“Oh my God, what have you done with my Pong?!” – Al Alcorn, creator of Pong.

PopCap-founder-gone-indie Jason Kapalka teams up with Cosmochoria creator Nate Schmold to make the decade’s strangest crossover so far: a lo-fi, high-complexity table-tennis-romance-simulator RPG that’s exactly as bonkers as it sounds.

When Al Alcorn, the legendary developer of 1960s table-tennis simulator Pong, got an email from the team at Blue Wizard Digital with details about Hypergalactic Psychic Table Tennis 3000, his response, in jest, was “Oh my God, what have you done with my Pong?!”

Hypergalactic Psychic Table Tennis 3000 is a story of an anthropomorphic paddle—voiced by Mark Meer (Commander Shepard, Mass Effect)—who feels destined to become the best table tennis paddle in the hypergalaxy. While crushing his foes, he learns a little something about love along the way. Each paddle he fights has a name, a story, a heart… each one is important, goddamnit.

We’ve taken the simplest possible interaction between two sentient video table tennis paddles and turned it into a beautiful complex tapestry of oblique jokes, role-playing mechanics, magic spells, ridiculous cosmetic equipment, capturable beasts, and a full dialog system allowing you to converse with—and eventually romance—the strongest of your paddle foes (should your ballwork be sufficiently skilled & your paddle love be reciprocated).

Get your ball past the opposing paddle to build your skills, discover your paddle-lover’s secret yearnings, and get up close and personal with the pixelated space between love and death. It’s an ultra-Freudian Dadaesque ball-paddling fever dream of a game, and it’s coming to Steam on March 3rd for only $1.99 USD.