Ping Pong

How to play ping pong online

1. Your paddle guards the bottom — steer with a finger, the mouse, or the arrow keys. Keep the square ball in play.
2. Aim with the paddle itself: the wide middle returns the ball dead straight, the ends bend it, and the very edge fires a screamer.
3. Rallies accelerate — the ball speeds up after the 4th and 12th hit, then resets with each point. Serves fire on their own, from whoever just scored.
4. Your paddle stops short of the side walls, exactly like the 1972 machine — a perfectly placed edge shot is unstoppable, and that's the point.
5. First to 11 wins. In a duel, each phone shows you at the bottom; your opponent's paddle plays live across the net.

A little background

This is the game that started the whole industry: Pong, built by Allan Alcorn at Atari in 1972 as a training exercise and dropped into a Sunnyvale tavern, where the prototype broke down within days — because its coin box was jammed full of quarters. Everything you see here was in that cabinet: the dashed net, the square ball (a round one was beyond the hardware), the segmented paddle with its flat middle and angled edges, the rally that speeds up after the 4th and 12th hit, and the three blips Alcorn tapped straight off the video sync generator because there was no room on the board for a real sound circuit. Even the gap your paddle can't cover is faithful — a circuit defect Alcorn kept, because without it two good players could rally forever on one quarter.

The one thing the cabinet never had: distance. Here the match can run live between two phones — you at the bottom of your screen, them at the bottom of theirs, one ball crossing the internet between you. Free, no ads, no account; the computer opponent works offline once loaded.