100000 Years of PONG

[mezrabad]

This November will mark the 100000 anniversary of PONG. (32 years = 100000 in binary)

Since the game wasn't digital, I'm not entirely sure if it is appropriate to acknowledge the 100000 (base 2) anniversary, but I'm using it as a vehicle to ask the Olde people here, the really Olde people, the ones who are so old they fart dust, to share their first PONG experience.

Now, I'm talking about the 1972 Atari PONG arcade game that you might have played back in the day and not at a classic gaming expo or in a Java applet. Nobody under 30 need answer, as you wasn't even born yet. Unless, of course, you played the actual machine when it was a living relic, say, in the arcades of Wildwood, NJ or elsewhere.

My PONG experience was when I was at a Brunswick bowling alley in or near New Paltz, New York circa 1973. I was five or six and had about 45 cents to spend on a snack from a vending machine. Instead, I chose to put the quarter portion of my small population of coins in to the strange game near the pool tables. My brother (who was 3 or 4) and I watched, completely clueless, as ball after ball went past our paddles. I finally clued in, slightly, when I realized the knobs moved the paddles. I managed to hit the ball back . . . once, before time ran out or the score went past a certain point. (I don't remember which). I have no memory of the sound effect.

My brother refused to spend HIS money on such an unworthy cause and insisted on the acquisition of a snack. We came back to where my mom was bowling and she asked me where my snack was. I told her it was in the "yellow game". She seemed to accept that, and we moved on. Never played it or saw it again in person, at least as far as I remember.

Please share your PONG memories with us!!!

[Hovoc]

i ordered a super pong off ebay once, does that count?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/hovocx/random/superpong.jpg

[mezrabad]

heh, well, it counts for super pong, kinda sorta, well, not really.

I was hoping to get to hear stories from people who played PONG back when they'd never seen another videogame before in their lives. Was it entirely alien to them (like it was to me and my brother) or did they jump right in and understand immediately? Did they see it with lots of other people playing it or was it pre-popular or at a slow time of day?

Since there really weren't "video arcades" to go to, you had to be lucky to see one, I guess, especially if you were under the "going to bars" age. Maybe I just happened to be lucky that my rarely visited (by me) local bowling alley had one.

But 38,000 of these things were made. Didn't anyone here play them back in 1973? I *can't* be the only one here that did that.

[Iron Draggon]

My sister and I used to play Pong all the time. Both of our parents bowled in leagues, so we grew up in bowling alleys, and that's really where my love for video games & pinballs and arcades in general began. I remember playing all the newest arcade games as they came out, including all the semi-video games like those projection screen driving games and light gun games that worked on the same principles. So yeah, I've seen it all, but unfortunately I never played some of them. I developed my favorites and kept going back to those, instead of just trying every new game that showed up, but if it drew a crowd of course eventually I'd have to check it out. And you know that Pong used to draw crowds. My sister and I even played doubles when the newer version came out, if I remember correctly, but that might've just been some knock-off machine and not an official version of Pong, I dunno.

So what did I think of it? Well at first I didn't like it, because I preferred to play pinball, and for a little kid I was pretty damn good on some machines. I remember one time at a pizza parlor that I had a line of bigger kids waiting behind me, while I racked up a shitload of free games. I played that machine for so long that my parents finally made me leave and give all my free games to all the kids that were lined up behind me. And I know I had at least 10 freebies. Anyway, playing Pong was just too slow paced by comparison for me, so the only reason I really played it was because my sister loved it and she always wanted to play. And of course it was much better with two than it was with one, so we played and played and played. Then the next thing we knew, there were more and more new kinds of video games, and all with the same simple white vector graphics. When the first machines with the cellophane color strips came out, we thought that was the biggest deal, because all videogames before that had those same boring white vector graphics. But we didn't really mind, because it was still cool that there were so many different kinds of games coming out. If it had a screen, it was cool, no matter how lame it was. That really was the way it was to us back then.

However, my favorite video game was a driving game. I don't remember what it was called, but you controlled an F1 racer in a grand prix race. All you did was drive straight the whole time and dodge cars as you passed them, but it was cool as hell. It was a top-down view, and you got points for how many cars you passed. But you also got points for how fast you went, so the idea was to go as fast as possible while passing as many cars as possible. It sounds simple, since there were no curves at all in the track, but it really wasn't very easy, because it went FAST when you were in high gear. You had a steering wheel, a gas pedal, a brake, and a gear shifter with lo & hi gears, very similar to Turbo, but with plain white vector graphics that had a simulated cellophane green color on some later models of the machine. Anyhow, one time I was "in the zone" on that machine, and I got to a point where there were no other cars. I guess I had passed them all and the machine was rolling over or something, because I drove at top speed for a long time with nothing at all to dodge anymore, which was very surreal, because there were ALWAYS other cars to dodge in that game. Even my parents were freaking out as they watched me, and we were all mesmerized by it. Remember, I was just a little kid, so that was a real trip in itself! Then finally the cars started coming at me again, and I quickly wrecked because I had driven for so long with nothing to dodge. It was really wild, we all thought that I must've broken the machine, or something really special was about to happen. We were convinced that it was gonna say that I had won the race or something, because there were no more cars left to pass.

But getting back to Pong, I got over it very quickly by the time stuff like Asteroids and Space Invaders came out. I played Circus and Death Race 2000 and all that stuff. And I was a very lucky kid too, because with my parents bowling in those leagues for hours at a time, they would just give me and my sister each a whole roll of quarters for the arcade, and we literally lived between there and the snack bar. And if we ran out of quarters, our parents would just give us another roll, because the arcade was literally our babysitter. It wasn't like it is now where you'd be very worried about leaving very small children unattended in a place like that, so we really lived it up. I even could've had my first sexual experience around the age of 12 with a guy who was trying to pick me up in one of those bowling alley arcades one time, while I was playing (getting destroyed at) Defender, but he was very drunk and I decided that I didn't want my first time to be with some drunk guy in a bowling alley restroom. It sure was tempting though! But perhaps I'm sharing a bit too much now, so let's just say yeah, I remember too! LOL

[mezrabad]

LOL, cool! I remember that car game, too! I was never any good at it, though, I remember trying it a few times. Addictive yet frustrating.

The only other games I remember having regular access to in a bowling alley was a pinball game called 8-ball and Gunfight (or Boothill) circa 1977/78. Except by that time, I was the one bowling, so I didn't get to play them too often.