Pong Kombat
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| Pong Kombat | |
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| Developer(s) | Gagne Software |
| Publisher(s) | N/A |
| Designer(s) | Stefan Gagne |
| Platform(s) | PC |
| Release date | 31 December 1994 |
| Genre(s) | Arcade games, Fighting games |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
| System requirements | 16MHz 386 VGA SoundBlaster MS-DOS 5.0+ |
| Input methods | Keyboard |
Pong Kombat is a fan-made parody video game produced by Stefan Gagne for a high school computer class assignment in 1994.[citation needed] The game combines the traditional gameplay of the arcade classic Pong with the over-the-top violence and gameplay of Mortal Kombat. The game was originally released via the Internet/BBS and gathered a following throughout the mid-1990s, spawning several official and unofficial sequels.
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[edit] Popularity
The entire project was completed in four weeks and was originally distributed in early 1995. Within several weeks thousands of people had played it. The original release came with a text document that instructed the users they could get one of three hint guides by contacting Gagne via e-mail or via his postal address. The number of requests for the guides over a relatively short amount of time reached several thousands, rendering the e-mail address useless (which is atypical for a time before e-mail was popularized), coupled with the amount of traditional mail received.
This was exacerbated by an assortment of shareware and demo CDs distributing the game, usually without Gagne's permission, increasing the number of people exposed to the title exponentially.
It became clear that Gagne himself would not produce a sequel or any type of follow-up to the title, and as a result many groups contacted him to produce an official sequel. Two freeware hobbyists, Ryan Sadwick and Arturo Aquino, in 1996 (under the moniker of Sadwick Productions and Art Entertainment respectively) began development of an unofficial sequel, Pong Kombat II, and late into development contacted Gagne and this became a fully sanctioned sequel. The game was produced using the Klik & Play game creation software for Microsoft Windows. This game featured many more characters and finishing moves than the original.
Several other unofficial sequels/clones have appeared, most notably Pong Kombat III by Brandon Kuroda that was released exclusively for the Apple Mac platform in January 1996.
[edit] Gameplay
The game consists of selecting one of five differently colored paddles: Blue Paddle, Yellow Paddle, Green Paddle, Red Paddle, and Purple Paddle, plus two hidden paddles, Monolith, and Shifter. In the Mortal Kombat style, each paddle had a varied background story, including a reason for entering the Pong Kombat tournament to defeat the final boss White Paddle, and upon winning the player is provided with a story of where the paddle's lives led to.
The game features one paddle on one side of the screen competing against a computer- or player-controlled paddle on the opposite side. In the style of Pong, a ball is hit back and forth, with each player allowed to miss the ball only nine times before losing. Additionally, as a parody of Mortal Kombat, special moves can be executed by pressing a sequence of buttons to send a projectile towards your opposition, reducing the number of times the player can miss the ball. After either player loses, the game prompts the winner to "Finish Him! (or her, case depending!)", providing an opportunity to perform a Mortal Kombat style fatality, a creative method to completely annihilate the opponent to add to the humiliation of losing.
The game included a sophisticated level of 3D rendered sprites, animations and backgrounds for a freeware game produced in 1994, which added to the appeal as well as the humour when several backgrounds were intentionally drawn in an amateurish fashion in a 2D drawing program.
[edit] Trivia
- Kano from Mortal Kombat makes an appearance in the game after playing 40 games in a row, parodying Mortal Kombat II that after playing 250 rounds lets the user play a version of Pong. Ironically the game suffers from a memory leak causing it to be near impossible to last 40 games in a row.
- Stefan Gagne received an "A" for his project.
- The prize for the Pong Kombat Tournament was "$1.34 and a plastic cup".
- Upon winning Mortal Kombat the game says "You are the supreme Mortal Kombat Warrior!", which is parodied with "You are the supreme Pong Kombat Warrior! You're a really swell person, too!"
- The final boss to Mortal Kombat had the ability to transform into any one of the games characters, whereas Pong Kombat's boss, White Paddle can fire any one of the other player’s special moves.
- To parody the arcade origins of Mortal Kombat, Pong Kombat asks the user to "Insert 2 tokens into drive A: to play".
- Gagne's friend Nick Steele appears randomly when the ball is missed by a paddle and says "Toasty!" as a parody of Mortal Kombat II.
- Along with the different individual fatalities, a special fatality can be executed when the winning player takes no damage; he transforms the opponent into spam. This is called "Spamality" and is accompanied by an excerpt from the Spam Song.
