This is an oversimplified origin story. Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's Odyssey before he assigned Al Acorn with making a ping pong game. Bushnell claims he already had the idea of a tennis game before seeing the Odyssey and that is totally possible but Bushnell was clearly trying to outdo a competitor when he asked Acorn to create Pong and not simply some innocent exercise that turned into a huge success. Bushnell admits this in a 2006 email to Baer:
"Your game clearly was on my mind when I gave Alcorn the project. I felt the Odyssey was not very fun and we could make it better. As you remember my tennis game postulated a bouncing ball more like Higgenbothems though I did not know about him at the time."
https://thegamescholar.com/2022/06/26/the-final-corresponden...
Surely it's more simple but not more boring? (At least to many people, myself included, who spent more time enjoying pong than pinball.)
edit: If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
It's completely subjective (though a fact about everyone, nobody, or somewhere specific between finding something boring can be objective if taken from a good poll or whatever).
>If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
Even many baseball fans would say baseball is more boring, as soccer is designed to be 90 minutes of pure action while baseball is designed to spend much of the time waiting for the next pitch. People can like the "boring" thing more.
Similarly, pinball was designed to be exciting with a bunch of fancy lights and sounds. Comparatively, early pong showed nothing but the two paddles and a ball and could make one sound. It was boring, people still loved it and sank thousands of hours in.
I still disagree with you, boring is in the eye of the beholder not in the object itself.
Pinball machines may have many more elements to them, they may be more eye catching, but to somebody who doesnt enjoy playing pinball at all it's still incredibly boring to them. Someone who enjoys it probably isn't finding it boring, or at least not more boring than doing nothing.
Yes football has more actual playing time and takes 90 (well, closer to 110 after half time and added time) minutes compared to baseball's often hours, yes footballers walk/run an average of 3-4x further in a game on average than baseball players.... and yes, some baseball fans will think football is less boring (I'm one of them! I like baseball but far less than football)..., but to somebody who loves baseball and hates football, football is the more boring one. And they're not wrong, nor am I for thinking baseball is more boring. It's just subjective.
Your comparison for "most boring" really only applies to somehow who has a quick look at both things, maybe in an art gallery, then moves on having found one of them less boring than the other. Not to people who actually played and enjoyed one or both of them.
Describing soccer as “90 minutes of pure action” is … wow. I quite like soccer, but it’s about 5 minutes of action spread out amongst 85 minutes of preamble (the preamble is the interesting part, though, which is why I like it).
That applies equally to baseball, though. How is the catcher setting up? How are the fielders adjusting? How far off the bases are the runners stepping out? Soccer and baseball are remarkably similar in this regard, and very different from most other field sports.
What they actually mean is that pong is boring compared to video games that came after, hence this line.
> And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun?
As a Gen Xer myself, I enjoyed climbing trees, roasting marshmallows, playing chess, camping in the woods, and building tree forts from scrap and sticks as a kid, despite the fact (as I am led to understand) that these are not bleeding-edge activities. I also enjoyed pong, despite being created before I was even born, as shocking as that may be to the author!
Pong is enjoyable today for the same reason that IRL table tennis is still enjoyable today, and the reason isn't the graphical fidelity of the paddles and ball (in either case).
As a GenX'r myself who's first video gaming experience at a young age was a little console (no idea what it was, it wasn't a famous brand) that played Pong, it was enormous fun and 5(?) year old me was always bugging my Dad to get the "special TV" out and tune it into the console... years later one of my favourite public domain games on my Amiga was PowerPong
Since the entire point of pong was to compete with someone else, yes, of course that tiny dot moving around a black screen IS fun, because for many people, winning competition, no matter how trivial or contrived or pointless is very very fun.
I played the 2600 version of Pong a few weeks ago.
Sure, it's simple. But it's still good. Just enough action to be entertaining, easy enough to understand immediately, and just hard enough to be challenging.
It's a bit harder to play these days than when it was new.
First, paddle controllers haven't aged well, and can be very hard to control if they're not recently refurbished.
Second, modern TVs have lag. It's very tiny. Not enough to be noticeable with todays games and consoles. But on something as close to the hardware as Pong on a vintage machine, it's there.
I thought maybe it was because of the composite encoding and decoding, so I switched to a machine with an RF connection and it was still there. Tiny, but there.
I switched to an old portable tube TV with RF in, and it was perfect.
Seems like there's too much going on with modern displays to handle simple things. I guess that's why my 4K LG TV takes longer to boot up than my tube TV takes to warm up.
