Selling, coding, and playing the “world’s largest videogame”

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Even if you don't normally play video games, it's a sure bet that you've heard of Atari's 1972 arcade hit Pong. You've probably even played it, either in one of its many ports or in one of those arcades that also sells beer. But you've probably never seen it quite like this.

A crowd of well over 100 gathered near the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, despite rising winds and the looming threat of a thunderstorm. We were all there to play (and to watch) Pong, but not on an arcade cabinet—the version we'd be playing would be played out on the programmable LED lights lining the side of Philadelphia's Cira Centre, a 29-story office building across the Schuylkill River from the museum. The lights, normally used to display static images or simple looping patterns, had been transformed into a fully interactive game of Pong by Drexel computer science professor (and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program) Frank Lee and his team in just a few short months. It's being billed by the event organizers as the "world's largest video game."

But the time spent developing the game was just a small part of Lee's journey, which spans five years and involves just as much lobbying as it did hacking. We talked to Lee and his team about what it takes to port a game to an office building, and then we traveled down to Philly to try the 437-foot-high game of Pong for ourselves.

Selling the game

"I initially thought of the idea in 2008," Lee told Ars. "I was driving down at night, and saw the sparkling lights at the Cira Centre. The LED lights at the Cira Centre are built-in as part of the structure of the building. Every other night I would just pass by it, but this night I saw Tetris shapes forming in my mind's eye, falling down, and that began this long journey to try to make this game possible."

The first thing Lee needed to do was get buy-in from the Brandywine Realty Trust, the company that actually owns the Cira Centre. He had no contacts at the organization, but after much networking and many months of persistence finally managed to secure a meeting with a mid-level executive.

"That was 2010, and I told him it was possible, and basically I was shot down," Lee said. "He said 'Pong is old, why would anyone care?'"

Lee tried to change their minds by pointing to the positive media attention garnered by the Google Doodle for May 21, 2010—a fully-playable version of Pac-Man created to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. Lee was convinced that people would care specifically because the game was old, but Brandywine wasn't convinced.

"People care because it's Pong. Because Pong is a cultural milestone, and I mean that in that people who've never played Pong know Pong," Lee said. "Little kids know Pong. Grandmothers and grandfathers know Pong, and so on. It is part of our cultural fabric, because it was the first successful commercial video game that launched the multi-billion dollar industry that we have now."

"But I was shot down," Lee continued, "so I went back to square one and tried to talk to everyone that I [could] to essentially lobby to anyone who'd let me do this."

Lee's fortunes changed when he met with the organizers for Philly Tech Week, a week-long event organized by Technically Philly that's meant to showcase Philadelphia's technology scene. In 2012, the event had over 10,000 attendees across 88 events, and this year's event looks to be even larger.

"When I first told [the Philly Tech Week organizers] the idea they were all over it," said Lee, "and they were trying to reach out to everyone that they knew."

This intense lobbying effort finally put Lee in touch with Gerard Sweeney, the CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust. The results of this meeting were more positive than the last.

"We met for 30 minutes," Lee said. "We sort of had small talk about what I did for about 20 minutes, then he asked me about the project. I said 'I love your building, I think it's one of the most beautiful buildings in Philadelphia. Using your lights, I want to create a video game, Pong.' And he said 'wow, that sounds creative and great. Let's go for it!' And that was it. All that effort to talk to the people in the middle went nowhere, but once the top person says yes, everyone falls into place. That was the five-year lesson that I learned."

Making the game

This discussion and approval happened in late January of this year, giving Lee just a few short months to put together a team and actually program the game.

"They came right on board and helped me on their own time, because I had no budget," laughed Lee.

Lee has three others on his team, besides himself: Gaylord Holder, Senior System Administrator for Computer Science at Drexel; Dr. Santiago Ontanon, a Drexel computer science professor; and Marc Barrowclift, a sophomore in software engineering.

The Cira Centre's LED lights are on a private network, and each light has its own IP address. They're controlled by a system from Philips—in this way, they're not entirely unlike the Philips Hue lights we reviewed a few months ago. Each LED can be lit or unlit, and can turn a wide variety of colors. The team's first task was to figure out how to hack this system—to make something built to display static images into something interactive.

