The HP Pong Banner
Posted in Tim Portfolio - September 1, 1996 - tim
Launched in 1996, this was evidently the world’s first interactive ad banner. Credit for the concept has to go to my partner Joel Hladecek (co-founder of Red Sky with me). It was simple: build a tiny functioning version of Pong in an ad banner, allowing the viewer to play along with a supposed engineer at HP (“the guy who built this”). Even though the game play was real, and quite compelling (people spent time in this banner), the complete run-time execution weighed in at less than 12k. Brilliantly coded by Chris Hurwitz, the dev team incorporated unheard-of tricks at the time; such as creating the bounce tone in the game from a single sine-wave slice of audio – replicated quickly in code. The graphics themselves were composited mathematically from one single pixel graphic. To this day it’s still a remarkable execution. No bandwidth, then, was the mother of invention.
The banner also performed well, drawing over three-times the click-through rates of other banners at the time (not to mention how much time was spent playing the game itself) and won many awards then and for years later.
[...] back in 1996 Red Sky built what has been called the first interactive banner (the Pong Banner, built in Shockwave, before Flash, brainchild of Joel Hladecek). We thought at the time we were [...]
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