This is literally the first video game, give it five stars you cowards. I played this at a game design summer camp, and remember the guy who brought it saying "everyone always makes fun of it, and then they play it and have a blast" and he was right.

Updating this to say that I think what I actually played at game camp was Table Tennis on the Magnavox Odyssey, which actually predates this by a few months. I'll keep this review up because it's the 2nd most liked review on this game as of writing this, but yeah, whoops!

(played as part of ATARI 50)

Feels silly to try to put a score on this, so I'm not gonna. But it is fun! And incredibly interesting to think about in context.

My wife and I played it with ATARI 50's default setup of P1 on the left stick and P2 on the right, which cleverly imparts a bit of the old squished-together-at-a-cabinet feel. She beat me soundly. But being low attention span 2020s people who have been at least familiar with video games our whole lives, it didn't exactly thrill us for too long.

I love thinking about the throngs of people playing this in bars in the 70s, crowded around it for hours, amazed just by the very concept. An entirely new thing. I wish I could see footage of that. Some must exist somewhere.

Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine if someone came to you with a revolutionary new idea: eating food. They sell you on the concept with the promise of wonderful vitamins and nutrients and tastes that'll please your various taste buds. You're excited to try it, on the frontier of a new dawn, and then they give you the first food ever: a rock. After trying it, I don't know about you guys, but I would've beat the budding visionary senseless and concluded that eating food was a fool's endeavor.

It's kind of like that with Pong. We are so lucky that they didn't just scrap the entire concept of video games after this garbage came out. Yeah yeah it was a different time and they didn't have the same capabilities blah blah blah. Don't care, this game is terrible. It's so boring that scientists probably distilled it's essence for use as one of the main ingredients of Nyquil.

But on the other hand, god bless the individuals that saw potential in this mind-numbing snoozefest, and saw that video games could be bigger, better, and more imaginative than scuffed table tennis. Without them, we wouldn't have Valkyrie Profile.

I noticed a weird bug where the ball went through the paddles sometimes, the devs really should fix that on the next patch...

There's something so cosmically hilarious in the fact the CEO of Atari saw what would become one of the most influential piece of tech to ever be made as a ''fucking piece of trash'', and the main developer, Allan Alcorn, thought of it just as a side project where he did some things haphazardly to make his bosses weird-ass demands happy. It grounds the legend around Pong while being even more inspiring un a way.

It wasn't the first arcade machine, it wasn't the most creative thing you could do with the tech even back then, but damn if those beeps and boops aren't charming as hell and if playing alone isn't some of the most oddly interesting fun you could have with a game like this, even if sometimes hitting the ball when it respawns is even harder than when another player hits it back...

I could go on about Pong for 4000 words... except actually no, I couldn't; it's Pong, and beyond its unbelievably important historical value and rich history, it's still a game, and even more than half a century later, it still holds up as one.

A legacy that other games from back then and soon after do share, but one still worth praising nonetheless...

Half-Century Challenge Series: https://www.backloggd.com/u/C_F/list/half-century-challenge/

HCC #3 = Pong (1972)

If there is any game that can be called synonymous with video games, it's Pong. When the term "video game" was first coined, it was because the average gamer experience consisted of playing something like tennis or ping pong on their TV. It's no coincidence the term "video game" came into mass usage during the early 1970s, right when Pong exploded.

The importance of Pong cannot be overstated. Dedicated Pong consoles, arcade cabinets, Atari ports, etc all rose into prominence. The idea of porting a game a million times for accessibility, and the sheer mass appeal Pong had over prior 0 player games or text adventures? It's breathtaking how much came out of the game. Remember, just 10 years prior if one wanted to play Space War, there were only a couple locations on earth where they could do so. Pong was even designed with controllers in mind, an early prototype to things like the Atari controller and by proxy controllers by companies like Nintendo or Sega.

One could even call it the genesis point of multiplayer gaming. Being able to play against both AI and another human was beyond novel. Fighting game arcade modes? They owe their thanks to Pong. Which in hindsight, makes it funny that my first time playing Pong was via the embedded port in Mortal Kombat 2. You see, in Mortal Kombat 2 if you win 250 matches in a row, you get to play one round of pong. So one evening as a child, I spent what must have been 2 or 3 hours killing the fake player 2 in my copy of MK2, just to play Pong for 30 seconds. I felt like I had been massively trolled.

That tangent aside, I brought up mini consoles earlier. Indeed, even Nintendo got their start in the game industry with the Color TV Game 6 which was directly inspired by Pong's success. Let alone the NES Classic Mini and SNES Classic Mini some half century later.

It would be easy for me to look at Pong and go "who gives a fuck" but honestly, I can't help but admire this abstract world with nothing more than a few white pixels. Everything comes from something. Even if it's not the most fun game to a newcomer in 2024, it still has plenty of usages. After all, it's a great project to recreate in languages like GML for the sake of learning game development. In fact, a friend and I actually did that for a narrative driven minigame compilation game a while back. https://c-fhacks.itch.io/aikon

With its sheer influence on the industry, the fact it's so helpful for learning game development, and that it's perfectly playable, Pong deserves this score. Perhaps even higher.

Next time: Maze (1973)