What is Millennium Pong?
Millennium Pong is simply Beer Pong also known as Beirut with 1000 cups instead of 10, lots of people instead of 2 and more than one layer of cups so they all fit on the table.
How many people were playing the game? How were teams structured?
I'm guessing maybe 50 people played throughout the night. We rotated groups of 5 people playing at a time, each person getting 2 balls per turn. So 10 balls total, until we lost a few. We tried to keep the teams (red and blue) even throughout the party. Players wore headbands or armbands cut from large pieces of felt.
When did you rerack?
The official rule was as follows: The shooting team can call for a rerack at the begining of their turn whenever a new trangle could be formed. So, the top layer could have been reracked 12 times, one rerack per cup in the back row. As the game continued, I think we strayed from this rule slightly.
How did you get all those cups to fit on the table?
We had 4 layers on each side. The top layer had 13 cups in the back row. The rest had 15, 16, and 17 respectively. Do the math, it should add up to 1000.
How did you prevent the beer from getting warm/flat?
We left the lower layers empty and filled the layer when we got to it. Beer was served from our kegerator in the kitchen into pitchers which we carried to the basement.
How much, and of what type of beer was used in this game?
We used 1 keg of Labatt, and half of a keg of Coors Light.
How long did the game last?
We started a little after 7pm, and finished at 3:30am. So, more than 8 hours.
What were the results of the game?
Red team won (shooting from the left side) with 20 cups left.
Where did this momumental event take place?
Ann Arbor, MI, home of the University of Michigan Wolverines.
How did you record the video?
We captured high-resolution frames of the event every 1-2 seconds with a networked camera. Each frame was transmitted to a web server, where it was available to watch live over the web. The high-resolution was necessarily degraded for publishing to YouTube.
Why would anyone want to watch the live feed rather than attend?
Well, we're not actually sure... But to keep it interesting for anyone who was watching at home, there were two buttons on the webpage, "Cheer for Red" and "Cheer for Blue." Each time someone, anywhere, pushed that button, speakers at the party blurted out the name of the team which recieved the cheer, along with another equally obnoxious random sound effect taken from a pinball game. We recieved over 2,500 "cheers" from 92 unique IP addresses during the course of the game.