If the Binatone Superstar was where gaming began for me, then Pong, or something extremely close to it, was the first game I can actually remember.
Possibly tennis. Possibly one of the other nine variants doing their best to look like a completely different sport. Memory, once again, is not always kind enough to separate these things neatly.
What I do remember is the shape of it. Black and white graphics. A bat. Another bat. A square ball. A centre line. Maybe a score if you were feeling especially futuristic. That was more than enough.
I suspect this would have been around 1980, plus or minus a couple of years. Near enough to be believable, far enough away that I am not about to pretend I was keeping records.
And on a portable black and white television, it looked magnificent.
High Technology, By Small Child Standards
Seen now, Pong looks almost aggressively simple. Two white blocks, one square dot, and not much else. No scenery. No music worth speaking of. No characters. No commentary. No crowd noise. Certainly no motion-captured athletes with endorsement deals.
Back then, though, this was high technology.
The idea that the television could show a game at all still felt faintly miraculous. The fact that the graphics were blocky was not a drawback. They were graphics. Moving ones. Controlled by you. That alone did most of the heavy lifting.
There is also something wonderfully honest about those early visuals. Pong was not trying to persuade you that you were looking at Centre Court. It was just offering a few glowing shapes and trusting your brain to meet it halfway.
And of course your brain did exactly that.
Was It Pong? Was It Tennis? Was It Hockey In Disguise?
One of the charmingly blurry things about the Binatone Superstar is that so many of its games were variations on the same underlying idea. Tennis, squash, hockey, basketball, football and various others all emerged from the same family tree of bats, angles, rebounds, and basic competitive panic.
So when I say the first game I remember was Pong, I am using the term a bit loosely. It may have been labelled tennis. It may have been one of the sports variants. It may have been a version that looked, in practical terms, exactly like Pong wearing a slightly different hat.
That was part of the magic, really. One basic concept, stretched heroically into a whole sporting calendar.
The Binatone itself was built for that sort of thing. As I wrote in the first post, it belonged to that early era where home gaming was still figuring out what it even wanted to be. The games were simple, immediate, and built around the hardware more than any grand illusion of entering another world.
Still, when you are a child, “slightly different arrangements of rectangles” can cover a surprising amount of imaginative ground.
Black And White Was Not A Problem
It is easy now to think of black and white as a limitation first and an aesthetic second. At the time, I do not remember feeling short-changed by it at all.
If anything, the black and white portable television added to the strange little science-fiction feel of the whole thing. Bright blocks moving around on a glowing screen. The soft fuzz of the set. The sense that this was not a programme you were watching but a machine waiting for you to do something.
Colour would have been nice, obviously. So would about forty more years of hardware progress. But that is not really the point.
The point is that it worked. The screen responded. The ball moved. You moved it back. A game happened.
That was enough to make it memorable.
Still Playable, Still Understandable
One of the nice things about something as stripped-back as Pong is that it has barely aged in terms of readability. You can explain it to someone in about three seconds, and they will understand it in two.
If you fancy seeing just how immediate that idea still is, you can even play a browser version at freepong.org. No tuning to channel 36 required, which frankly feels like cheating.
That simplicity is probably why the game still makes sense all these years later. It is almost pure interaction. Timing, movement, reaction. Nothing extra. No clutter between you and the idea.
In some ways it is less like revisiting a specific old game and more like revisiting one of the basic building blocks of video games themselves.
A Wimbledon Week Post
As it happens, I am writing this in the middle of the Wimbledon Championships, which in 2026 run from 29 June to 12 July. So a tennis-themed post felt appropriate.
There is something pleasing about writing about one of gaming’s earliest electronic takes on tennis while the real tournament is unfolding a few miles down the road. One version has grass courts, elite athletes and strawberries. The other has two blocks, a square ball and the occasional argument with old television tuning.
Both, in their own way, are about angles, timing and trying to return something before it gets past you.
Why This One Stuck
I cannot swear that this was the first game I ever played in a strict historical sense. With machines like the Binatone Superstar, one Pong variant can blur into another very easily after a few decades.
But it is certainly the first kind of game I can properly remember.
I remember the look of it. I remember the black and white screen. I remember the blocky, hi-tech feel it had at the time. I remember the odd thrill of making something on the television respond to me.
And that, really, is enough.
Not every important first memory arrives with perfect technical documentation. Sometimes it is just a white square crossing a black screen on a portable television somewhere around 1980, plus or minus a couple of years, and a child realising that screens are much more interesting when they answer back.
So if the Binatone Superstar was the beginning, Pong, tennis, or one of its many cousins was the first clear shape inside that beginning.
Simple. Blocky. Black and white. Completely unforgettable.