A single straight line takes the least time to cross the field but is easier to anticipate, where bouncing diagonals take longer but their positioning is harder to predict. The sides deflect at greater angles but come with increased risk of missing the side edges produce the sharpest angles but the player has to move the paddle into the ball to hit it, the game’s riskiest move. The middle of the paddle is the safest point because of its surface area but reflects the ball at the same angle it hits. Pong’s simple gameplay means equally simple strategy. Pong’s simple graphical user interface keeps track of every point and declares a victor. This is determined by the size of the player’s paddle and the angle of attack.
The gameplay from there is geometry and physics, how fast the ball moves and at what angle.
Similarly, Pong’s two-dimensional gameplay involves angling the ball into an opponent’s goal on a flat, enclosed play field the size of the screen. Despite famously named after table tennis, Atari’s Pong is actually most closely-related to air hockey with its pneumatic table and hovering disk, itself a simplified version of the real-life sport. To examine the two sides of this one gameplay coin, let’s look at one of the first digital sports before exploring how its design evolved from humble beginnings into lightning quick games that required new strategies.ĭue to limited processing power, early computing could only render a few graphical elements at a time. This means that a game consists of mechanical actions and the systems that produce them.
Of course, creating an action videogame is more involved than creating a real-world sport because physical factors such as gravity and acceleration just exist in reality, where a computer running the game must not only keep track of the rules but create the physic systems that affect them. Basketball is basically this idea off the ground, where a ball is bounced and thrown into a smaller goal suspended in the air. Soccer and hockey both divide the court into halves controlled by one side and players move the ball or puck along the ground and try to hit it into the opposing side’s goal blocked by their defender. Many of the world’s most famous sports use a variation on one of these structures. Since both sides have their own goal, each has to think offensively and defensively, knowing when to strike to get the upper hand while making sure they don’t create an opening for their opponent. Over time, designs have been built up and refined into different sets of rules and placed into confined courts. Most sports follow the same basic ideas- two teams compete to overcome the other through athletic and mental ability to reach a goal worth a preset number of points, and declare the one with the highest score after a set period of time the winner.
The competitive desire is so innate to the human condition that sports have existed since before history itself. This is especially true of Pong’s iconic gameplay, turning the bouncing ball structure into the wildly different Windjammers and Lethal League while still retaining its spirit. The history of videogames is packed with examples of games that started as simple versions of real life activities only for their designs to evolve into lifelike simulations of the original, but just as important is how different genres can be combined in infinite ways to make new styles.
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