

The History of Pong 73
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.
Why Pong Succeeded (Score:1)
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.
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
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.
Re:Pong: a myth? (Score:1)
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Re:Is Michael trying to take over Slashdot? (Score:1)
Re:Gameplay! (Score:1)
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:
patents (Score:1)
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.
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Pong: The Jobs/ Woz feud (Score:2)
Full details are available at Woz's website [woz.org].
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:2)
Elite! (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3)
WHat about pong kombat? (Score:3)
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.
Re:WHat about pong kombat? (Score:1)
Re:Pong Source Code (Score:1)
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--
Re:the inventor (Score:1)
patents, etc. (Score:2)
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
nasty nasty (Score:1)
Easter Eggs galore (Score:1)
Check out the rest of the website, too. Neat stuff.
baer's biased history (Score:2)
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.
Here's a PONG Java applet (Score:1)
Click your mouse to position the paddle, drag it to slide the paddle.
A rather addictive and advanced version of pong (Score:2)
Ralph Baer is NOT the father of home video games (Score:1)
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:3)
The significance of Breakout and Apple? Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked at Atari and, as partners, created Breakout.
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Pong Source Code (Score:2)
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.
Breakthrough? (Score:1)
Re:Pong: a myth? (Score:1)
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."
Damn... (Score:1)
nostalgia (Score:1)
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.
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
shades of william gibson's early days (Score:1)
Re:Pong: The Jobs/ Woz feud (Score:1)
The Existential Pong FAQ (Score:2)
An existential pong faq? Heeeee-larious.
Here [dencity.com]
check out my band. Bratwurst Orange [mp3.com] we play pong on an Odyssy^2.
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
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.
Synthesizer Pong (Score:2)
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.
Besides PONG, it also makes for a great Blue nightlight!
Pong in a Chip - unused games? (Score:1)
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?
Self serving load of tripe (Score:2)
From 'Who did it first? [pong-story.com]
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.
Yes, and the info was in previous /. posts... (Score:1)
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/1424204.sht
--=Maj
Everything? (Score:2)
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)
Prehistory of Pong (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Pong?!? (Score:1)
Pong: a myth? (Score:1)
Wouldn't it be funny if Pong was just a myth made up to convince us all proving the law that:
Gnop! (Score:1)
Gameplay! (Score:1)
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]
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:2)
Re:Pong?!? (Score:1)
How old are you?
Seems to be missing.. (Score:1)
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.
Pong's makings... (Score:1)
Who remembers the first 1st person version, also known as Ball Blazer.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Pong Prototype ? (Score:1)
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]
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
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--
Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
you don't really fly, per say...just kinda spin & stuff...
still, it looks kinda cool
Build your own! (Score:5)
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
A great remake for Linux (Score:1)
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 !
You keep using that word, I don't believe it.... (Score:1)
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.
Re:Pong Source Code (Score:1)
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
Pong at Bletchley Park (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:1)
http://www.atari-history.com/arcade/arcade75.ht
...I just think "created" is a little misleading.
IRC... (Score:1)
-HobophobE
Re:pong on the LCD Screen on an SGI Origin Server (Score:1)
Re:Gnip Gnop! (Score:1)
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.
Re:Self serving load of tripe (Score:1)
I have no clue what you're talking about.
Pong for ncurses (Score:1)
Pong as an Easter Egg (Score:3)
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?
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pong on the LCD Screen on an SGI Origin Server (Score:1)
hold up there buddy (Score:2)
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.
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
PIC based Pong project. (Score:1)
Doh... (Score:1)
Try 2! (Score:1)
Re:I know it's cool to be retro and all but.. (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why Pong Succeeded (Score:2)
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...
Pong on an oscilloscope (Score:1)
Re:the inventor (Score:1)
I thought Al Gore invented Pong?
Re:Gameplay! (Score:2)
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.
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Gnip Gnop! (Score:1)
Anyone remember a game with red and yellow ping-pong balls called Gnip Gnop?
Nolan Bushnell lives on!
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