One ball.
Ten lives.
Pong, with the one change worth making in fifty years: the ball drags a real fluid simulation behind it, so the field remembers every rally you have played on it.
Play it now ▸ — solo against the machine for the highscore board, or 1 on 1 with somebody on the network.
The arcade original, with a ball that burns a trail through a fluid simulation. Solo runs go on the highscore board.
Where it started
Pong was Atari’s first product, in 1972, and it is the game that established that there was an industry at all. It was not the first video game — Tennis for Two predates it by fourteen years and Spacewar! by ten — but it was the first that ordinary people put coins into, and the prototype famously broke down because the cash box was too full.
It has survived because it is the smallest complete game there is. Two paddles, one ball, one rule. There is nothing left in it to remove, which is why every arcade that has ever existed has had one.
How to play
- Move your paddle to keep the ball in play. Mouse, touch, or the arrow keys.
- Every ball you get past the machine is a point, and there is no score limit — a run lasts as long as you do.
- You start with ten lives and lose one each time the ball goes past you. When they are gone the run is over and the score goes to the board.
- The ball accelerates as a rally goes on, and the angle it leaves your paddle at depends on where it hit. That is the whole skill: you are aiming, not just blocking.
Getting past the machine
Hit with the edges of the paddle, not the middle. A ball struck off-centre leaves at a sharper angle and arrives somewhere the machine has to travel to reach; a ball hit dead centre comes straight back at a speed it can always handle.
Long rallies are worth cultivating rather than ending. The ball speeds up as the rally continues, and a fast ball at a sharp angle is the only thing that genuinely beats a machine that never has a lapse in concentration.
Watch the fluid. The trail is not only decoration — it shows you the path the last few shots took, which is the fastest way to see that you have been returning everything to the same place.
Questions
What is the fluid simulation for?
The ball pushes a real velocity field around as it travels, and the field carries dye that fades over a few seconds. Practically, it means the trail curls and drifts instead of drawing a straight line, and you can read the shape of the last rally off the screen. It runs on the GPU and does not affect where the ball goes.
Can I play someone else?
Yes — choose pong and search for an opponent, and you queue on pong as your topic. The next person who wants the same game lands in a live conversation with you and the field opens between you.
What counts for the highscore board?
Goals scored past the machine in a solo run. Games against another member go on your win–loss record instead.
The rest of the arcade
Tetris, Chess, Oware, Draughts and Snake. All of them play the same two ways: against a machine or against a person.