E&M Pong Homepage

(This page last updated Jun-24-2003.)

E&M Pong is a Mac OS game I wrote. It's a variation on the classic game of Pong, where two paddles each try to prevent pucks from getting past its side of the screen.

The twist here is that the balls and pucks are charged, meaning pucks can be attracted to or repelled by paddles as well as other pucks. The really interesting part is that I've boosted the magnetic forces, so when you move a paddle up or down, you actually make the charged pucks turn. Action at a distance! (Also, the faster a puck is moving, the more it effect magnetism will have!)

My friend Matt Deeds came up with the idea and implemented it on Linux. I wrote this independently, and the gameplay turned out to be vastly different on our two versions.

I worked on E&M Pong back in early 1997, and I never did get around to finishing it. Here's what I wrote on this page the last time it was updated, in December 1997:

"I haven't worked on this in nearly a year, but I'll be working on it in January and hope to have a functional copy out by the end of January 1998."

Ha! :)

Since I'll never actually finish this thing now, here's the incomplete proof-of-concept:

empong.sit (61K StuffIt File)

You may need to manually change your resolution to 640x480 to get it to run properly. All I had was a 13" monitor back then. :P

Screenshots

Displaying ELECTRIC fields:
(Red = Positive, Blue = Negative)

Displaying MAGNETIC fields:
(Red = Into screen, Blue = Out of screen)