November 29, 2006
The Pong Revolution Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:50 PM EST David Rapp’s AmericanHeritage.com piece today on Pong (“The Mother of All Video Games”) made me remember the oddly intense satisfaction of playing Pong in the early 1970s. As Mr. Rapp notes, people lined up for the right to pump quarters into the game when they encountered it in a bar, and my memory is that when a home version became available, adults—well, young adults—fought over the controls. Looking back on it, I suspect part of the pleasure was the rich, deeply pleasing and somehow persuasive sound the machine made when the bar of white light representing the paddle intersected the dot of white light representing the ball, coupled to the fact that the virtual paddle and the virtual ball seemed to obey the same physical laws as real ones did; it may sound strange to say this, but it was an astonishingly effective illusion. The game was by modern standards remarkably crude—as I remember it, a black-and-white screen with only one effective control, which let you move the paddle up and down on a single axis—but nothing else had ever looked and behaved like it. The modern video games I have seen always startle me by their absolutely unconvincing representation of whatever they are representing; Pong felt eerily real. Its charm probably derived from the collision of that apparent reality with its manifest and unique unreality. It was an image that seemed to behave like an object, and nothing had ever done that before. Although I spent my childhood watching ten or more hours of television a week, this game was the first TV-screen one anyone I knew had ever interacted with. It was gloriously new. More than a decade ago, maybe closer to two, I went out to the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, where a Pong set was proudly exhibited, with rather the same curatorial attitude that the British Museum might display in its placards for an exhibit of Etruscan or Inca toys. Seen in that museum, Pong already looked old, and it was almost incredible that it had ever given people such amazed delight. My sense of incredulity perhaps derived from the fact that I have found almost all subsequent video games barren sources of amusement. The only exceptions were a variant of Pong with a color screen, where the paddle made the ball demolish layers of colored brick-like shapes, and a truly wonderful game, again black and white, where two very simple icons representing spaceships, each possessing a limited supply of fuel, tried to shoot missiles at each other, with a variant that made the sun exert a gravitational field. These were a lot of fun, but they did not astonish. Pong, by contrast, had been something truly unprecedented; these were merely clever tweaks of the system. I think that if you played Pong when it first appeared, you experienced a sense of technophile wonder that was in its own small way more like the sensation felt by people who saw the first films than it was like almost any experience of a consumer product since that time. It was, I think, the first virtual reality most people had ever encountered. It was a new thing under the sun.
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