Show HN: 1D-Pong Game at 39C3
69 points - 01/11/2026
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress.
I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project.
I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without any hitch or compile errors - impressive. What a nice way to test some capabilities.
Have fun with it an build your own version. And there are soooo many ideas that could be implemented. I am waiting for your feedback!
Will we end up with a league of networked 1D-Pong games? ;-)
That's cool.
The only 1D game I'd seen before was this one, which I saw at the Exploratorium (a science museum in San Francisco): https://www.wobblylabs.com/line-wobbler
Someone made an open source clone: https://github.com/Critters/TWANG
I gave that code to Claude and asked it to make a web based version I could play on my phone. It's not as fun as the version with an LED strip, but it's actually playable (which surprised me): https://tools.encona.com/twang
Oh, I've seen that 1D RPG! that was actually at the last chaos camp as well :)
It'd be nice to have a version with keyboard input, I unfortunately can not pick up and shake my CRT monitor
Played this a lot at 39C3. Love the speed-up-the-further-back-you-hit mechanic.
Thanks for building, lot’s of fun.
Nice! I wrote a similar '1d' game a while back, as a sort of 'art project' / simplest game I could come up with:
https://bobbyjack.itch.io/1derlust
I had a few ideas about how to extend the concept into a proper game; might revisit one of these days.
This reminds me of early games on personal computers like the Altair that had a row of LEDs for output. Maybe the title of these was something like "Kill the Bit" or similar.
If you have an account on reddit, can you please post this in r/FastLED. The folks writing/using that library love to see it being used.
I remember a 1D roguelike someone made for a 24h competition, was surprisingly fun
Pedantically, this game is at least 2D due to including time. It presents more dimensions if we consider the different LED colors.
I'm now trying to contemplate what a truly 1D pong game would be. We can't escape time so we would have to remove positional and chromatic dimensions. That leaves us with a single blinking monochromatic LED.
Perhaps the game would resemble Richmond's flashing lights.