*So, if The Oregon Trail launched computer gaming and educational gaming, Pong launched video gaming, arcade gaming and console gaming.
*The premise is . . . we all know the premise. It’s essentially a game of ping pong or tennis. Two players compete to knock a small projectile back and forth across the screen. When a player fails to return the ball, the other player gets a point. First one to eleven wins.
*Pong was originally released as an arcade game in 1972 in a single restaurant/pub. It became incredibly popular and Atari ended up sending arcade cabinets all over the country and eventually the world. Pong wasn’t actually the first arcade game, but it was the first to achieve any kind of popularity.
*Before 1972 was up, the game was consistently earning $40 a day at the test location, something unheard of for any kind of coin-operated entertainment device. By the end of 1974, Atari had shipped more than 8,000 arcade cabinets.
*In 1974, the game crossed over into a new arena: console gaming. Home Pong was created. It was a small console that could plug into a television set and enabled the buyer to play the game in the comfort of his own home. By the end of 1975, more than 150,000 consoles had sold.
*In the following years, everyone had a Pong knockoff, if not several. Atari capitalized with several more deluxe versions. Video games had arrived, in the arcade and in the living room.
*So, I purchased a really great little console, called the Atari Flashback. It’s a tiny little console that comes with a ton of old Atari games pre-loaded onto it. I anticipate using it a lot on this journey. It plugs neatly into my flatscreen via the Audio/Video ports. HDMI not available, of course. But we wouldn’t want these games to look too great, now would we?
*So, there were some differences but this is as close, I think, as I can get to really replicating the original Pong experience. The main difference is that the screen has a colored background here and the paddles and ball are also colored. In the original, of course, it was black & white and that was kind of it. And then games on this version go to twenty-one, not eleven. Hardly crippling.
*What I’m really looking for is the mechanical experience, the gameplay itself. And this does a good job duplicating it. The console I bought is the deluxe version, so it comes with two different kind of controllers. There’s the classic Atari joystick, but there’s also what are called Paddle Controllers.
*Dial based. Not shaped in any way like a paddle; they just have a picture of a ping pong paddle on them and were the original controllers for Pong so they’ve picked up the name paddle controllers. Anyway, it’s a dial you can turn to move your paddle up and down on the screen, exactly like the dials that were on the arcade cabinet and on the Home Pong console. So, let’s go.
*You can play the computer, as well as playing another person. I did most of my playing with the computer.
*So, this game is damned hard at first.
*I loaded it up and go! First game. A rousing victory for the computer: 21-0.
*That’s right, I said twenty-one to nothing. I managed to return maybe four or five shots. Otherwise, it was just my paddle wildly shooting up and down the screen as the ball just whizzed by.
*This game takes precision. I mean, you have to see where the ball is going and get your paddle there to block it, but the dials are damnably loose. They turn really freely and they encourage you to overshoot by making really big turns. Super responsive, I guess, you’d say and the freedom of movement isn’t like a joystick where you hit the range of motion really quickly on every side. You can turn these things a long, long time without hitting a stop on the dial. So they encourage big, fast moves while the game requires a slower, more precise style of play.
*I figured this out over a solid half-hour of playing without a single victory.
*These paddles are so small. I mean, they are barely bigger than the projectile, which is tiny. You have something like zero room for error which led to much groaning and sighing when the projectile would whiz by my paddle by what could fairly be called a hair’s breadth. I mean, this thing is brutal.
*I cannot tell you how thrilling it was to actually be in the lead at one point. At one point, I was in the lead 2-0 and that was so amazing.
*Then there was this real nail-biter. I mean, we were neck and neck all the way up to twelve or so and then the computer took the lead and I never took it back. But that one ended up computer victory 21-15, which I was super happy with.
*Anyway, at this point, after playing for half an hour, I discovered that you could toggle the difficulty.
*Right, so you can make the paddles bigger. I knew those damn things were way too small!
*So, you can make them both bigger or keep them both small or, if you want to be a bit more nuanced, you can make one paddle bigger and the other small.
*Which I then proceeded to do.
*Okay, so here’s the gauntlet I’m throwing down. Not that it’ll matter for a while. But I intend to beat these games. Not just play them for a while and then move on. I played Oregon Trail four times before I beat it. I’m now like well into the double digits on Pong, but I intend to win before I give up.
