Pong Quest is coming. Yes, it’s a real game, and yes, it’s from Atari.
Pong originally launched in 1972. The game was essentially a recreation of table tennis where the paddle is replaced by a small rectangle that the player controls by turning a dial. Almost 40 years later, not much has changed for Pong other than the fact that Atari is leveraging the hell out of their intellectual property, turning Pong into a new and bizarre RPG.
It’s called Pong Quest, and yes, you play as a pong paddle. In the fantasy world of Pong Quest, paddles are alive, can be dressed in various costumes, and go on quests in order to save the kingdom and “reveal the mysteries of the spooky door.” Whatever that means.
Besides anthropomorphizing Pong paddles into rectangular people, Pong Quest essentially does whatever it can to make Pong more interesting. This includes 50 specialized balls with unique abilities that change the way the ball behaves, either giving them insane rebounds or changing the way gravity works, or they just change the rules of Pong to include things like huge buzzsaws in the middle of the playing field.
And because it's Atari, Pong Quest also splices Pong with other Atari titles like Centipede, Breakout, and Asteroids.
There's a single-player adventure that takes you on a magical journey into various dungeons, but there's also multiplayer battle modes where you can take your custom paddle and specialized Pong balls into competitions against other players. Multiplayer games are up to 3 players, which is a confusing number given that Pong is traditionally a two-player game.
Now here’s the really special part: Pong Quest is arriving for all major consoles (that's Switch, PS4, and Xbone One) and PC via Steam later this spring, so you won’t have to wait long to start dressing your Pong paddle like a bear and using it to trounce your rectangular friends.
Source: Atari