50 Years of Video Games: Pong (Arcade)

While the first publicly available video game released in 1971, people would not really take notice of interactive digital entertainment until almost a year later when in 1972 Pong helped kick this new medium into gear. Pong’s importance is so great that it’s not hard to find someone holding the erroneous belief that Pong was the first video game ever released, but Computer Space holds that title despite not really being known to most outside of those deeply invested in the hobby, Pong instead getting the consolation prize of being the first commercially successful video game. For the 50 Years of Video Games series I am electing to start the year after Computer Space came out so we can follow the popular games for each year from when the public first embraced video games to their monumental success as the most popular entertainment medium today, but you can always go back and look at my Computer Space article as a sort of unofficial start to this before we dive in and explore a game most anyone reading this already knows.

Pong is, at its heart, an incredibly simple game that can be easily gleaned by simply viewing it in action. On screen, two white vertical bars are positioned on their own half of the screen, a dotted line splitting the black play field down the middle. Above both halves of the screen are large white numbers, this representing the score of the player assigned to each of the white bars. A small white dot will appear in the play field, and if it manages to get past either bar, a point is scored by the opposing side. Many people are tempted to compare Pong to tennis or table tennis, and Pong was not even the first game to really use this idea since Table Tennis on the Odyssey is pretty close in design to Pong and came out earlier. However, I have always thought of Pong more like air hockey, both players essentially guarding a very large goal by shifting their paddle up or down to block and hit the ball back to the other side. Unlike air hockey you can’t move your paddles horizontally at all, but the tennis comparison is also flawed since in tennis the players can in fact get closer to the net and even in table tennis there’s a required bounce on the table not present in Pong’s design.

The play in Pong is pretty easy to pick up, the game ending once one side has reached eleven points. Controlling your paddles is surprisingly intuitive and deeper than one might expect, this mostly coming down to Atari managing to strike on a very effective control method. In this multiplayer game each player controls their paddle with a knob they twist, this giving players a good degree of minute control if they want to adjust its position slightly but the player can also easily twist it more quickly if they need to reach a speedy ball in a hurry. Pong has been remade, copied, rereleased, and adjusted in many ways since its initial arcade debut, but the knob does feel like it might be one of the best ways of controlling it. Something like a computer mouse, VR controller, or touchpad can give people much more precision in moving the paddle, but those perhaps make it too easy. On the other hand though, controlling the paddle with buttons means it can’t handle the minute movements as well since most buttons only detect if they are either pressed or not pressed so it is hard to handle the range of possible speeds the paddle would need to move at. Joysticks of the time were not as good at reading pressure so they would not offer the minute control a knob can provide. The fact that controllers with knobs on them would become referred to as paddle controllers almost entirely comes from their utility in controlling the paddles in Pong says a lot for how iconic these simple yet elegant knobs fit the game.

However, Pong’s real key to success isn’t just the knobs but the paddles themselves. The actual white bars that represent your paddle in-game are surprisingly small. It’s essentially twice as tall as the ball it needs to hit and the vertical height of the screen is large enough to fit over ten of them if they were stacked on top of each other, so actually moving to properly catch the ball isn’t an easy feat. Later iterations of the game would sometimes increase the size of the paddles to make it easier and allow for more of a volley, but the tiny paddles actually lead to a very zippy game where players are always asked to pay attention to the ricochet of the ball and need to keep adjusting since they can’t just idle a large barrier in the approximate area the ball is headed. You won’t be able to lean on luck to succeed in Pong so both players are consistently involved in the bid to stay alive and earn points as they try to come out on top.

The paddles continue to provide the secret ingredient that likely helped Pong become so iconic thanks to the intelligent work of Allan Alcorn. Tasked by Nolan Bushnell to make a prototype tennis game similar to ones the Atari founder had seen before, Allan took some initiative beyond the scope of the project and had the tiny paddles actually ricochet the ball differently based on where they were hit. This does mean the physics of Pong are deliberately inconsistent at parts, hitting the ball squarely in the middle of the paddle results in a 90 degree return regardless of the approaching angle while seven other small segments of this already small paddle hit it at various angles. Luckily it never feels like it’s producing a completely illogical return and it ricochets off the top and lower bounds of the play area with reasonable reliability, but this does mean that how the ball is hit can change how it moves so you can try to deliberately influence its path rather than being purely responsive to how the ball flies.

