Raspberry Pi Pico Pong Plays on Pimoroni Unicorn

Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: Pip Austin)

If there's one thing we've noticed over the years, it's that the Raspberry Pi is deeply intertwined with retro gaming. This project, created by developer Pip Austin, proves this by bringing Pong's classic game to our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico.

According to Austin, who shared the development on LinkedIn, this is her first Raspberry Pi-based game. She opted to use a Pico Unicorn from Pimoroni for visual output. This board features an LED matrix that you can easily program with Python.

The best Raspberry Pi projects are built from the ground up and, according to Austin, the code for this game was created entirely from scratch. It operates just like Pong mechanics-wise with small adjustments made to suit the hardware at hand.

Players control the side bars using the four buttons on the Pimoroni Unicorn. Scores are tallied in real-time for both players. When a player wins, a victory message scrolls across the screen for the winner.

If you want to play Pico Pong, Austin was awesome enough to share the code on GitHub. All you need to get started is a Raspberry Pi Pico, Pimoroni Unicorn and someone to play against.

Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer at Tom's Hardware US. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.