Pong

How to beat the computer at Pong

The computer paddle tracks the ball, and the difficulty setting decides how quickly it reacts and how fast it can move. You will not out-muscle it, so you win with geometry. The trick is to return the ball toward the part of the table the computer has just left: push it high, then send your next shot low, so its paddle has to sprint the full height of the screen while the ball crosses. Wide, angled returns beat flat ones, because the further the computer has to travel, the more likely it arrives a fraction too late.

Matches run to seven points, so a couple of stolen points swing a whole game. Think of each rally as an argument about position, not speed. A flat return down the middle asks the computer nothing. A steep return into a corner asks it a hard question, and on any setting below Hard it will sometimes get the answer wrong.

Positioning and paddle tips

The angle of a return depends on how your paddle meets the ball. Catch it with the top or bottom edge and the rebound widens, opening up the far corner. Meet it dead center and it flies back flat. Where you wait between shots matters just as much.

• After every return, drift back toward the middle of your side so you can cover a shot to either edge.
• Watch the ball rebound off the top and bottom walls and move to the interception point early, not late.
• Aim away from the computer's current position rather than straight at the ball.
• Vary your returns; a steady rhythm lets even a slow paddle settle into place.
• On higher difficulty, keep rallies controlled. Forcing long vertical chases beats raw speed, since the computer rarely misreads a slow, well-placed ball but often loses a full-height dash.

A point you can practice

Here is a two-shot pattern worth drilling until it feels automatic. Return one ball toward the top corner. The computer slides up to meet it. As its answer comes back, set yourself so the ball lands on the bottom half of your paddle. That contact sends the ball back low, and now the computer has to cross nearly the whole screen to reach it. On Easy and Medium this high-low switch wins point after point. On Hard the paddle usually gets there in time, so add a third beat: high, low, then high again off the wall. Somewhere in the zig-zag the machine arrives half a paddle short. Tennis coaches call this hitting behind your opponent, and it works just as well against a fifty-year-old video game as it does on clay.

Mistakes that give away points

Most lost points are self-inflicted. The worst habit is ball-watching: staring at the ball as it crosses instead of working out where it will arrive. The ball travels in straight lines and bounces off the walls at matching angles, so its landing spot is set the moment it leaves the computer's paddle. Read the bounce, move there early, and you get to choose which part of the paddle makes contact. Arrive late and you are lunging, and a lunge gives you no say in the return angle.

Two smaller leaks. Don't camp at the edge where the last shot went; the middle covers both corners. And don't swat at fast balls with one big last-moment slide. Small early adjustments miss far less often than heroic saves.

Pong and the birth of the arcade

Pong is where the commercial arcade began. Atari shipped it in 1972. Co-founder Nolan Bushnell handed the idea, a simple tennis game, to new engineer Allan Alcorn as a training exercise, and Alcorn quietly made it better. He split the paddle into segments so each part returned the ball at a different angle, made rallies speed up the longer they lasted, and pulled the famous blip sound out of circuits the machine already had. The first cabinet went into Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, and soon stopped working because the coin box had jammed full of quarters. The idea had a rival parent, too: Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey console played a similar tennis game earlier that same year, and the dispute ended with Atari paying for a license. By 1975 a home version of Pong, sold through Sears, had carried the game into living rooms. One ball, two paddles, first to a handful of points: almost everything about video games grew from that duel.