Blog - Pwong - 1972 Remixed in More Ways Than One
Tuesday, June 2, 2009A friend of mine on facebook linked to a Pong-remake you can find and play here, called Pwong.
It's a flashier version of Pong with colorful, trance-electronica aesthetics, and some new additions like heavy use of multiple balls and temporary power-ups.
But none of that is anything I'd bother to write about. Instead, what fascinated me about this game was the music:
The music for the game I instantly recognized as a trancy remix of the synthpop classic "Popcorn",
A song famous for being the first piece of primarily-electronic music to ever make it onto popular music charts.
Note that the song's most famous release (the one that hit the pop charts, making electronic music history) was made in 1972.
If I'm not mistaken, that is also the same year Pong was released by Atari.
I can only assume the music choice in Pwong was then deliberate, and if so -- brilliant. Finding two separate, highly influential and historically relevant works of electronic media created more or less at the same time (Pong and "Popcorn"), and when creating a revamped new take on the former, choosing to enhance it with a revamped, new take on the latter.
That's too perfect to have been an accident. So, kudos to the developers of Pwong for that choice. It was a discovery that I, as a geek for both electronic music and video games, was delighted to find. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:58 PM
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