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[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 75 - Pong: It’s Not Just a Game

FLASHBack time again, and this week we're going to look at the Flash Pong: It's Not Just a Game. While this animation was uploaded on Newgrounds on 14 June 2002 (under the title "Pong Gets Personal"), and even earlier to Albino Blacksheep on 19 February 2002, I've found evidence of it being published for widespread online consumption as early as sometime in November 2001 on a site called madblast.com. Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep list the author as Oska, but who is Oska? Oska is actually Oska Software, an Australian Developer that started out writing educational software for the Japanese market. One edutainment game they wrote featured a koala mascot, and they got the bright idea to repurpose all the animations of the character that they'd already made. Possibly inspired by Microsoft Office's Clippy, they made their koala Oska into a piece of software that would show character on your desktop, floating over other programs, playing different interactive animations. Oska was the first of the company's DeskMates®, but he would quickly be followed by a whole host of others.   Oska had been appropriate for all ages as was another of their DeskMates®, TeeCee, who was sort of a knockoff BonziBUDDY minus the malware nastiness. There was also Fat B an obese beer swigging redneck bastard whose animations were slightly more questionable. However the bulk of the DeskMates® made by Oska Software were straight up pornographic stripper girls who would dance on your computer screen for you. They originally started with just 2D Animation, then evolved to 3D models rendered in 3D Studio Max, and finally they used the profits this venture was turning to hire models for video capture.

Oska Sotfware would advertise their DeskMates® by having their animators work on funny Flash animations when they weren't putting together a new stripper girl. They would embed ads for their web store into the Flashes themselves, and then upload them into the usual places in hopes that the animations would go viral. These Flashes were also the basis of an eCard website they operated, cards-n-toons.com. The bulk of the Flash content on that site was either USA ultra-patriotic post-9/11 propaganda cartoons, or just straight up smut humor, in a similar vein to the software they were trying to sell (and sometimes even staring some of the DeskMates® girls). Both of these categories were likely to be passed around virally among their target demographic. Pong: It's Not Just a Game, being a homage to first generation videogaming as well as a stick figure beatdown Flash, was a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of Oska's Flash content. However, once Oska had the assets drawn for it, they went ahead and made two sequels: Pong: Breakdown, in which the accelerating ball of a continued perfectly horizontal volley breaks the right paddle, and the stick figures inside the paddle decide to go beat up Pac-Man instead, and Pong: Assassin, where the right paddle is letting loose with some Williams Sisters -style Tennis Grunting until a stick figure with a knife comes from offscreen to backstab it.   Even with the implausible storylines, Pong: It's Not Just a Game and its sequels did accurately portray a few aspects of the original Pong Arcade game by Atari. The timing chips on the original motherboard for Pong were not precise enough for the game's sprite drawing routine to keep up with the offset needed to interlace scanlines across both fields of the 30 frames per second refresh rate of the CRT monitors of the time. Instead, it just drew the second field of scanlines directly on top of the first, resulting in the every-other-line appearance that the Oska Pong flashes reproduce.   Secondly, the incident that kicks off the It's Not Just a Game animation, an argument about the ball being "Out", is actually reflective of a real hardware limitation of the original game. The paddles were not allowed full vertical travel of the screen, because of a quirk in how the ball movement logic was wired onto the motherboard. If the paddles had been allowed the full range of motion (or if the adjustment pots on the motherboard were miscalibrated), it was possible in situations where the ball hit the paddle right in the corner of the play field, for the ball to get trapped in the vertical blanking interval of the screen, straddling the top and the bottom of the playfield at the same time and softlocking the game. Rather than fix the ball movement logic, the game was wired to keep the paddles slightly away from the edges, which in practice, sometimes lead to shots that felt like they should have been counted "Out" because the paddle just was not allowed to reach them.   However, the perfect horizontal volley of Pong: Breakdown, while in theory was allowed by the game's 42 velocity vectors for the ball, was in practice very tricky to achieve on the actual arcade hardware, owing to a design error in the original schematics which went undetected for 40 years. The pinout on one of the Integrated Circuits used was misnumbered on the schematic, swapping the #1 pin and the #10 pin. This meant that when the printed circuit board was laid out, there was some crosstalk between the two paddles when they were closely aligned vertically, messing with the zones on the paddle that would bounce the ball at various angles. Only if the paddles were both at the EXACT SAME vertical height would there be a sweet spot exactly in the middle of each that would bounce the ball perfectly horizontally.   That wraps it up for this week. Next week on FLASHBack, we'll finally be getting around to that character that kills puppies, and a different character who saves them, that had to be postponed because of the breaking Magical Trevor news. (Unless some other news breaks about one of the First-Class Flash Artists, then who knows when we'll get to them?)