Conclusion

As the evolution of video games continues, we continue to see recreations of some games and deaths of others. The death of Pong’s original hardware did not hinder its survival. Through different consoles, consumers can still play Pong; sure it does not provide the same experience, however, the concept of “Avoid missing the ball for a high score” remains.

The world is not concrete, but rather it is always changing, and with it, even video games also change. From Pong, we see the importance of adaptation for the survival of games; the importance of adaptation for the survival of “concepts” and ideas in the world.

Giovani Carta (2017) suggests “To play a game as it was is necessary to preserve its technical and experiential manifestations: what makes a given game that game”. Therefore, the extent of preservation of the original Pong will always be limited by technological and experiential advancement. Pong with knobs as controllers cannot remain with us forever, however, the game can remain through different resurrected forms.

Pong’s survival through different game forms suggests that the game concept will always be understood as “a ball being exchanged between two players” however the playing methods will vary significantly for someone who played Pong in a real arcade in 1972 and someone who played it on a computer using the metadata from the internet archive in 2020. This leads to different manifestations of the game in the two people’s minds.

Additionally, in Alan Liu’s words “New media are old; and old media new” new media is haunted by new media. The fact that two people think of the same concept when Pong is mentioned means the game has survived through different digital mediums and is an example of how the old media remains to haunt the new media.  Even though Pong witnessed the tragic death of its original console, it lived through different consoles and platforms and it helped shape the video game industry.

Pong paved the road for the following games by showing that video games do not have to be complex like Odyssey to be interesting to people; sometimes simplicity is what attracts people. 

Giovani Carta suggests “To play a game as it was is necessary to preserve its technical and experiential manifestations: what makes a given game that game” and that shows that we cannot duplicate the specific setting and game versions, however as seen through Atari’s efforts, we can always try to come up with new ways to remake the games and modify them to keep them relevant in more advanced times.

Also as Giovani mentions “Emulation, in particular, rebuilds a digital environment by adding and subtracting functions. Think, for instance, of save state options, missing in the original platforms, that have been introduced in almost every console emulator or think of the impossibility of using native controllers with certain emulators.” In Pong World, Atari was able to rebuild Pong by adding new features like bonus points for hitting specific targets, more colors in the interface, and the save feature to keep progress and this shows that adaptations are necessary for the game to make it appropriate for and able to compete with the newer digital environment it was being resurrected in. 

Reviving old games on new hardware works better when the game is adapted to fit the hardware; Pong world on the app store works better than Pong from metadata from the internet archive on the computer. Some sacrifices have to be made for the salvation of games and in Pong’s case, it was the death of the original console for the survival of the game concept.