Read Online The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World by Steven Kent - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Kent
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expensive parts. Bushnell’s original vision included paddles that simply batted the ball in the direction it had come from. Feeling that this was inadequate, Alcorn devised a way to add English to the game and aim the ball with the paddles.
Instead of using solid lines to represent paddles, Alcorn broke the paddles into eight segments. If the ball hit the two center segments of the paddle, it flew straight back at a 180-degree angle. If the ball hit the next segments, it ricocheted off at a shallow angle. Hitting the ball with the outer edges of the paddle would send the ball back at a 45-degree angle.
Alcorn also added ball acceleration. The original game simply buzzed along at the same speed until someone finally missed the ball. Alcorn found the game dull and thought that speeding the ball during extended rallies might lend some excitement. He wrote the game so that after the ball had been hit a certain number of times, it would automatically fly faster.
A certain mythology has arisen about the creation of
Pong.
People have written about the meticulous effort that went into creating the resonant pong-sound that occurred whenever the ball struck a paddle. According to Alcorn, that sound was a lucky accident.
Here I was developing this thing and feeling kind of frustrated because it already had too many parts in it to be a successful consumer product. So Ifelt like I was failing, and Nolan didn’t mention that the game had come off better than he’d expected.
Now the issue of sound … People have talked about the sound, and I’ve seen articles written about how intelligently the sound was done and how appropriate the sound was. The truth is, I was running out of parts on the board. Nolan wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands—the approving roar of cheering people when you made a point. Ted Dabney told me to make a boo and a hiss when you lost a point, because for every winner there’s a loser.
I said, “Screw it, I don’t know how to make any one of those sounds. I don’t have enough parts anyhow.” Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in a half a day. They were the sounds that were already in the machine.
—Al Alcorn
Pong
played more like squash than ping-pong. Thanks to Alcorn’s segmented paddle, it had become a game of angles, in which banking shots against walls was an important strategy. Players controlled inch-long white lines that represented racquets, which they used to bat the small white square that represented the ball. The background was black.
The game was streamed through a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television that Alcorn picked up at a nearby Payless store. He set the television in a four-foot tall wooden cabinet that looked vaguely like a mailbox. Since the printed circuit boards hadn’t been made, Alcorn had to hard-wire everything himself. The inside of the cabinet had hundreds of wires soldered into small boards and looked like the back of a telephone-operator’s switchboard.
It took Alcorn nearly three months to build a working prototype. His finished project surprised Bushnell and Dabney. Instead of giving them an interesting exercise, Alcorn had created a fun game that became their flagship product. Bushnell named the game
Pong
and made a few changes, including adding a bread pan for collecting quarters and an instruction card that read simply, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” To test the game’s marketability, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a location along the Atari pinball route.
Our initial idea was to go into business as a contract design firm and sell our ideas to others for licensing. We had a contract with Bally to design a video game for them, and we saw it as being a big, pretty long project.
So I had Al do this
Pong
game, this ping-pong game. And, dammit, it was fun. We tweaked it a little and it was more fun, and we thought to
Instead of using solid lines to represent paddles, Alcorn broke the paddles into eight segments. If the ball hit the two center segments of the paddle, it flew straight back at a 180-degree angle. If the ball hit the next segments, it ricocheted off at a shallow angle. Hitting the ball with the outer edges of the paddle would send the ball back at a 45-degree angle.
Alcorn also added ball acceleration. The original game simply buzzed along at the same speed until someone finally missed the ball. Alcorn found the game dull and thought that speeding the ball during extended rallies might lend some excitement. He wrote the game so that after the ball had been hit a certain number of times, it would automatically fly faster.
A certain mythology has arisen about the creation of
Pong.
People have written about the meticulous effort that went into creating the resonant pong-sound that occurred whenever the ball struck a paddle. According to Alcorn, that sound was a lucky accident.
Here I was developing this thing and feeling kind of frustrated because it already had too many parts in it to be a successful consumer product. So Ifelt like I was failing, and Nolan didn’t mention that the game had come off better than he’d expected.
Now the issue of sound … People have talked about the sound, and I’ve seen articles written about how intelligently the sound was done and how appropriate the sound was. The truth is, I was running out of parts on the board. Nolan wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands—the approving roar of cheering people when you made a point. Ted Dabney told me to make a boo and a hiss when you lost a point, because for every winner there’s a loser.
I said, “Screw it, I don’t know how to make any one of those sounds. I don’t have enough parts anyhow.” Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in a half a day. They were the sounds that were already in the machine.
—Al Alcorn
Pong
played more like squash than ping-pong. Thanks to Alcorn’s segmented paddle, it had become a game of angles, in which banking shots against walls was an important strategy. Players controlled inch-long white lines that represented racquets, which they used to bat the small white square that represented the ball. The background was black.
The game was streamed through a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television that Alcorn picked up at a nearby Payless store. He set the television in a four-foot tall wooden cabinet that looked vaguely like a mailbox. Since the printed circuit boards hadn’t been made, Alcorn had to hard-wire everything himself. The inside of the cabinet had hundreds of wires soldered into small boards and looked like the back of a telephone-operator’s switchboard.
It took Alcorn nearly three months to build a working prototype. His finished project surprised Bushnell and Dabney. Instead of giving them an interesting exercise, Alcorn had created a fun game that became their flagship product. Bushnell named the game
Pong
and made a few changes, including adding a bread pan for collecting quarters and an instruction card that read simply, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” To test the game’s marketability, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a location along the Atari pinball route.
Our initial idea was to go into business as a contract design firm and sell our ideas to others for licensing. We had a contract with Bally to design a video game for them, and we saw it as being a big, pretty long project.
So I had Al do this
Pong
game, this ping-pong game. And, dammit, it was fun. We tweaked it a little and it was more fun, and we thought to
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