Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress.

I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project.

I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without any hitch or compile errors - impressive. What a nice way to test some capabilities.

Have fun with it an build your own version. And there are soooo many ideas that could be implemented. I am waiting for your feedback!

Will we end up with a league of networked 1D-Pong games? ;-)

That's cool.

The only 1D game I'd seen before was this one, which I saw at the Exploratorium (a science museum in San Francisco): https://www.wobblylabs.com/line-wobbler

Someone made an open source clone: https://github.com/Critters/TWANG

I gave that code to Claude and asked it to make a web based version I could play on my phone. It's not as fun as the version with an LED strip, but it's actually playable (which surprised me): https://tools.encona.com/twang

Played this a lot at 39C3. Love the speed-up-the-further-back-you-hit mechanic.

Thanks for building, lot’s of fun.

This reminds me of early games on personal computers like the Altair that had a row of LEDs for output. Maybe the title of these was something like "Kill the Bit" or similar.

Very cool. I spent many hours as a kid playing Zap by calico on road trips. Surprisingly fun for how simple it is. https://youtu.be/UxPFH5yHZR0?si=5vVK85a3ut5dQeGT

Pedantically, this game is at least 2D due to including time. It presents more dimensions if we consider the different LED colors.

I'm now trying to contemplate what a truly 1D pong game would be. We can't escape time so we would have to remove positional and chromatic dimensions. That leaves us with a single blinking monochromatic LED.

Perhaps the game would resemble Richmond's flashing lights.

I remember a 1D roguelike someone made for a 24h competition, was surprisingly fun