Quadrapong: Eight Strikes and You're Out!

In the last two posts, we looked at an asteroid-dodging space game called Space Race. It was Atari's attempt to breath fresh air into arcades that had seen nothing but Pong clones for nine months. But in case you were under the impression that this was the end of the ball and paddle fad…

Not even close. In fact, you can practically mark time in the early '70s by looking at which pong variant was being cloned by every developer in the market.

The first variant to take off was Pong Doubles (September 1973). All it did was add two paddles to Pong but companies still rushed to imitate it, releasing “deluxe“ and “pro” versions of whatever Pong knockoff they had originally produced.

After Pong Doubles, the next big variant is the one I'm going to cover here, called Quadrapong.

Well, in reality, the first version of the game was called Elimination and was released by Kee Games in October 1973. However, Kee Games was just Atari in disguise; that is, the company was a ruse by Nolan Bushnell to get around exclusivity deals with distributors. So let's take the “canonical” version to be the Atari release, Quadrapong.

Making the Game

The BrowGames version of Quadrapong is based on the original version, which I played in the TTL emulator, DICE. I also made use of footage from an original cocktail table, which you can see here.

Quadrapong is a Pong-style, four-player elimination game, where each player is situated on one of the four sides of the screen. Each player starts with eight "lives" and protects a goal. If a ball gets past them and into their goal, they lose a life. If they run out of lives, they are "eliminated" (thus the title of the Kee version). Play continues until all but one player is eliminated.

Walls

Balls bouncing off of corner walls, originally from the game Quadrapong.
Believe it or not, walls were actually a new thing at the time. In the original Pong, the ball just bounced off the top and bottom of the screen, so there was no need for on-screen barriers. It's true that some of the clones included horizontal lines at the edges, but they probably had no meaningful impact on the gameplay relative to Atari's version.[1]

In Quadrapong, however, the walls cover the corners, creating "goals" for each player to defend. The reason for this is not entirely clear, but it may have been to prevent easy points at the corners of the screen. If a paddle deflects at a ball at a high angle near the corner, there is no time for the defending player to react to it.

[1] It's hard to be sure, because I haven't seen gameplay from the clones. In most cases, I just have still images from flyers.

The Paddles

The paddles are very similar to those in Pong, though the walls provide natural limits to their movement. Here's a look at how they move:
Demonstration of paddle motion in the game Quadrapong.
Note that the paddles can intersect one another. This sometimes causes unusual bounce sequences in the corners but doesn't appear to break the game.

The Life Counter

We're going to need to keep track of the score somewhere. Pong just had numbers at the top of the screen, but remember, Quadrapong is a game of elimination. So it would be better to have something that ticks down.

What about... a life counter?
Demonstration of the first video game life counter, from Quadrapong.
This may actually be the first instance of a life counter in a commercial game. The coin-op video games up to that point don't appear to have used one, and the Magnavox Odyssey didn't have any mechanism for keeping score. It's possible that there were games on university computer systems (like the PLATO network) that made use of life counters, but these wouldn't have been accessible by the general public.

When the life counter runs out, the player's paddle is replaced by a wall and play continues for the other players.

The Ball and Its Movement

For the most part, the ball bounces the same as it did in Pong, but there are some wrinkles. The most interesting one is the case where a player on one side of the court deflects it straight into the side of another, like this.
Demonstration of dribbling in Quadrapong.
This was in the original game, and could make for some very weird behavior. I didn't try to reproduce all of this weirdness in the BrowGames version, but I did retain the dribbling.

The Computer Player

I did include a computer player, and it uses more complex targeting logic than what I laid out for Pong. I will hold off on those details for now. It makes use of the same mathematical principles (single bounce only), but accounts for multi-ball scenarios as well.

Let's watch four computer players duke it out.
Four computer players competing in Quadrapong.
The simplest way to adjust the computer player difficulty to adjust the "AI Error Distance". The larger it is, the more mistakes the computer will make.

How Does It Play?

I actually think that Quadrapong is a solid game, and even superior to the original Pong. Its legacy may have suffered from the fact that it's best played with four paddles, and scraping together four people who want to play a game from 1973 is a tall order. Fortunately, with the BrowGames computer players, you can play a full game all by yourself.

As with Pong and Pong Doubles, Quadrapong was cloned many times in the year that followed. However, unlike with those games, some of the Quadrapong clones actually did make substantial changes to the gameplay. For example, Ramtek's Wipe Out added a central cross that sometimes deflected shots and Allied Leisure's Hesitation added a block obstacle to the center.

Those releases are from early '74, so I may try adding central obstacles in a future update to Quadrapong, but for now, let's move on. We're currently in October 1973, but there will be yet another variant in the ball-and-paddle craze before the year is up. Stay tuned.

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