*This game doesn’t have levels you progress through or anything, but I need to at least win a match. I’ll count that as beating the game.
*But look, I’m not going to be a hard-ass and say I’m going to beat every game on the hardest difficulty. As I progress through this journey I anticipate picking up some mad skillz ( *sigh* ) so you know we’ll play it by ear. But for now, I’m looking at beating a game on the easy setting. I mean, it’s just the way I’m probably gonna have to go.
*So, I did indeed do the easy setting, giving myself a big paddle and the computer a small one.
*I almost immediately had two incredibly close games. The first one was just me and the computer trading the lead all the way down the line. And it wrapped up with a computer victory of 21-19. Let me tell you, there was some very loud shouting on the last couple of rounds of that particular game.
*By this time, I’d progressed to the point where I could keep the ball in motion for a substantial period of time, which is when the game really gets fun and the games start getting longer. When I first started the games were typically like two or three returns at best before somebody made a point. But now, the ball is in play for like fifteen to twenty returns on some of these plays and that is when it just becomes nail-bitingly intense and I was just gasping and shouting and everything.
*Seriously, no one has been this invested in a game of Pong for a good forty years.
*Then we had a game that was even more intense because we got to the last play of the game and we were tied 20-20. And this game, by the by, does not go by the classic “win by at least two points” rule, so we were dead-locked twenty to twenty and the next play would decide the game. White knuckled, I gripped the controller with sweaty palms.
*The bellow I unleashed when the computer took the point on that last play was epic, let me tell you. Let me tell you.
*But it was still a thrill. 21-20. Man, I was going to win soon, surely.
*And I did. Took a couple more games and not all of them were all that close, but I did eventually get the win by like 21-19. And that was a thrill.
*You guys . . . this game is ******* fun. I mean, it is fun as hell.
*And it is addictive. I mean, my second time playing the game, I played forty-five minutes without even looking at the clock and it did not seem like it when I finally checked the time. Because you just play and when the game is over, you just hit one button and start a new match. So, it’s just so easy to just play and play and play.
*I mean, I expect to keep playing this game. I’m ready to move on to the next game on the list now, but I played a few more matches of Pong after I won the other night and I think I’m gonna play more soon. I mean, it’s a blast.
*In short, it’s so obvious to me why this was the hit that it was. It’s just so fun. I can imagine the temptation to play another match even when it cost money was huge. It’s almost impossible to stop when all you have to do is click a button for a new match. I mean, the money must have been pouring into those machines.
*It might be too easy or something for people who are good at the more complex games of today, I don’t know. But it was challenging and fun and addictive. It could be frustrating, but always in a good way. And it just kept me really invested in the game. There would always be a huge groan when I missed a return by a tiny bit or the computer managed to return a really tricky shot I’d managed.
*Oh, I should talk a bit about strategy, I guess. It’s not always easy to control, but there are ways to put some English on the returns. If you hit the ball while the paddle is moving, it’ll send it off at an angle. Catching the ball with a corner of the paddle will send it off at an angle too and the corner tactic will speed the ball up really fast, which is when it gets easy to miss a return. So, if you like barely nick the ball with the corner of your paddle, it’ll just zoom to the wall and bounce and go off at another crazy angle and then it’ll be more likely to get through. Straight hits move kind of slow.
*And you could get in these loops where both paddles would just be absolutely still and the ball would just go back and forth. Like it was really easy to slip into a direct face off where the ball is just going back and forth in a straight line. I just sat back and watched that go for like twenty returns. The only way out is to move just a hair to try to catch the ball with the corner and angle it off.
*Sometimes those loops would happen in more surprising ways where the ball would have a couple of ricochets off the walls in between the paddles, but both paddles could still just remain absolutely still and the ball would just go back and forth.
*Anyway, I loved this game. It was so much fun. Harder than I expected. Actually took me a while to get good at it. And the better you are the more fun it gets because you’re able to keep the ball in play for longer periods.
*Wow. Pong. Great game. If you haven’t played it in a while, go check it out. Ideally with paddle controllers which adds a lot to the difficulty level of the game. But check it out online or something. If you’re a good gamer, it might not hold up. But if you’re like me, it might just suck you in. Forty-odd years on, Pong holds up.
*Next time, it’s another Atari game and another one I can use my Flashback console for. It’s Pong with an added twist and it’s a game with actual levels! Join me next time as we jump to 1976 and Breakout!