The Pong scoring system ... game ends at 11?

[Tickled_Pink]

I was watching a couple of YouTube videos showing the original arcade Pong in action. In both the ones I watched the game ended when one player got 11.

 

Does the game always end on 11 or is there some other mechanic at play? And if it does end at 11, does anyone know the reason for this? It just seems to me that 9 would have been the more logical choice considering that only a single digit is initially displayed per player.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

Clearly Atari were years ahead of Spinal Tap

 

[Rybags]

The home systems went to 15 if I remember rightly.

 

21 is the usual finish for table tennis, and there's probably short variants that go to 11.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

In all honesty though, I suspect the reason Pong ended at 11 was because maybe because several school-ground games I remember playing were up to 10 because us kids had 10 fingers to count on and my guess is Atari felt that achieving a score above 10 would be an indicator of victory.

 

But I could totally be talking out of my ass.

[DanBoris]

I was watching a couple of YouTube videos showing the original arcade Pong in action. In both the ones I watched the game ended when one player got 11.

 

Does the game always end on 11 or is there some other mechanic at play? And if it does end at 11, does anyone know the reason for this? It just seems to me that 9 would have been the more logical choice considering that only a single digit is initially displayed per player.

 

According to this site, 11 is the official winning score for Ping-Pong

 

http://www.killerspin.com/spin-info-table-tennis-rules#11

 

Technically a player needs to win by 2 points, but that would have been difficult to implement in Pong.

 

There is also a switch in Pong that can be used to configure it for either a max score of 15 or 11.

[Shawn]

Ya tied at 10 makes a deuce just like in real tennis.