1D-Pong Game at 39C3
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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? ;-)
HN · launched Jan 11, 2026 · 69 upvotes (top 15%) · 0 views
Niche: terminal and arcade games · 42 launches, 3 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 42 launches in terminal and arcade games →
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 : 573 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #100 of 574 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 74 days after the earliest competitor.
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