Question: What the heck is PONG supposed to be?

When you’re playing it, it feels like the video game representation of some real-life sport. You’re bouncing a ball back and forth with another player, which at first glance sounds a lot like like table tennis, AKA ping pong– and that would seem to explain the name. And yet, PONG is two-dimensional and free of gravity. The ball goes in a straight line, at a fairly constant rate of travel. And you don’t play ping pong by rotating a wheel. Come to think of it, it’s not a darned thing like ping pong. So what the heck is it?

To answer this important question, we built this real-life Tabletop Pong game.
Continue reading A playable game of Tabletop Pong →