Pong was boring, and people loved it
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
edit: If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
It's completely subjective (though a fact about everyone, nobody, or somewhere specific between finding something boring can be objective if taken from a good poll or whatever).
Even many baseball fans would say baseball is more boring, as soccer is designed to be 90 minutes of pure action while baseball is designed to spend much of the time waiting for the next pitch. People can like the "boring" thing more.
Similarly, pinball was designed to be exciting with a bunch of fancy lights and sounds. Comparatively, early pong showed nothing but the two paddles and a ball and could make one sound. It was boring, people still loved it and sank thousands of hours in.
Pinball machines may have many more elements to them, they may be more eye catching, but to somebody who doesnt enjoy playing pinball at all it's still incredibly boring to them. Someone who enjoys it probably isn't finding it boring, or at least not more boring than doing nothing.
Yes football has more actual playing time and takes 90 (well, closer to 110 after half time and added time) minutes compared to baseball's often hours, yes footballers walk/run an average of 3-4x further in a game on average than baseball players.... and yes, some baseball fans will think football is less boring (I'm one of them! I like baseball but far less than football)..., but to somebody who loves baseball and hates football, football is the more boring one. And they're not wrong, nor am I for thinking baseball is more boring. It's just subjective.
Your comparison for "most boring" really only applies to somehow who has a quick look at both things, maybe in an art gallery, then moves on having found one of them less boring than the other. Not to people who actually played and enjoyed one or both of them.
> And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun?
Pong is enjoyable today for the same reason that IRL table tennis is still enjoyable today, and the reason isn't the graphical fidelity of the paddles and ball (in either case).
Sure, it's simple. But it's still good. Just enough action to be entertaining, easy enough to understand immediately, and just hard enough to be challenging.
It's a bit harder to play these days than when it was new.
First, paddle controllers haven't aged well, and can be very hard to control if they're not recently refurbished.
Second, modern TVs have lag. It's very tiny. Not enough to be noticeable with todays games and consoles. But on something as close to the hardware as Pong on a vintage machine, it's there.
I thought maybe it was because of the composite encoding and decoding, so I switched to a machine with an RF connection and it was still there. Tiny, but there.
I switched to an old portable tube TV with RF in, and it was perfect.
Seems like there's too much going on with modern displays to handle simple things. I guess that's why my 4K LG TV takes longer to boot up than my tube TV takes to warm up.
My Dad was in IT so I got exposed to a few earlier computers. What snagged me was discovering his ZX81 and reading enough of the manual to discover that I could write software myself! I think my Dad was a bit taken aback when I showed him my first program!
Lol of course he wasn't. He was in Eastern Europe judging by price/salary.
Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!
Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games.
I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary.
Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.
It was the first time I ever played a real Pong cabinet. Both my friend and I agreed it was exceptionally good despite being such a simple game. The experience of playing it felt very analog and responsive with no perceivable latency.
Galloping Ghost is a huge sprawling arcade where you pay a daily rate and can play all the games with effectively infinite quarters. So we played dozens of games that night, and there were very few games with such immediacy in the controls.
That lack of latency made you feel 100% responsible for any mistakes. It was surprisingly addictive and competitive because there didn't seem to be anything to blame in terms of lossiness/non-determinism between the controls and what's happening on-screen. You were to blame, and it implied you could easily be better next time.
There’s a reason the early units were mostly in bars.
I would imagine that the loser drank every time they lost a point / game.
A few years ago so guys at work were playing Mario Tennus on a Nintendo Switch. I tried it a few minutes and said "it's Pong" and was done. Fancy graphics and special moves (like Mortal Kombat) added to Pong did nothing for me. In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference. Anyway, Mario Tennis is just Pong but some people like it.
IMO the claim that Mario Tennis is Pong is verifiably correct, and it's also obviously wrong. Dropbox, as the infamous comment goes, "really is" "just" filesharing and -mirroring, scaled up -- and Dropbox is also something different than really flashy WebDAV.
Have you tried Pong Kombat [1], there's minutes of potential fun there. It may be your perfect blend of anti-fun though.
> In fact special moves never appealed to me as I prefer skill to memorization, but that's just a preference.
There's no memorization in Mario Tennis, is there? It's 4 possible moves or something, all tied to specific buttons.
Also, FWIW, the skill in fighting games is knowing when to use special moves, not memorizing them. Anyone that has invested even a tiny amount of time getting good at a fighting game has memorized all the inputs/combos, that is not the challenging aspect of fighting games.
A prerequisite to using them is memorizing them. You said it yourself right there. Not my thing, that's all.
The one posted below is a coincidence. I wasn’t aware there was one based on MK 1. Mine was based on MK 2.