If both players are fairly reactive and understand the paddle’s intricacies though, things will not necessarily end in a stalemate. Over time the ball in play will move faster to make it harder to keep up and plan your returns, the speed eventually resetting to its more manageable easy starting pace once a side has scored. A simple idea but one that ensures Pong doesn’t drag and that matches can reach a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time, this certainly being one of the areas where the knobs do better than something with perfect movement control since it becomes harder to perfectly respond to the rapidly ricocheting square on screen. Pong’s sound design is limited but the bouncing noise actually helps to crank up the intensity a little as that speed up begins, the simple “boop”s of hitting the screen’s edges or a paddle helping to add an almost metronomic quality to the play until there’s finally the release from the building tension as a low drone signals that the ball has slipped past a player.

There is definitely a lot that works in Pong, a string of small but well-conceived ideas chained together into something easy enough to get into. Its simplicity is almost its only fault though. Even with the different launch angles based on the part of the paddle hit there’s not much to latch onto and the amount of strategy you can derive from that is limited and often doesn’t impact the play too much since the action is still mostly tied to player responsiveness rather than trying to outsmart the opponent. In tennis, table tennis, and even air hockey there are more rules in place and options to your movement, but Pong will always be about trying to keep that central ball bouncing. It’s built around that idea well enough to the point it both worked in its time and can still provide a decent time now, but its appeal is probably closer to thumb wrestling where it can be fun to play and it isn’t totally straightforward but it’s not something most people would get too invested in when considering its inherent merits.

THE VERDICT: Pong caught on the way it did because it provided a simple package that was tuned to provide that simple appeal excellently. It can’t rise above the basics of hitting a ball back and forth in a simplified sport, but the paddle sizes, the knob controllers, and little touches like the different launch angles mean it can be somewhat amusing when two people decide to play it. It can be idly addicting in the same way bouncing a rubber ball against a wall can be and the social angle of a mildly engaging activity with another human being can enhance how playing it is remembered, but what Pong really is best viewed as is a very solid starting line for the industry because while it’s not the first game ever made by any stretch, it is the one that caught on and helped lay down the fundamentals for a wellspring of successful titles after.

And so, I give Pong for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. The idea that something that did no wrong is perfect feels like it misses the point of why a game can be enjoyable. Games need to do right as well to be appealing, and you can even say not doing more right is a flaw in itself. I’m sure most people who would declare Pong one of the best games ever either barely touch the medium or really just mean one of the most important games ever, but I do not want to fill this section with too much negativity. Pong is a remarkably strong first outing from the then newly formed Atari and at least deserves to represent the medium and its history when it comes to popular culture. It is a tight, easy to understand experience that isn’t so simple it’s dull but also isn’t so complex that people unfamiliar with digital entertainment would struggle to understand it. Video games are a medium with so much potential and creativity though that acting like Pong was somehow the apex when things barely kicked off feels unusually dismissive, but I also don’t want to undermine Allan Alcorn’s intelligent approach to design. Video games have evolved so much from this first big success, but it being a big success shows that it did do something right. However, looking at all the wonderful niches various titles have filled since then shows that something can be higher in quality even if it ends up with them having a few more visible flaws despite greater successes.

Pong is rudimentary, and that is its advantage and disadvantage both. It provides a flash of fun but not to such a degree that it can get its hooks in you, its charm simple and somewhat universal but needing more to rise above being a fairly sound baseline for how a game design can work. 50 years later it can still provide decent fun and 50 years from now it will probably still be able to do so but there are so many more ways a game can engage with a player that overstating its appeal and quality does no one any favors. It is a piece of plain bread that fed the world well when they didn’t even know they were hungry for video games, but the flavors we’ve discovered since then don’t deserve to be diminished simply because there’s something simple and functional still here. Basically what it comes down to is Pong definitely deserves some praise for the things it did, but let’s not get carried away when evaluating a fairly basic game about hitting a ball back and forth even if it did take me 2000 words to adequately do so.