I was 5 or 6 when my uncle showed me ZS Spectrum he bought for 3 months of salary in late 80s. He only had pong and some logic games with him. It wasn't the famous Pong of course, but still - my mind was blown
by the fact that you can control something on the TV. This was the moment I decided I want to be a programmer.
Presumably ZX rather than ZS? Three months salary sounds high - its main appeal in the UK was the very affordable price point and consequently their ubiquity leading to plentiful third party games. Were you in the UK?
My Dad was in IT so I got exposed to a few earlier computers. What snagged me was discovering his ZX81 and reading enough of the manual to discover that I could write software myself! I think my Dad was a bit taken aback when I showed him my first program!
Or they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import and they were not in the UK.
Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!
My uncle worked as an electrical engineer in a helicopter factory in Poland, he was middle class. It was communism so our salaries were just so shitty compared to the west.
Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games.
I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary.
Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.
Yes, ZX Spectrum. I live in Poland, it was still communist at the time, anything from the west was crazy expansive, everybody thought my uncle was crazy when he bought the computer, but he was always a hobby electronic and early adopter.
Some of the best software devs I have ever met were some old graybeards who cut their coding teeth under the old Soviet umbrella. My theory is that the scarcity of cutting edge hardware forced folks to squeeze ever drop of capability out of the hardware that they had available to them via the software.
A few months ago I played a vintage Pong arcade cabinet @ Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, IL.
It was the first time I ever played a real Pong cabinet. Both my friend and I agreed it was exceptionally good despite being such a simple game. The experience of playing it felt very analog and responsive with no perceivable latency.
Galloping Ghost is a huge sprawling arcade where you pay a daily rate and can play all the games with effectively infinite quarters. So we played dozens of games that night, and there were very few games with such immediacy in the controls.
That lack of latency made you feel 100% responsible for any mistakes. It was surprisingly addictive and competitive because there didn't seem to be anything to blame in terms of lossiness/non-determinism between the controls and what's happening on-screen. You were to blame, and it implied you could easily be better next time.
I never saw Pong in the wild, but played a lot of early games and home games.
A few years ago so guys at work were playing Mario Tennus on a Nintendo Switch. I tried it a few minutes and said "it's Pong" and was done. Fancy graphics and special moves (like Mortal Kombat) added to Pong did nothing for me. In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference. Anyway, Mario Tennis is just Pong but some people like it.
Downvoting on HN is many things at once, but I hope the above comment remains readable. Beliefs like the one above are important because they help define the conceptual edges of categories, which cannot be surmounted and overcome until well-understood. Some might say, not unreasonably, that there's skill in applying/countering special moves in a similar way to countering some unexpected bankshot in Pong; those people are working from the more modern category of "asymmetrical character selection"-based videogaming.
IMO the claim that Mario Tennis is Pong is verifiably correct, and it's also obviously wrong. Dropbox, as the infamous comment goes, "really is" "just" filesharing and -mirroring, scaled up -- and Dropbox is also something different than really flashy WebDAV.
Mario Tennis (the Switch version at least, Mario Tennis 64 is closer to pong) is mostly a resource/meter management game in my eyes. The ball going back and forth and where it lands doesn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, it's almost secondary. It's more about knowing when to spend meter to score points/defend.
> In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference.
There's no memorization in Mario Tennis, is there? It's 4 possible moves or something, all tied to specific buttons.
Also, FWIW, the skill in fighting games is knowing when to use special moves, not memorizing them. Anyone that has invested even a tiny amount of time getting good at a fighting game has memorized all the inputs/combos, that is not the challenging aspect of fighting games.
>> Also, FWIW, the skill in fighting games is knowing when to use special moves, not memorizing them. Anyone that has invested even a tiny amount of time getting good at a fighting game has memorized all the inputs/combos, that is not the challenging aspect of fighting games.
A prerequisite to using them is memorizing them. You said it yourself right there. Not my thing, that's all.
Would you consider Tennis for the Famicom to be Pong? It’s quite different. For one, the ball follows a path that resembles tennis, as opposed to bouncing off walls. The ball moves in a 3D area, and the player can move in a 2D area.
As I recall my introduction to Pong-- we got an early videogame console--it may have been a Magnavox Odyssey--for Christmas. And it was pretty cool. However, one of the controller connectors went bad fairly quickly. But, by that point, we were pretty much done with the entertainment value so we just returned it for a refund.
Back then it was magic. That’s all that matters. The game can be made fun for sure. I used godot and some mortal kombat visuals to create what I called mortal pong (source code MIA). You basically had MK characters instead of paddles, the ball was the MK dragon logo, and you could perform special moves to beat your opponent. And of course you could do fatalities.
