In praise of simplicity...

By Steve G. Steinberg

When you trace the history of home computing back to its roots, you arrive at a surprising place. You arrive at Pong. Introduced in 1972 by Atari, this primitive electronic version of table tennis was in many ways the progenitor of the PC. After all, it was while designing new versions of Pong at Atari that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak honed their skills that would result in the Apple II. More importantly, Pong was the first time people saw computers as friendly and approachable. It launched a video game boom that made thousands of kids want to become computer programmers, and prepared an entire generation for interaction with a blinking and buzzing computer screen.

Primitive as it seems when compared to today's flashy 3-D video games, Pong is enjoying a resurgence. People are snatching up old copies from garage sales and attics, and refurbished consoles are turning up in hip bars. For an industry that is based on unrelenting progress, where next year's product is always faster-stronger-better, this kind of nostalgia is a dangerous sign. Are consumers sick of the technological treadmill, or are they just reminiscing? Are PC users going to soon start pining for the days of VisiCalc and Word 1.0? A look back at the rise, fall, and rise again of Pong provides some intriguing answers.

Think back to the 1970s. Interactive entertainment meant pinball machines and computers still filled up entire rooms. Now, insert into the scene protean entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell. He had seen an early video game called Space War that was developed at MIT and decided to make a scaled down version. The result bombed -- it was popular with engineering students, but too complicated for most people. But Bushnell remain convinced that video games were the Next Big Thing, and he hired on a 24-year-old engineer named Alan Alcorn with the promise of 10% of Atari's stock. Then, just as a test, as a way to get Alcorn ready for more complex projects, Nolan asked him to build the simplest game possible: a small ball that bounced between two paddles.

Because Alcorn had recently graduated from college he was up-to-date on the latest in transistor logic and was able to quickly hack together the simple game using a TV set for a display. "At first it wasn't a whole lot of fun" admits Alcorn. "But it's like crafting a piece of art, you have to go in there and wrestle with it." That meant adjusting the speed of play, adding some sound affects, and tweaking the basic design until it was so fun to play that it was positively addictive. The final game was a mix of artistic inspiration and technological necessity. For example, says Alcorn, "Due to a bug in the hardware, you couldn't move a paddle all the way up to the corner. But actually, that turned out to be a feature because otherwise two good players would have been able to play forever."

The result, with just the Zen-like instructions of "avoid missing ball for high score", was put in a Sunnyvale bar called Andy Capp's and became an immediate hit. Atari, founded by Bushnell with $250 in 1972, was sold to Warner Communication for $28 million just four years later. The video game industry was born. Game designers outdid themselves in developing fancier, more complex games. Pong begot Space Invaders, which begot Super Mario, which begot Sonic the Hedgehog, which begot Mortal Kombat II, which begot ... Pong?

Twenty-three years later, signs of Pong's return are everywhere. In fact, if you play Mortal Kombat II well enough, you're rewarded with a free game of Pong. Why the revival? Just ask Chris Nicolella, associate editor of GamePro magazine. He tells of how an office mate recently brought in an old Atari 2600 console and half the magazine's staff stayed till 10 'o clock on a Friday playing old classics. "We were working up a sweat playing on the 2600", says Nicolella. "I don't think games today have the same addictive drive as the old ones."

Even game designers can be heard agreeing that current games too often concentrate on fancy graphics rather than on that allusive quality known as playability. David Fox, who has designed video games for companies like LucasArts and Rocket Science, admits that "you can get lost in the same way you can get lost in a special effects movie. You end up concentrating on the technology instead of the characters."

And there's another common complaint: Video games have become more complicated. The street fighter games that are popular today require you to memorize complex sequences of commands. Where before video games served as inspirations for computer interface designers (remember Pong's 6 word instructions?), now they are as hard to use as a spreadsheet.

Chris Crawford, a noted silicon valley game designer, points out that this partly has to do with the popularity of video game sequels, like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat III. Each sequel has to attract the people who bought the one before, so each adds new features and becomes more complicated. "It's not a general entertainment medium anymore, but a *hobby*," says Crawford. "Gamers insist on a level of complexity that is inaccessible to the general public."

It's called "featuritis", and it's a situation increasingly familiar to anyone who has tried to keep up with the yearly revisions of programs like Microsoft Word and Photoshop. Each year, these programs get larger and more complicated, often adding new features for their own sake rather than any real utility. Indeed, Stewart Alsop, a long-time industry pundit, recently wrote that he has become "spreadsheet challenged." He is no longer able to figure out how to use a spreadsheet program, even though he has worked with them for the last 14 years. As he put it, "I've gotten stupider or spreadsheets have gotten too smart." The nostalgia for the simpler days of Pong is a sign that a lot of people are feeling the same way.

What's the solution? Stewart Alsop believes that companies need to come out with smaller, stripped down versions that don't have all the fancy new features, but that do what most people want. Software for the general public, not just computer hobbyists. Of course, that's going to require software companies figure out new ways to generate revenue streams other than a constant line of program updates. But companies had better find a solution fast. Or, as with Pong, users may start digging their old software out of the attic.