July 16, 2008
Scope This Out
Ian Bogost just pointed me to a page on building your own modern version of Tennis for Two, the proto-Pong, proto-Odyssey game that Willy Higinbotham devised in 1958. It’s just the thing to do with that oscilloscope you have lying around. Interesting that the game is in side view and has a net, unlike the first wave of digital tennis games that were to follow.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
There is a history channel program that shows how the game was developed and that you had to do english to score it was that boring. It wasn’t until the ball changed direction frame when it hit the paddle that it became the game we all grew up with.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Given that the path of a tennis ball is a parabola, I think the profile view was almost inevitable on this platform.
Have you seen the source code for A.S. Douglas’s “Noughts and Crosses” (1952)? It’s new to me.
http://www.adit.co.uk/html/noughts_and_crosses.html