TONG

What is TONG?

Sometimes, the total is greater than the sum of the parts. Tetris and Pong are classics, addictive and unshakable from their places in gaming history. TONG is the result of mixing the two, capitalizing on the essential qualities of each classic and adding new twists of its own to make an explosive chemical reaction out of it all.

Why? Why play Tetris and Pong in the same place at the same time? It is weird, that's for sure. Tetris and Pong work different parts of your brain, parts that like to have your full attention to themselves. So right at first, TONG can seem a bit overwhelming. As it turns out, though, for all the zillions of variations and clones we've had of Pong and Tetris over the years, putting the two together actually makes the "twists" and "extras" make sense. In Arkanoid, Break-out, Brick-out, etc, what are these blocks doing in the middle of a Pong game? In various Tetris clones, where do the new, non-four-block shapes come from and what's with the explosives and other bonuses? Well, when Pong and Tetris are going on simultaneously and in the same space, all that stuff and many more clever ideas suddenly aren't little novelties, they're sensible parts of a frantic game.

Downloads

The latest release version is 1.0, which can be downloaded as:

Florian Forster has contributed Debian packages: Wart has contributed Fedora Core 4 packages: TONG is also in the Games section of the Source Mage GNU/Linux distribution.

If anyone else would like to help out and build additional binary packages, I'll be glad to credit you and/or distribute those here as well. I'm especially interested in having a nice easy-to-install Mac OSX version.

Project Information

TONG is free software (under the GNU General Public License), is being developed on GNU/Linux and should run on any platform that SDL works on. It requires SDL, SDL_image, and SDL_mixer.

TONG has successfully been built for GNU/Linux, Win32, and Dreamcast. Releases are made at arbitrary milestones, basically whenever I see fit to do it. :^) If anyone would like to volunteer for porting (should be trivial) and/or packaging binaries for Macintosh/OSX, Dreamcast, or any other platform, please do so, and let me know!

If you want to play bleeding-edge TONG, grab it from CVS. You can also grab a Nightly CVS tarball.

Comments? Email me!