Rebound (video game)

Rebound
Flyer
Developer(s)Atari
Publisher(s)Atari, Inc.
Platform(s)Arcade
Release
  • NA: February 1974
Genre(s)Sports
Mode(s)Multiplayer

Rebound is a two-player sports arcade video game developed by Atari and released in February 1974. In the game, two players each control paddles on either side of a volleyball net, with a ball dropped from the top of the screen. The players bounce the ball back and forth across the net with the goal of scoring points by having the ball reach the bottom or side of the other player's half of the screen, with the trajectory of the ball dependent on where it strikes the paddle. The winner is the first player to reach eleven or fifteen points, depending on the game settings.

Development of Rebound began in late 1973, as one of several variations they produced in 1974 on the gameplay of the successful Pong (1972), Atari's first game and the fourth-ever arcade game. Around the same time, Atari launched Kee Games, a subsidiary meant to produce clone games of Atari's products and act as a competitor in order to expand into more distribution channels in the same region than the industry typically supported. Kee's first game, released in March 1974, was Spike, a clone of Rebound, which added a "spike" button to the game that made the paddle jump up and attempt to bounce the ball downwards instead of up. In addition to the base game, Atari sold a conversion kit to convert any Atari two-player Pong variant into Rebound, and in 1977 Rebound was included in Video Olympics for the Atari 2600, a collection of Pong variants.