Playing Pong in a Mac's dock icon is cute as hell

iOS engineer Neil Sardesai just paid homage to one of the oldest games in gaming history: pong. The engineer created a Mac pong version that runs smoothly on your dock — yes, your dock — and can be increased or decreased in size by toggling the panel with your mouse. Take a look.

Within minutes of sharing his Mac pong dock masterpiece, Sardesai received praise and requests to try other games in the same iteration. It brings me personal joy that someone went ahead and created an old-school Doom dock play. The creator calls it "janky" but I think Doom in your dock is perfect.

Background — Sardesai linked to an Apple developer page titled "NSDockTile" with the explanation: "The visual representation of your app’s miniaturized windows and app icon as they appear in the Dock."

Sardesai explains that Dock tile objects are not explicitly made in an app. In fact, dock tiles have to be created through an already existing window and then be customized accordingly depending on what the vision is for the program. Contingent on what your app is, you can display or remove the badge from the dock. It can get creative as you can draw whatever you want on the dock yourself.

For Pong, a simple game, this kind of customization should have been easy to carry out for the dock icon. After all, pong's undying appeal is in how bare it is. Originally created by Atari engineer Allan Alcorn, the game had a basic objective: "Avoid missing ball for high score." That was in the early 1970s when microprocessors hadn't hit the market yet, which explains why you won't find the code for the original pong, according to The Guardian. The rest is history.

While video gaming has gotten exponentially more complicated, visually captivating, and accompanying various lore for different game-verses is diverse, pong will be hard to replace. Just like Tetris, the tiny dot navigating the screen from one player to the other is meant to stay with us forever.