Pong’s creator is now “a grizzled guy in his mid-70s” who believes there’s a market for people who’d prefer to try out virtual reality headsets at videogame arcades. An anonymous reader quotes MIT Technology Review:
In 1972, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell invented Pong, a version of table tennis that, in many ways, launched the video-game industry. Forty-five years later, Bushnell is using that same simple game to test the waters for virtual-reality arcade gaming. Bushnell’s latest venture is a company called Modal VR, which is building its own wireless virtual-reality headsets and games that it plans to roll out in places like arcades, malls, and movie theaters in the coming months.
Bushnell’s company has built three games — a fighting game called Mythic Combat and Project Zenith a first-person shooter set in outer space. (More than 16 players can gather in the same virtual space.) Their third game, a VR adaptation of Pong “was originally put together as a joke, in homage to Bushnell’s past — but the company decided to use the simple two-player game anyway to demonstrate what it’s working on at the World’s Fair Nano technology fair in San Francisco in late January.”

The article describes players who “donned a prototype bulky black headset and played Pong in virtual reality, running from side to side to control the game’s simple white paddles — which a smiling Bushnell said was fitting because “we’re at the Pong stage of VR.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Pong’s Inventor Unveils Three New VR Arcade Games – Including Pong