What this game is
Pong is two sticks and a square. Of all the expressive means video games have, only the angle of a rebound is left here — and that turns out to be enough for a real match.
The whole point hides in one rule: the rebound depends on which part of the paddle hit the ball. The middle sends it back almost straight, the edge sends it back steeply. So you are not merely returning the ball, you are choosing where to send your opponent — and deciding how much time you leave yourself for the next return.
Rules
- The blue paddle on the left is yours, the red one on the right belongs to the computer.
- Controls: the up and down arrows, W and S, the mouse over the field, or a finger on a touch screen. The paddle does not teleport: it has its own top speed and drives towards the cursor.
- A ball that flies past a paddle gives the opponent a point.
- After a point the ball is served from the centre to whoever just conceded, at a small random angle, after a short "Ready…" pause.
- The match runs to 11 points. The score sits on the card beside the field.
- The ball mirrors off the top and bottom walls. There is no wall behind the paddles — that is the goal.
- The rebound off a paddle is set by the point of contact: the further from the middle, the steeper the angle, up to roughly 55 degrees.
- Every hit speeds the ball up. Between the serve and the ceiling it more than doubles, which is why long rallies end far faster than they started.
How to play better
- Watch the trajectory, not the ball. Go where it will be, not where it is — at high speed that difference decides the rally.
- Come back to the middle after every hit. From the centre any point is reachable in the least time, and that is cheaper than guessing.
- Use the edge of the paddle deliberately. A steep angle drives the ball to the far side, but it also travels slower across the field, so your opponent has time to get there. A fast flat ball through the middle is sometimes nastier than a pretty diagonal.
- Treat a wall bounce as a mirror: unfold the field beyond the wall in your head and the ball travels in a straight line. The landing point then takes a second to work out instead of a guess.
- The mouse is better for fine adjustment, the keys for a long dash across the field. You can switch between them mid-rally.
- Your opponent makes one error per attack, and it is a new one every time. Do not treat it as predictable — but do not treat it as unbeatable either: it is not faster than you at any level.
A bit of history
Atari released Pong on 29 November 1972. Allan Alcorn built it, and he built it as a training exercise: co-founder Nolan Bushnell handed the new engineer a simple task to warm up on. The result was convincing enough that the company decided to manufacture it for real.
It was not, however, first. A tennis game had already appeared on the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console, designed by Ralph Baer; Bushnell had seen the Odyssey demonstrated some months before he set Alcorn the task. In 1974 Magnavox sued Atari and other manufacturers for patent infringement, in what became the first major court case in video game history.
Still, it was Pong that carried video games out of the laboratories and into bars and arcades. By the end of 1972 thousands of machines had shipped across the United States, and the arcade industry is usually dated from them.
This version follows the applet that ran on this site from 2005: the same two paddles and the same accelerating ball, a match to eleven points, and three levels of opponent.
About the levels
There is an awkward truth here: a paddle that tracks the ball perfectly cannot be beaten at all. It simply never misses, and the match never ends. So the levels do not limit the opponent's intelligence, they limit two entirely physical things — reaction and precision.
Paddle speed. It is 3.6 pixels per frame on Easy, 4.8 on Hard and 6.2 on Expert, against your 6.6. Even Expert is slower than you, deliberately so: anything faster than you would mean nothing ever gets past it.
Aim error. Before each attack the computer rolls one random offset and keeps it for the rest of the rally. The spread is about a quarter of the paddle height on Easy, an eighth on Hard and a twentieth on Expert. Rerolling the error every frame would be pointless: it would average out to zero and leave a paddle that never misses again.
Easy cannot read the flight at all. It reaches for the ball's current height, and only starts moving once the ball is past the middle of the field.
Hard works out the landing point in advance, wall bounces included — by exactly that mirrored unfolding of the field — and heads there the moment the ball turns its way.
Expert aims on top of that. When the ball crosses the middle it compares 49 possible contact points on its own paddle once and picks the one you fall shortest of: for each it computes where the ball would land, how far you could travel during the flight, and by how much you would miss. It is deliberately not allowed to redo that plan every frame — otherwise the paddle starts chasing you and oscillates itself out of the rally.