A crowd of well over 100 gathered near the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, despite rising winds and the looming threat of a thunderstorm. We were all there to play (and to watch) Pong, but not on an arcade cabinet—the version we'd be playing would be played out on the programmable LED lights lining the side of Philadelphia's Cira Centre, a 29-story office building across the Schuylkill River from the museum. The lights, normally used to display static images or simple looping patterns, had been transformed into a fully interactive game of Pong by Drexel computer science professor (and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program) Frank Lee and his team in just a few short months. It's being billed by the event organizers as the "world's largest video game." But the time spent developing the game was just a small part of Lee's journey, which spans five years and involves just as much lobbying as it did hacking. We talked to Lee and his team about what it takes to port a game to an office building, and then we traveled down to Philly to try the 437-foot-high game of Pong for ourselves. Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games; it is a tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. While other arcade video games such as Computer Space came before it, Pong was one of the first video games to reach mainstream popularity. The aim is to defeat the opponent in a simulated table tennis game by earning a higher score. The game was originally manufactured by Atari Incorporated (Atari), who released it in 1972. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, which later resulted in a lawsuit against Atari. Surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work, Bushnell and Dabney decided to manufacture the game.

• published: 11 Sep 2013
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