Curve Ball - The best Pong game remakes that you never knew existed
Most hardcore gaming fans will be familiar with the original Pong title released by Atari back in 1972 just before the golden age of arcade games and labeled the first successful commercial arcade games. This classic piece of gaming history was a simple 2-player tennis simulation that involved two block paddles, a center dividing line and a ball. The game-play and controls were basic to say the least; players simply had to hit the ball back and forth without letting it hit the back of the screen on their side. At the time the hype surrounding this new form of entertainment kept gamers coming back for more, but after some time they soon tired of the repetitive motions and Atari began releasing follow up versions, like Quadrapong, Super Pong, Pin-Pong, Pong Doubles and most famously, Breakout.
These new Pong games added more interesting game-play elements to the original title, for example Quadrapong allowed 4 players to play on one screen or breakout pong was a unique one-player version that is almost a completely different game altogether. Apart from this handful of official Atari releases there is also a long list of exciting not so official remakes that take this classic to another level; here are some of the most popular versions.
Pong, the next level (1999) – Released by Hasbro Interactive onto various platforms this is an excellent follow-up to the first pong game, built with cool clean graphics and 3-D modeling. It offers basically the same style of 2-player game-play as the original, except gamers can choose from 5 variations that include standard classic pong, a football field styled victory and soccer pong game, jungle pong with an ancient ruin backdrop and arctic pong which involves two penguins kicking the ball at each other.
Curve Ball (2002) – This is an addictive 3-D version of pong released by Paragon Digital Media onto the internet. It offers gamers a slightly more challenging style of game-play as players are placed at either ends of a 3-D tunnel, with the opponent at the far end and you in the foreground giving a confusing 1st person perspective. During the game the ball gets successively faster as levels progress and will bounce all over the screen, adding a very frustrating excitement to this challenging pong remake.