Posted on 10/30/2022 2:41:55 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Yep, I’m old. I played Pong.
Then Asteroids came along and blew it away.
First played Pong in the Pinball arcades.
Boring? I am sure Pong died out because the Democrats found it too mentally straining and confusing. Gave them a headache trying to cope.
Then a local pizza joint got a version where you could move the paddle anywhere you wanted on your side of the net.
And it was all over after that.
She uses a lot of words and letters to say “I’m stupid”.
I recall some iteration of the game that a neighbor kid had where you could induce some “english” to the ball by swiping the paddle as you hit it. He knew about it and I didn’t and, man, he kicked my ass for a few rounds.
“Boring?”
It was high tech stuff at the time! We used to have elimination tournaments for a cash pot. There would be 20-30 people. lol
Your optimism is wonderful. What makes you think that there will be anyone still talking in 50 years?
I remember you could put English on it!
If hes a gen x’er, he could have grown up with it.
1964-1980, roughly is where they count them.
Ah, those ubiquitous plastic tables. Shelves too.
I don’t remember the wood grain on the console. I must have had the cheap one.
This was trumped by “tanks”.
It was too easy to bump the console right as the "ball" got to your opponent's paddle.
No, I did not master that tactic.
Super simple but took some pretty serious eye-hand coordination when you had the speed cranked up (seems like it had three speeds). Plus the social aspect mentioned in the article — head to head against another person. A close game could be truly exciting for both players and “crowd.”
A friend had the early Atari and I played at his house. It’s hard for younger people to appreciate the novelty of Pong when it came out. That was part of the attraction, and it was fun to be able to play this simple game on a TV screen. I played and liked a lot of the older games, but I don’t have the patience or the coordination for the newer ones. Maybe that’s the secret of Pong’s popularity: anyone could play it.
I had a home version of this game around the 1975 period. I remember there being a “hockey” version of it too that had extra paddles to move around. Very primitive. Yet at the time, it was the epitome of high tech. “What will they come up with next” was my father’s attitude towards it.
My parents had a Pong box on a TV in the early 80s. I played it a few times, but it was indeed boring. Never have cared for video games except for a few card games.
He also has a place in the history of video games for his 1958 creation of Tennis for Two, the first interactive analog computer game and one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display.Give credit where credit is due.
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