Arcade Version, Released 29/11/1972. Played on an Atari Super Pocket

Publisher: Atari, Inc. Designer: Allan Alcorn

I exist in a void, a beam of light moving along a single plane. Up and down, up and down, unable to cross the void to reach my competitor. They are the only company I have, a second beam of light, and I wish it had a neck, as then I would be able to throttle it.

The ball appears from nowhere, firing at me so fast that I twitch and miss it. Again, it zips past me. At this point, I curse my idea of completing a single player game of Pong. I reset and am ready for the ball. I position myself at a place where it will bounce off my bar. My nemesis effortlessly launches it back. I dart back and forth, trying to anticipate where the ball will go and occasionally, I hit it.

My nemesis has no soul, no mind, and yet it has ice in its veins as it slowly and carefully counters my every volley. The more I play, the more angry I get at the tiny handheld device and my nemesis, which means my already impaired coordination gets worse. I limit myself to one or two plays in a day, to counter this.

Will sound help? I turn the volume up to hear the ball being batted back and forth, then the loud crash when a goal is scored. It’s a jarring stab of white noise sound. It doesn’t help, and I lose again.

The Atari Super Pocket has difficulty levels for the arcade games, so I resort to checking them out, seeing if things will be better on Easy Mode, only to be met with the embarrassment that I am already on easy mode. Maybe I should wait for the Evercade Nexus I pre-ordered to show up, then I can use an analogue stick which is closer to a paddle? It’s a built-in game to the Super Pocket, so no, that’s not a possibility. There are far too many games of extremely varied quality that I want to try out.

Bang, crash and once again, I lose the game.

I read about strategies. I realise that having played Arkanoid but not this, I am simply trying to make sure I hit the ball, I didn’t realise there were hit boxes on the bat. It’s tricky enough trying to get the bastard ball to meet my bat, now I need to get better at getting it to collide with a specific third of it. Maybe I can try to be in motion when I hit the ball. I shoot past the ball as it goes past me into the goal. And it does it again.

A week into my endeavour and I’m getting better. I actually get to ten points out of the eleven needed to win the game. I whiff it, missing the ball and then being unprepared for the next one to spawn. And the next. Ten to Eight becomes Ten to Ten. Our volley goes back and forth, speeding up until it finally gets past me. I was so close!

Another week goes by and I hit 10:11 again a couple of times. I hear that the original Atari Evercade cartridge with Pong on it was unbeatable. It’s time to do research into the Super Pocket version I’m using. I realise that if I click in the Dpad a little, my bat shakes slightly. Is that something? No, it makes things much worse. I spot that the bat goes ever so slightly over the edge of the screen on one side. This means nothing, but I’m beginning to distract myself, trying to find anything I can to help.

There’s nothing definitive about whether or not the Super Pocket version of Pong is winnable. The website Evercadia has no logged wins, which is worrying. I start looking into the history of the game, the legend about an arcade machine in a bar overstuffed with coins to the level where it couldn’t work. The tales of earlier games of this ilk, Tennis for Two and so on, but this was the first commercially successful video game. Does this information help? Not really, but looking into this and the next chronological game, it’s interesting seeing that other countries had as many people copying each other as the 80’s video game scene.

Does this help? No, getting into the mind of Allan Alcorn didn’t really do anything.

I could save scum, I think. I could hit the menu button and save the state once I’d got a few points and reset to it when I started losing. But that’s the coward’s way. Even after so many games, I decided that was something I would never do. At least not for Pong.

More time passes, I dip into a couple of other games. I spend most of a lunch break making a ton of attempts in a row and failing every time. Later on that same day, I have a break from work to grab a coffee and sit down with the Super Pocket for a few minutes. I try not to pay attention to the fact that I I’m shooting up the score and my opponent has yet to score anything. My nemesis gets a score in and as ever, the embarrassing slip where I immediately miss the ball when it spawns once, twice. They’re up to six, but I’m at eight. Then ten. I start to worry; will they suddenly improve? Will they be unbeatable? Will I slip up again, so close to the end?

A volley goes back and forth between us. Locked in an eternal battle and once again, my nemesis is too calm, too collected. I have to disrupt what it does or we’ll be doing this forever. The ball slips past them, finally, eleven points to the human! I’ve won! Let’s not think about how long this took me, or how many times I lost, I switched the Super Pocket off or simply hit start to reset the game.

Will I return to Pong? Maybe, it was fun, even if it was frustrating. There was a learning curve, even if it was a fairly basic one. My nemesis rests for now, and I’ve left the game feeling less resentful of them.