“An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”

I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently, a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey, released earlier in 1972:

This is a 34-minute video by FrameRater walking through the console and all of its strange games:

I found it a very interesting case study. The Odyssey had a version of Pong before Pong – but it also had many other games that could be charitably described as “Pongs in disguise.”

It all feels very, very convoluted for such a simple concept. You have to insert the right cart, tape an overlay to your TV of a certain size (the roll of tape is included), and understand the complex and poorly written instructions in the manual. Then, during the play time, you’d have to master the very strange controllers (left dial – horizontal movement, right dial – vertical movement), often do a lot of work that the console didn’t do (keeping track of collisions, or even scoring!), and deal will all sorts of accessories in the real world, like included cards, dice, stickers, and so on.

You can admire the scope of this all – when life gives you Pong, you make a pongolade – but it all feels so clunky and convoluted, which the video catalogs in detail. But, in hindsight, it doesn’t matter if the included Pong (here, called Table Tennis) is good, right?

Reader, Table Tennis wasn’t good at all. It wasn’t just the strange controllers, but also the really weird logic where you could twist the ball already in flight:

Only looking at this made me realize, some 50+ years too late, the true power of Pong.

Pong didn’t bother with many games, with complicated rules, with the breadth of it all. It just did one thing really, really well.

For the Odyssey, it seemed like a lot of games were about mastering the controller. For Pong, it was only ever about mastering the game. The interface was simple: you have one dial, so rotate it. The game was fun to play, with its logic both challenging and predictable. The instructions were sparse and barely needed anyway. There was automatic scoring, which Odyssey didn’t have. There were also sounds – turns out, people really liked sounds.

The Odyssey was clearly an in-betweener, a complicated hybrid device weighed down by its well-intentioned maximalism. Pong was simple, attractive, optimized to the bone. I feel that it offers universal lessons, feeling eerily similar to iPod’s release in 2001 – focusing on just the few things that mattered, and doing them really, really well.