Review: Back to the 70s - Pong (Atari, 1972)

The 1970s was a dawn of a new era in gaming, The all great grand-daddies of the newer generation of gaming started in the form of video gaming. It started in the development of a game entertainment system for homes (dubbed as "Interactive television" at the time). The Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 was the result of the 21 long years of conceptualization, exploration, and design.

The Magnavox Odyssey, The first ever home video game console

The Odyssey is nothing more than two paddles that can be moved horizontally and vertically through the dials (the rotary thing on the box-looking controller), don't believe me, look at this:

The actual screen of a TV hooked on to a Magnavox Odyssey.

But wait, does it feel familiar? Whether it is the two moveable paddles on the screen or the lack of certain graphics thereof, this console inspired to create one of the most well-renowned grand-daddies of video game of all time, and that is..... *drumroll*

Pong.

Pong is a game created by Atari in 1972, it is a recreation of a game of table tennis (ping pong) to a video game. where a player plays a match against another or a pre-programmed computer. When it is initially set up in a small bar, the game was an instant hit. The day after, the arcade machine was receiving complaints of quarters not being able to be inserted in the slot, after close inspection, the coin box was fully loaded with coins that it can't take more.

...And that's when the video game industry sparked the breath of life...

Pong itself has a simple game mechanics of two player, or a player against a computer, moving the paddle back and forth via the means of a rotary controller (much like the odyssey), several re-creations of Pong has different controllers such as keyboard input (up and down) or a mouse input (the paddle moves vertically with the mouse).

The ball in play would start to move towards one paddle, and the direction where the ball moves next would be indicated with the position of where the ball has landed on the paddle, if the ball hits the paddle on the right end, the ball would move towards the right, and vice versa, if the ball hits the paddle on the left, the ball would move towards the left. Both players would try to return each other's ball movement and will score if the ball passes the paddle of the other player.

Paddles are being moved to return the ball towards the opponent

The goal of this game is simple; it is to score as many as possible while conceding as little as possible from the other player, like a table tennis match would. The limits of the player being considered a winner may vary between Pong consoles and variations, some Pong variations would consider a player would win after reaching a certain points, some would have a time limit and the player with the highest score wins, but most of them would just play until the players stop playing.

Boom, I scored!

The difficulty level of this game also varies to the kind of Pong variations that are present, some Pong games are incredibly and impossibly difficult, because the computer would know where exactly the ball is going to land and position the paddle on that spot. Other Pong games, not as so, because the computer is programmed to return most of the shots but not all.

An impossibly hard Pong game, I don't score at all

Other than it being a simulation of a table tennis match, the game simply has no story to imply howsoever, one could call it, a never-ending table tennis match of two competitors fighting to get higher score than the other.

At the time, Pong was considered revolutionary and took shape of the video game arcades that we know now. At that time, a single Pong machine could take in up to $40 a day, which equates to 160 plays, it was rare then for an arcade machine to produce that much of an income. Pong generated a huge pubic attraction and became one of the video games that will surely go down in history.

Play the remake of Pong in Java here!