Mechanical Pong: When the real thing isn't retro enough

This will be an Olympic sport in 20 years.

This gorgeous machine is the creation of Niklas Roy, a prolific German artist who creates works that shatter conventional ideas about industrial design and the capabilities of technology. PONGMECHANIK is an authentic game of Pong, powered entirely by a fully-functional analog computer, and by far the most ambitious work of retro-inspired hacking I've ever seen.

Party like it's 1939.

The heart and soul of PONGMECHANIK is the relay switch. A relay is an electromagnetic device that operates a switching mechanism; this switch can be off (zero) or on (one), and thus represents a single byte of data in a binary computer system. (Many of these relays together is known as an array.) Nowadays, relays are commonplace in the telephone and railway industries, where it is necessary to instantaneously control huge voltages of electricity without delay. Relays were also used in the 1930s to construct the world's first computers, but were abandoned quickly due to their size and unpredictability. The total processing power of PONGMECHANIK's brain, entirely driven by a few dozen telephone relays, is barely enough to store a single word of text on this page.

These wheels rotate underneath the black playing surface to indicate score.

Niklas explains PONGMECHANIK's design on his webpage. The machine is divided into four parts: the array of telephone relays, a system of pulleys and springs which control the movement of the player/ball, the metal chassis that detects the collision of the ball with the paddle, and the sound effects, provided by two wood blocks (seriously!) struck with large metal solenoids controlled by the brain.

While I was skeptical at first as to the practical application of such a daunting (and low-tech) task, all it took was a few YouTube videos to thoroughly impress me. PONGMECHANIK is an almost-exact replica of the 1972 Atari version of Pong, a game which launched the entire commercial video game industry in the United States and left burning holes in the wallets of college dropouts nationwide. Although paddle and ball movement seems a tad slow, collision detection is suprisingly accurate. Furthermore, the machine's design is, dare I say, sexy. A clear plexiglass cabinet on top of a handsome wooden base gives the machine a clean, futuristic look. Ducking underneath the playfield allows a user to ooh and ah at the ballet-like dance of relays, pulleys, springs, and wires, all pulling and whirring in glorious harmony to bring Pong to life.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like PONGMECHANIK will be available to the masses any time soon; the machine is large, cumbersome, and delicate, and spends most of its life in Niklas's home. But that doesn't stop me from giving its inventor the NERD OF THE CENTURY award. This is, quite simply, the biggest, most ambitiously complex, and most wonderful home video game project I've ever come across, and it's not even really a video game!