8 ms·
Pong was boring, and people loved it
- bradleyankrom 4y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33419317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33419317 (7 days ago)
- crtified 4y agoIt looks more like 28 days ago, to be fair.
- ajuc 4y agoI was 5 or 6 when my uncle showed me ZS Spectrum he bought for 3 months of salary in late 80s. He only had pong and some logic games with him. It wasn't the famous Pong of course, but still - my mind was blown by the fact that you can control something on the TV. This was the moment I decided I want to be a programmer.
- dcminter 4y agoPresumably ZX rather than ZS? Three months salary sounds high - its main appeal in the UK was the very affordable price point and consequently their ubiquity leading to plentiful third party games. Were you in the UK? My Dad was in IT so I got exposed to a few earlier computers. What snagged me was discovering his ZX81 and reading enough of the manual to discover that I could write software myself! I think my Dad was a bit taken aback when I showed him my first program!
- nottorp 4y ago> Were you in the UK? Lol of course he wasn't. He was in Eastern Europe judging by price/salary.
- dcminter 4y agoOr they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import and they were not in the UK. Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!
- ajuc 4y agoMy uncle worked as an electrical engineer in a helicopter factory in Poland, he was middle class. It was communism so our salaries were just so shitty compared to the west. Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games. I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary. Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ajuc 4y agoYes, ZX Spectrum. I live in Poland, it was still communist at the time, anything from the west was crazy expansive, everybody thought my uncle was crazy when he bought the computer, but he was always a hobby electronic and early adopter.
- kcplate 4y agoSome of the best software devs I have ever met were some old graybeards who cut their coding teeth under the old Soviet umbrella. My theory is that the scarcity of cutting edge hardware forced folks to squeeze ever drop of capability out of the hardware that they had available to them via the software.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoLimitation breeds creativity.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pfdietz 4y agoI never loved Pong.
- effnorwood 4y ago
- reaperducer 4y agoI played the 2600 version of Pong a few weeks ago. Sure, it's simple. But it's still good. Just enough action to be entertaining, easy enough to understand immediately, and just hard enough to be challenging. It's a bit harder to play these days than when it was new. First, paddle controllers haven't aged well, and can be very hard to control if they're not recently refurbished. Second, modern TVs have lag. It's very tiny. Not enough to be noticeable with todays games and consoles. But on something as close to the hardware as Pong on a vintage machine, it's there. I thought maybe it was because of the composite encoding and decoding, so I switched to a machine with an RF connection and it was still there. Tiny, but there. I switched to an old portable tube TV with RF in, and it was perfect. Seems like there's too much going on with modern displays to handle simple things. I guess that's why my 4K LG TV takes longer to boot up than my tube TV takes to warm up.
- amelius 4y agoThe same holds for Flappy Bird. I would say it is based on very similar ideas.
- jccalhoun 4y agoThis is an oversimplified origin story. Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's Odyssey before he assigned Al Acorn with making a ping pong game. Bushnell claims he already had the idea of a tennis game before seeing the Odyssey and that is totally possible but Bushnell was clearly trying to outdo a competitor when he asked Acorn to create Pong and not simply some innocent exercise that turned into a huge success. Bushnell admits this in a 2006 email to Baer: "Your game clearly was on my mind when I gave Alcorn the project. I felt the Odyssey was not very fun and we could make it better. As you remember my tennis game postulated a bouncing ball more like Higgenbothems though I did not know about him at the time." https://thegamescholar.com/2022/06/26/the-final-correspondences-with-nolan-part-1-ralph-baer/ https://thegamescholar.com/2022/06/26/the-final-corresponden...
- pryelluw 4y agoBack then it was magic. That’s all that matters. The game can be made fun for sure. I used godot and some mortal kombat visuals to create what I called mortal pong (source code MIA). You basically had MK characters instead of paddles, the ball was the MK dragon logo, and you could perform special moves to beat your opponent. And of course you could do fatalities.
- oweiler 4y agoA MK pong sounds awesome! Are there any releases of your game?
- skhr0680 4y agoThere’s always “Noggin Knockers 2”
- toast0 4y agoPong Kombat is out there https://archive.org/details/PONGKOMB https://archive.org/details/PONGKOMB
- pryelluw 4y agoNo, sadly it is lost to the sands of time. I lost the source code and unaware of any copies floating around. It was still unfinished and rather buggy. The one posted below is a coincidence. I wasn’t aware there was one based on MK 1. Mine was based on MK 2.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoPong was absolutely NOT boring. Terrible clickbait title.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI thought it made a pretty good point that it was boring compared to things like pinball, yet was still massively popular.
