC microcontroller, generates simple black and white NTSC output and everything.

    VCR Pong [rt66.com]

    Klowner
  • Pong fans should definitely try Ping [claranet.fr] .
    It's an svgalib Pong game with bonuses, carebears, hilarous musics and fx, and it rocks. The documentation says it's the official tennis simulator of the US army !
  • Gameplay is more than a fancy choice of weapons and nice graphics which is all that Quake seems to specialize in. Half-life puts you there, from the first instant you start a game on that train ride, you are immersed in another reality. Games like this, System Shock, Fallout, BG and Thief rise above the crowd in creating a world that grips your imagination. System Shock especially could really creep you out. Turn the lights out, and try to survive that level with the invisible slimes. I swear I was actually screaming when they jumped me. Half-life was very similar.

    Now I'm not saying FPS games like Quake and Unreal aren't intense and addictive. Far from it, but their intensity comes from your human opponents. Yes the gameplay is an important element, but it doesn't grab your imagination in the same way as the games I mentioned above.
  • 11 Line Perl Script, that includes comment lines. =)
    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

  • Last week a friend and I went to Bletchley Park, where British codebreakers broke the German Enigma cipher during World War II. The site is run by (very) enthusiastic amateurs, and just about every conceivable kind of anorak was there displaying something.

    A local computer society has a room at the site devoted entirely to old computer equipment. Among the nerdjunk were a number of old Pong machines. My friend and I played a game and a half, at which point we were bored stiff. But it was a nice nostalgia trip while it lasted.

    So if you want to play a few games of Pong on vintage equipment (or you're into WWII, or crypto, or old toys, or you want to see the works of the Leighton Buzzard Model Boat Club, or...), Bletchley Park is the place to go.

    -

  • Hate to be nitpicky, but the true story of Breakout can be found here...

    http://www.atari-history.com/arcade/arcade75.htm l

    ...I just think "created" is a little misleading.
  • I once wrote pong in the form of a mIRC script. I'll do it again if you keep bringing it up...

    -HobophobE
  • WOW! I want one- doom and pong in the palm of my hand ! but quite seriously i'd like to see the screen shots to if anybody has any. c-bob
  • Yes!
    I thought of the same thing when I saw that message. It was quite a fun game to play actually (assuming you had two people of course). We got it at a yardsale a long time ago. It's in a rather bad shape now though.

  • I have no clue what you're talking about.

  • They don't even seem to have looked at freshmeat. The section "pong for your PC" holds just 3 or what for WinDos, so I went to freshmeat to find me a linux pong. I was really glad to find a pong for ncurses at this page [kennesaw.edu]. I had to change the Makefile to look for -lncurses instead of -lcurses, but it runs, and is really really funny. Does anyone else know of good Linux pong clones?

  • Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:3)

    by namespan ( 225296 ) <{gro.liametile} {ta} {napseman}> on Saturday March 10, 2001 @07:11PM (#371644) Journal
    I seem to recall that Pong is a popular easter egg. Places I've heard that it is:

    1) Hidden somewhere in the open firmware of Macs that have open firmware.
    2) Hidden in Microsoft Excel
    3) Hidden in the about box of some version of the Mac OS.

    Can anyone verify the above? Or know of any others?

    --
  • Some from SGI told me once that someone was bored and programed pong to run on the little 4" LCD screen on the front of an Sgi Origin Rack. Anyone happen to have a url with pictures of this? Deke
  • "You see, Pong was the evil twin brother of the little duckling called Ping... oh, wait, wrong story."

    That may be the wrong story, but the intro sounds ridiculously more interesting than the history of a white ball getting the beating of its life from two white paddles.
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057
  • I've been learning PIC stuff and came across <a href="http://www.efd.lth.se/~e96rg/mc/video/pong.h tml" target="_new">this</a>. It's direction on how to make your own pong game w/ a PIC 16F84. Could be interesting to make a game system using Wafer cards that have both a PIC 16F84 and a EEPROM...
  • This [efd.lth.se] is better... heh..
  • Try this this [efd.lth.se]. I guess it didn't like the target="_new" tag..
  • If Linux were a beer, it would be shipped in open barrels so that anybody could piss in it before delivery.
    And it would be illegal to make a chemical analysis to see if Microsoft Beer XP contains urine.

    And anyone would be forced to drink a MS Beer XP when they buy a new glass, even if you want to pour D*FFIX in it.

  • Wondering why there hasn't been a "breakthrough" game lately?

    Since Conker's Bad Fur Day last Tuesday? Or since Phantasy Star Online in late January? No, I guess I hadn't. But Black & White will be coming out soon enough, so I'm not worried...

  • Yup thats my mini lab project for CS in my first year... Joy of programming a 68008 and ADC/DACs for this one to work.
  • original pong was invented, but I have known Al Alcorn (the inventor) pretty well in the past

    I thought Al Gore invented Pong?

  • Actually, gameplay has been steadily decreasing in (default, not including mods) quake versions, while the pallete and geometric complexity have been increasing.
    Halflife has amazing gameplay, fast action with a bit of precise jumping, I'll admit it can be tedious, but it's a good mix.

    --
  • Cool!

    Anyone remember a game with red and yellow ping-pong balls called Gnip Gnop?

    Nolan Bushnell lives on!
    --

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