From Pong to 4wallpong: a short history of the paddle game
By Reflex Lab · November 2026
Few games are as recognisable as Pong: two paddles, one ball, a dotted line. 4wallpong is a modern take on that idea. Here is where it comes from.
Tennis for Two (1958)
Long before home consoles, the physicist William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. It ran on an analogue computer and showed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope screen. Visitors at an open day queued to play it. It is often named as one of the first video games made purely for entertainment.
The Magnavox Odyssey (1972)
Ralph Baer, an engineer, developed the first home video game console, released by Magnavox in 1972 as the Odyssey. One of its games was a table tennis game with two player-controlled blocks and a ball. Plastic overlays on the TV screen supplied the graphics the machine could not draw.
Atari and Pong (1972)
In the same year, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari and gave the engineer Allan Alcorn a practice project: a simple tennis game. The result was Pong. Alcorn added details that made it feel alive. The paddle was split into segments, so the ball left at different angles depending on where it hit, and the ball got faster the longer a rally lasted.
The first Pong machine was set up in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. The story goes that it stopped working after a short time because the coin box was overflowing. Pong became a huge arcade success and is often seen as the start of the commercial video game industry.
Pong at home
In 1975 a home version of Pong came out, sold through the department store Sears. It plugged into a normal TV. Over the following years dozens of companies built their own Pong consoles, and a whole generation learned to play video games with two paddles and a square ball.
What 4wallpong keeps from Pong
Two ideas from the original are at the heart of 4wallpong. The angle depends on where the ball meets the paddle, and the ball gets faster the longer you keep it in play. Both make Pong easy to learn and hard to master, and both are the reason a run of 4wallpong feels calm at the start and frantic two minutes later.
What 4wallpong changes
Classic Pong is a duel: you defend one side, your opponent defends the other. 4wallpong is a single-player game against the clock. All four walls are open, and you defend all of them at once with four connected paddles. Instead of points against an opponent, you play for time, and every run goes onto a shared leaderboard.
The constant 1 % increase per hit is also new. It turns every run into a curve you can plan for: you know exactly how fast the ball will be after 50 or 100 hits, and the question is only whether you are still there.