Pong

Pong or usually marketed as PONG (all upper-case letter) is a two-dimensional tennis sports game, and is one of the earliest arcade video games. PONG was released in 1972, was published and developed by Atari Inc., a video game company founded in the same year by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Back to when PONG was released, PONG was one of the video game, which reached mainstream popularity.

Interactive

PONG is a very simple game, yet exciting game. PONG imitates the gameplay of tennis sport, which has two players. One player plays on the left side, and another plays on the opposite side. In PONG game each player controls an in-game paddle by moving it up and down. The players use paddle to hit a ball back and forth. When the ball touches the paddle, the ball bounces to the other side. The aim of this game is to get more points, points are earned when one player fails to return the ball to the other. To move the paddle, the players need to press 'W' or 'S' keys to move it up and down consecutively, or simply move the mouse up and down.

Setting

PONG is a two-dimensional game. Back to the earlier days when PONG was released, the setting of the game is black and white, where paddles, ball, and the barrier are in white; the rest is in black colour. However, today, we can play this classic game on Atari Arcade website, and the game is redesigned to be more attractive, and more colour involved, such as gradient colour white for the ball's colour, paddle's colour of each side is now distinguished, and the rest are in gradient colour of black (not a flat black colour). There are some cool effects added as well, such as the effect of the ball moving, the ball bouncing off of the paddle, and the effect of celebration when one side gets points.

Original Design of PONG

The Design of PONG Today

Fireworks effects adds excitement of the game

Goal

The goal of PONG game is similar to tennis game in sport, which is to earn more points. To earn more points, one must be able to return the ball to the opponent side, and if the opponent side could not return it back to the other side, then the opponent side is fail, and the other side gets the point.

Challenge

The challenge in PONG game is, the paddle can't be moved to the tip of the corner, this makes a little gap which a ball can pass. With this gap, we can control the paddle so that the ball would pass the gap. However, to control the paddle is not easy, due to the ball is moving and we have to predict the correct location of the paddle.

Again, another challenge is to return the ball to the opponent side. The ball movement is dynamic, according to the force of paddle gives to the ball. Because of the dynamic, we have to predict where should we move the paddle in order to get the ball touches the paddle and returns the ball to the opponent side.

All images is derived from: PONG — Atari.com & Wikipedia.com
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