I’ve searched for the past few days to find comments on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and most everything I’ve read gives us a very small chance of getting any further in the contest.    The only positive comments I have seen are for AR Pong and Pong World, both very good looking games.     We knew we were taking a risk by going full-on retro-evolved with our entry, and it looks like it will not pay off.   The response to our video is telling, with 3 “dislikes” to counter 1 “like” (which is from me…how pathetic), so by all indications, we’ve simply made people mad.   I saw that some of the other videos were heavy on the “dislikes” as well, so it’s quite possible that someone came through and just hit “dislike” on everything, but it doesn’t really matter.  The reality is, we did not hit “the nostalgic Atari nerve” we were trying to reach.

Our question should have been: “Does that nostalgic Atari nerve even exist?” Our problem might be that we just love classic Atari too much.  We love Atari the same way younger generations love Nintendo and the Sony.  We don’t think Atari ever got a fair shake, and we want to see it held in as high esteem as the companies that came after.   However, by doing that, we probably missed the point.  The idea was to “modernize” Pong, not drown it in hardcore nostalgia.  Still, I’m happy we stuck to our guns,  even if it means our chances are just a sliver of the size of our hopes.

Anyway, unless something drastic occurs, this will be one of my last transmissions about the contest.  I need to reflect heavily on what it all meant and why we even entered in the first place.

On the good side, I have a new HTML5 Canvas tutorial I’m working on and we have another Atari-related HTML5 Canvas game that we cannot reveal just yet.   Things are looking bright, but I today I wish they were just a bit brighter.