July 15, 2026
Pong, but make it messy
Pong Wars on the Commodore 64
Retro fans are obsessed, roasting, and weirdly emotional over this tiny computer ball fight
TLDR: A coder turned an online ball-bouncing animation into a Commodore 64 project, sparking a big nostalgia wave around the classic 1980s computer. Commenters were split between admiration, playful mockery over the slow finale, and armchair fixes from people convinced they could build it better.
A programmer saw a hypnotic online animation of two balls endlessly flipping each other’s territory and had the most gloriously retro thought possible: what if this ran on a Commodore 64, the beloved 1980s home computer? That kicked off a monster build log full of trial, error, and old-school tinkering. But in the comments, the real show began. One reader dryly framed the whole saga as a 12,000-word journey with side quests, which immediately set the tone: this wasn’t just a coding project, it was a full retro odyssey.
Then came the split-screen drama. Some people were delighted just to see the old machine doing anything this playful, with one commenter saying it would have made a perfect screensaver for kids who could happily stare at bouncing balls forever. Others showed up with the classic internet energy of, "nice idea, but why didn’t you do it my way?" One armchair engineer suggested a simpler approach and basically accused the project of making life harder than necessary. And then the absolute tabloid gem landed: a brutally funny hot take telling everyone to skip to the end for the hilariously slow result. Ouch.
The nostalgia crowd also had their moment, reminding everyone that the Commodore 64 manual literally taught bouncing-ball programs to beginners back in the day — yes, kids, computers once shipped with manuals that actually taught you stuff. So the mood was a chaotic mix of admiration, backseat driving, retro bragging, and affectionate roasting. In other words: the internet’s favorite kind of nerd drama.
Key Points
- •The article documents an effort to recreate the "Pong Wars" animation on a Commodore 64 after the author saw Koen van Gilst’s version on Mastodon.
- •The project defines a 20x20 blockfield, two smoothly moving balls, boundary collisions, and block-flipping behavior as the core elements of the effect.
- •The author highlights collision detection and bounce-surface definition as the main technical challenge.
- •The implementation is designed around Commodore 64 timing constraints, especially using the vertical blanking period and a BASIC frame hook for per-frame custom code.
- •The article explains C64 display memory layout and shows assembly code that clears 1,024 bytes of screen memory by writing SPACE characters starting at `$0400`.