Gong was released in March 2021 by Brad Parker, a developer on the libretro team. It is a minimalist take on Pong, the 1972 Atari arcade game designed by Allan Alcorn that opened the commercial history of video games: one ball, two paddles, a score, and nothing else. Seen from above like a table tennis table, each paddle moves up and down along its edge of the screen; the return angle depends on where the ball hits the paddle, and the speed increases as the rally goes on.
Like Dinothawr, Gong is not an emulator but a game written directly as a libretro core. It serves as a textbook example in the libretro repository: a few hundred lines, no dependencies, a demonstration of what the API expects from a minimal core. It is also, incidentally, a perfectly playable Pong.
| Author | Brad Parker (Libretro) |
| Year of release | 2021 |
| Engine | Native game written as a libretro core |
| Game type | Action, bat and ball |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Gong is entirely free, shipped complete with Recalbox: there is strictly nothing to provide or install. See the Included games page.
The system is called Gong, but the game shows up in the list under the name Pong: that is the name written in the metadata shipped by Recalbox. It is one and the same game.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro gong | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Libretro gong is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, including the Raspberry Pi Zero 2: the game needs no horsepower at all. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core.
Gong is a read-only system: the game is shipped complete and its folder is not meant to be modified.
/recalbox/share_init/roms/ports/Gong/
Supported extension: .game
The folder holds a single file:
/recalbox/share_init/roms/ports/Gong/
└── gong.game ← the game entry, launched by the core
The gong.game file does not contain the game: everything lives inside the core itself. It is simply a marker that makes the entry appear in the game list and triggers the launch.
Unlike the other ports, this system does not read
/recalbox/share/roms/. Dropping files into/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Gong/has no effect: they will not appear in the game list.