#pong

Mucho antes de la guerra de consolas que conocemos hoy, el germen de la industria del videojuego se gestó en una sala de estar y se dirimió en los tribunales. En 1972, el éxito arrollador de Pong, la máquina arcade de Atari, escondía un secreto incómodo: su concepto había sido tomado de la Magnavox Odyssey, la primera consola doméstica creada por el ingeniero Ralph Baer. Lo que siguió no solo…

Jonah Uellenberg won the Ping Pong Prize at the 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest earlier this month, with a version of Pong that recompiles its own source code on every frame. Each run of the program prints the C source for the next frame, with the current display and game state embedded inside it, so compiling and running that output advances the game by a single step. Somewhat ironically, Uellenberg didn’t write the obfuscated code himself; instead writing clean, commented source in a programming language he built called Insert, whose compiler generated the scrambled C that took the award.