1D-Pong Game at 39C3
Details
- External ID
- 46579612
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- 1D-Pong Game at 39C3
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 69
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8491436100131752
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress.I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project.I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without any hitch or compile errors - impressive. What a nice way to test some capabilities.Have fun with it an build your own version. And there are soooo many ideas that could be implemented. I am waiting for your feedback!Will we end up with a league of networked 1D-Pong games? ;-)
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- one dimensional pong game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The game logic itself is trivial, but a physical 1D-Pong display requires microcontroller firmware, physical LED strips, and custom hardware wiring.
What it would actually take: Requires an ESP32 or Arduino microcontroller, addressable LED strips (WS2812B), hardware input buttons/knobs, and a power distribution circuit. The firmware handles high-frequency LED animations, button interrupts/debouncing, and timing-sensitive gameplay states in C++ or MicroPython.
Discussion
13 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: FastLED library, Line Wobbler, TWANG32, YOU_ARE_DEAD, Zap by Calico
Concerns raised: Cannot play without physical shake input (CRT monitor limitation)
Feature requests: Keyboard input support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 333 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #62 of 334 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 74 days after the earliest competitor.
- Wirespan, a daily power grid optimization puzzle I made for my son · hn · 2026-08-25 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- A short walking sim based on 3DGS that runs in the browser · hn · 2026-07-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Shoot-em-up Deck Building game · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Beakdown · hn · 2026-07-28 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Jev Plays Pokémon Red · hn · 2026-09-25 · 280 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Strange Attractors · hn · 2025-10-31 · 804 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Dozenal · hn · 2026-07-27 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- An addictive phone game about phone addiction · hn · 2026-05-11 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.