‘Pong’ is now half a century old. Pretty much exactly 50 years ago, Atari released Pong. It wasn’t the first video game ever created, nor the original take on virtual table tennis – But in Pong, the early video game industry was born in 1972. A few years later, the home version of Pong would become an instant success. The success of Pong and Home Pong gave Atari the resources and expertise needed to create the Atari 2600.
Nowadays you can play Pong on-line on your web browser.
Did you know that Pong type games were once included in several TVs as built-in feature? And that there was once also a “Pong In A Chip“?
And there were Finnish engineers from Salora involved in the creation process of that chip?
Read more from those links:
https://www.pong-story.com/gi.htm
https://www.v2.fi/uutiset/pelit/36483/Uusi-tieto-1970-luvun-TV-pelivillityksen-juuret-ovatkin-Suomessa-paivitetty/
https://www.v2.fi/uutiset/pelit/32045/Salora-Playmaster–esitelma-suomalaisesta-pelitelevisiosta-vuodelta-1977/
Salora Playmaster Mini Peek – rare gaming television from 1977
5 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
I had it on an Odyssey which that called it tennis before 1972 when Atari released Pong if I recall correctly. You not only had to watch where you let the ball hit the paddle, but it also had a knob to control the “English” on the ball.
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/ralph-baer-al-alcorn-pioneer-award-dice/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/14/resurrecting-pong-one-jumper-wire-at-a-time/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/15/inside-the-atari-2600/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How PONG Works: From Schematic to PCB to Console
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF7lo0vU_WI
See Pong brought into the 21st century with a new PCB from scratch, HDMI output, USB-C input, and more modern console touches.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Let Machine Learning Code An Infinite Variety Of Pong Games
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/let-machine-learning-code-an-infinite-variety-of-pong-games/
In a very real way, Pong started the video game revolution. You wouldn’t have thought so at the time, with its simple gameplay, rudimentary controls, some very low-end sounds, and a cannibalized TV for a display, but the legendarily stuffed coinboxes tell the tale. Fast forward 50 years or so, and Pong has been largely reduced to a programmer’s exercise to see how few lines of code can stand in for what [Ted Dabney] and [Allan Alcorn] accomplished. But now even that’s too much, as OpenAI Codex can generate a playable Pong from just a few prompts, at least most of the time.
Infinite pong games with Raspberry Pi Pico-W
Use PicoW for connect to OpenAI Codex and generate a new game each
https://hackaday.io/project/188096-infinite-pong-games-with-raspberry-pi-pico-w
In this project I will explore the possibilities of the OpenAI API to generate code on the fly, without any human intervention.