What Pong invented

Rules + physics + score. Pong (1972) is the proof that those three, alone, make a complete game. Everything after inherits the frame.

The part that makes it a sport is one rule: where the ball meets your paddle is where the return goes. Center sends it straight; edge sends it veering. Your paddle is your aim. Skill expression, one sentence long.

The fake physics

The paddle isn't a wall. It isn't even physics. In the 1972 machine, collision was a video AND gate — if the ball's signal and the paddle's signal lit at the same instant, that was a hit — and the reply was authored, not computed: send the ball back toward the opponent, angled by where it struck. Eight paddle segments, eight replies. The incoming angle was thrown away. No surface normal existed anywhere in the circuit. This rebuild keeps the doctrine and reads the strike continuously instead of in eighths.

It also tested the doctrine the hard way. For one revision the paddle obeyed real reflection physics, and play exposed it within minutes: a late save could carom the ball into your own goal — physically correct, historically impossible, instantly unfair. The reflection came out; the authored return went back in. Fidelity to the mechanic beats fidelity to Newton.

The opponent is honest

It tracks the ball at a capped speed, and the cap is its entire personality. You can't outlast it — straight returns come back forever. You out-angle it: buy a diagonal it can't cover in time. And the rally quickens 3.5% with every clean strike, topping out near double serve speed, so every exchange bends toward a kill.

How it was built

One day under a full capture protocol: screen recorded, prompts counted, failures logged unedited. The AI wrote the simulation and its tests. Four first-run test failures were all in the tests themselves, none in the simulation. The two real bugs never tripped the test suite — both turned up in play, on a phone: first a ball that ghosted through a late-moving paddle, then a fix that could ricochet a save into your own goal. Tests prove the rules; only play proves the game.

This exhibit is an original reconstruction of the mechanic, not the original game. Playbill locked — Adam, 2026-07-04.