- swores 4y agoSurely it's more simple but not more boring? (At least to many people, myself included, who spent more time enjoying pong than pinball.) edit: If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc. It's completely subjective (though a fact about everyone, nobody, or somewhere specific between finding something boring can be objective if taken from a good poll or whatever).
- boomboomsubban 4y ago>If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc. Even many baseball fans would say baseball is more boring, as soccer is designed to be 90 minutes of pure action while baseball is designed to spend much of the time waiting for the next pitch. People can like the "boring" thing more. Similarly, pinball was designed to be exciting with a bunch of fancy lights and sounds. Comparatively, early pong showed nothing but the two paddles and a ball and could make one sound. It was boring, people still loved it and sank thousands of hours in.
- stephencanon 4y agoDescribing soccer as “90 minutes of pure action” is … wow. I quite like soccer, but it’s about 5 minutes of action spread out amongst 85 minutes of preamble (the preamble is the interesting part, though, which is why I like it).
- micromacrofoot 4y agoBoring is always relative. It was actually quite exciting at the time. Interacting with your television was very novel.
- ghaff 4y agoAs I recall my introduction to Pong-- we got an early videogame console--it may have been a Magnavox Odyssey--for Christmas. And it was pretty cool. However, one of the controller connectors went bad fairly quickly. But, by that point, we were pretty much done with the entertainment value so we just returned it for a refund.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoWhat about mass group psychic SIGGRAPH '91 pong? [1] [1] https://vimeo.com/78043173 https://vimeo.com/78043173
- hondo77 4y agoYes! I was there and it was definitely not boring.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoThat's really exciting to hear, can you tell me more about being a first person participant?
- phkahler 4y agoI never saw Pong in the wild, but played a lot of early games and home games. A few years ago so guys at work were playing Mario Tennus on a Nintendo Switch. I tried it a few minutes and said "it's Pong" and was done. Fancy graphics and special moves (like Mortal Kombat) added to Pong did nothing for me. In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference. Anyway, Mario Tennis is just Pong but some people like it.
- revolvingocelot 4y agoDownvoting on HN is many things at once, but I hope the above comment remains readable. Beliefs like the one above are important because they help define the conceptual edges of categories, which cannot be surmounted and overcome until well-understood. Some might say, not unreasonably, that there's skill in applying/countering special moves in a similar way to countering some unexpected bankshot in Pong; those people are working from the more modern category of "asymmetrical character selection"-based videogaming. IMO the claim that Mario Tennis is Pong is verifiably correct, and it's also obviously wrong. Dropbox, as the infamous comment goes, "really is" "just" filesharing and -mirroring, scaled up -- and Dropbox is also something different than really flashy WebDAV.
- toast0 4y ago> Fancy graphics and special moves (like Mortal Kombat) added to Pong did nothing for me. Have you tried Pong Kombat [1], there's minutes of potential fun there. It may be your perfect blend of anti-fun though. [1] https://archive.org/details/PONGKOMB https://archive.org/details/PONGKOMB
- doix 4y agoMario Tennis (the Switch version at least, Mario Tennis 64 is closer to pong) is mostly a resource/meter management game in my eyes. The ball going back and forth and where it lands doesn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, it's almost secondary. It's more about knowing when to spend meter to score points/defend. > In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference. There's no memorization in Mario Tennis, is there? It's 4 possible moves or something, all tied to specific buttons. Also, FWIW, the skill in fighting games is knowing when to use special moves, not memorizing them. Anyone that has invested even a tiny amount of time getting good at a fighting game has memorized all the inputs/combos, that is not the challenging aspect of fighting games.
- hedora 4y agoAccording to my parents (but missed by the article), it was an extremely popular drinking game. There’s a reason the early units were mostly in bars.
- ranger207 4y agoPong is multiplayer. The addition of a real person playing the metagame against you is fundamentally different than any AI in single player
- pengaru 4y agoA few months ago I played a vintage Pong arcade cabinet @ Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, IL. It was the first time I ever played a real Pong cabinet. Both my friend and I agreed it was exceptionally good despite being such a simple game. The experience of playing it felt very analog and responsive with no perceivable latency. Galloping Ghost is a huge sprawling arcade where you pay a daily rate and can play all the games with effectively infinite quarters. So we played dozens of games that night, and there were very few games with such immediacy in the controls. That lack of latency made you feel 100% responsible for any mistakes. It was surprisingly addictive and competitive because there didn't seem to be anything to blame in terms of lossiness/non-determinism between the controls and what's happening on-screen. You were to blame, and it implied you could easily be better next time.