We feel sorry for youth of today. If you spend a few hours playing a modern video game and decide you want to write your own, there’s a big job ahead of you. Games now are as much performances as programs, with cinematic 3D renderings, polyphonic sound and music tracks, and detailed storylines. That wasn’t true 40 years ago, when you could play Pong and then think about writing your own version. The Raspberry Pi people must agree as they are taking preorders for a book called “Code the Classics.” In it, they interview designers of several classic arcade games and then show Python versions of the games you can run — and hack — yourself. You can see their video about the title, below.

The code is from Raspberry Pi founder [Eben Upton] and as you might expect the games aren’t necessarily faithful reproductions but inspired by the old arcade standards.

The 224-page book is listed as volume one and apparently, between the two volumes, the book will tackle different genres of classic games ranging from Pong to Sensible Soccer. From the video, we think the other games are Centipede, Frogger, and Bubble Bobble.

If you are interested in retrogaming, this should be a good read. We don’t know how much is in volume 1 and when volume 2 will be around, though.

If you don’t want to play games written in Python, you can always write Python programs to play games for you. If your favorite programming language is solder, you can still play Pong.