"If I could figure out what the commands, the packets, were that were being fed to the lights," said Lee, "then I could interactively turn them on and off, which is basically the basis for any game." Luckily for the team, the data being fed to the lights was unencrypted, and they were able to work through this problem relatively quickly.

Holder obtained from the Cira Centre an XML file that contained the IP addresses of all the lights, Barrowclift told Ars. He then created a script that would parse that file, and map out a virtual image of what the lights on the building were currently displaying—Barrowclift sent us a few images of the code alongside the virtual image (above) to demonstrate.

"And that's where I came in," he continued. "I took that structure [Holder] made and I picked a few from there, and I would control lights from that view that I would make from his application. That would allow [Ontanon] and anybody else that wanted to make games to essentially code games like they've always done, at least in concept."

The Philips lights' relative popularity helped the team out during this process. Barrowclift pointed us to a project called "kinet", maintained by GitHub user vishnubob, that saved them from having to start from scratch.

"Instead of having to go LED by LED and get the IP address… and figure out what was the exact command that will turn it on," Barrowclift explained. "This guy essentially did all that for us."

When Holder's code, Barrowclift's code, and the kinet project combined, the team had something that bypassed Philips' system for displaying static images in favor of something interactive that was relatively easy to code for. Essentially, they had written a gaming API for an office building. The next step was the game itself.

Playing the game

I arrived at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about an hour before the event was scheduled to start on Friday. The event was definitely tailored to its audience—arcade cabinets for Space Invaders and Asteroids (as well as a multi-game cabinet with Dig Dug and a few other Namco titles) were up and running, and local chiptune band 8static was already warming up. Lee and his team were easy to find—they were all huddled around the game's controller, which I managed to get a good look at before the crowd obscured it.

All of the code for the game itself (as well as the associated code we mentioned) was stored on a MacBook Pro, which was hooked up to an off-the-shelf X-Arcade Dual Joystick via USB—this same control panel, which holds two joysticks and eight buttons for each, is commonly used in custom-built MAME arcade cabinets for those who don't want to build their own custom control panel. The laptop was connected to the Internet through an AT&T 4G hotspot and then connected through a VPN tunnel to the private network for the Cira Centre's lights.

The presence of the small crowd caused some technical problems for the team's setup—while it had apparently worked fine during testing, the 4G hotspot's connection became overloaded. All of the code being transmitted from the computer to the building looks relatively light, but since all of it is on the computer it needs a stable, consistent connection to run smoothly, and the first game (between Lee and Gerard Sweeney, the realty company's CEO) was rendered unplayable about halfway through because of lag.

After a few minutes of "live hacking," as Lee's team referred to it, things smoothed out, and the game became more responsive as the evening went on. I was in the fourth group to play the game, and while there was a small bit of lag between my input and the movement of the lights, the embarrassing 3-0 shutout I suffered at the hands of my opponent was due entirely to my own lack of practice and not to technical issues.

What comes next?

If you're in the area and you missed the game (or if you didn't go because of the thunderstorm barreling down on the city—Friday's play session only lasted about half as long as originally planned), you'll have another chance to play it on Wednesday, April 24th.

Now that the hard work has been done, though, what's next? The team has already put together playable games of Snake and Space Invaders, for example, and Barrowclift is working to create a game of Tetris, the game Lee originally saw on the side of the Cira Centre in his mind's eye. But Lee doesn't want to stop at porting classic arcade games.

"What I like about this building and these lights is the fact that it is an ultra low-resolution display—20 by 23 pixels, that's nothing," Lee told Ars. "So it's heavily constrained, and I like constraints because constraints are the engine, the drivers for creativity. What I wanted to do in my proposal that I laid out was essentially to create Pong and other games that people would be familiar with, but have it as an annual event where for example kids from middle school and high school could submit new game ideas."

"Or, use the entire building, which could become interesting. We're only using one side of the building. What new games can you come up with?"

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham