It was the American physicist William Higinbotham who in 1958 created what many consider to be the first computer game. The game was called "Tennis for Two" and was played on an oscilloscope with help of a simple analogue control. It took, however, until 1972, when the Atari Company, founded by Allan Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell, picked up the idea and created a commercial version and called it PONG, that the game became one of the first real big seller for the computer games industry. PONG is a simple, minimalist game that consists of two rectangles and a square, which symbolize two tennis racquets and a ball. You can either play against another opponent or against the computer. In this simplified version of tennis, the goal is to hit the ball so the opponent misses it.
PONG is probably the computer game that have inspired most artists over the past decade. When the Computer Games Museum in Berlin in 2007 organized a major exhibition entitled "pong.mythos" over 30 artists was attended with works of art inspired by PONG. The catalogue explains why PONG fascinated so many artists: ”No other video game has been the origin of artistic production quite as often as the simple black-and-white tennis game. In addition to its popularity, it seems to be this minimalism that especially appeals to artists, since the playing pattern is a virtual prototype of the essence of each and every communication situation: the ball as the smallest possible unit of information, oscillating between sender and receiver” (ur katalogen pong.mythos, 2006).
I can mention a few examples from the exhibition. The artist group ////////// fur / / / / showed their "Pain Station" (2001) in which the player who missed the ball were punished with physical pain by a blow on the hand, heat or an electric shock. "Pain Station" connects the physical world with the virtual and the virtual player's mistakes turns into real pain. The artist group Blinkenlights working in the urban environment was represented with a project that transformed a large office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz to a digital screen where passersby could play PONG on the façade with the help of their mobile phones. In the artists S. Hanig / G. Savicic work "BioPong" (2005) the ball was replaced with a live cockroach which the players would try to push over to the other side. And in the group Time's Up version "Sonic Body Pong" (2006) the ball in the game was just a sound which the players could hear in their headphones and with help of large green rectangles on their heads they would try to hit the sound from the ball.
There are many other examples that were not in the exhibition "pong.mythos". As early as 1999, the artist Natalie Bookchin made "The Intruder", a work where PONG was one of 10 different computer games that she used to create an interactive artwork by Jorge Louis Borges short story "The Intruder". The Danish artist Anders Visti mixed the game PONG with the art of Piet Mondrian "PONGdrian v1.0" from 2007. The playing field in Vistis artwork reminiscent a painting by Mondrian and when the ball hits the fields it disturbs the lines and colour fields, and creating new opportunities for the players. Finally, I can mention the Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, who has made a series of performances called "Game Over". In a theatre auditorium, he creates animated sequences by using real people in colourful T-shirts, where each individual represents a square on a screen. By moving the people in the auditorium, he can create short video sequences, for example of PONG playing in the lounge.
The reason that PONG is so popular among artists is that it is one of the very first video games, there is a large identification factor and a strong relationships between the game and the audience and the artist. PONG is also one of the easiest games in terms of both appearance and to learn to play, which paradoxically makes it so easy to transform and use in different contexts. The phrase "less is more" seems in this case as a good explanation why PONG has inspired so many artists in recent years.
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