Via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a video showing the gameplay and windup clockwork behind Blip a Tomy “digital” game (and PONG rip) from 1977.

The only digital part is the LED, but it manages to include mechanical pseudorandom action — a neat trick — and somewhat cleverly fuses game design and the engineering of the beast (the “game timer” is actually the windup knob).

Thank God for digital technology. It makes my putative calling so much easier (but don’t get me wrong — working on Blip was probably pretty awesome).

It would be pretty sweet to come up with CNC plans for this thing — open source clockwork pong.