Al Alcorn is one of the most important figures from the earliest days of the videogame industry. Not only was he there at the birth of Atari, alongside Nolan Bushnell, but he was the engineer who built Pong – the second coin-operated videogame machine and the game that kicked off an industry. He was also integral to the creation of the Atari VCS – the first incredibly successful cartridge-based home console, as well as a number of other products and designs. Over his ten year tenure at Atari, Alcorn saw the company grow in leaps and bounds, had meetings in hot tubs and eventually saw the company starting to slide after Warner Communications bought it.

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Since those days he hasn't been directly involved in the videogame industry, but has remained on the cutting edge, working for Apple from 86-91 on a new technology called mpeg and working with a think tank funded by Paul Allen earlier this decade (from which he spun off Zowie – a company that created a line of 'smart toys'). We caught up with Al atfor a chat.

Pong.+So+popular+that+the+streets+in+towns+with+machines+were+deserted+-+everyone+was+inside+playing!+Okay,+maybe+not.+But+it+was+popular!

We both wound up with jobs out of college at Ampex. They built the first audio tape recorder, but the key thing here was that they invented the videotape recorder, so we were working with people who really knew video – analogue video. Nolan was there in that group, and I was in – I was actually still at college, I was at Cal Berkley in the 60s. Nolan had worked at an amusement park in Salt Lake City. He went to college at the University of Utah, and he worked at an amusement park in the summer, so he understood the business of coin-operated games; in those days [that was] pinball machines and mechanical driving games… Nolan understood the economics of that, but that wasn't going to make him any money. He got a job at Ampex and I was at Ampex at the same time; it was one group – this was the group from which Atari kind of sprang out of.Nolan was at the University of Utah… that was very important because – we're talking back in the 60s – the University of Utah, of all places, they invented computer graphics there. A gentleman named Ivan Sutherland… one of the greats of computer science, he actually built the first graphic computer there. Nolan saw the early game of Spacewar! on the PDP-1… saw the confluence of seeing that you could do stuff – a game – with this computer, even though it was a million bucks worth of computers, and understanding the coin-op business, saying 'why not make a game using that kind of technology? You could make a fun game.' That's really the lead-in. So here he was at Ampex. Computers had come down in price pretty rapidly, and his idea was to go build an arcade [game]. He had a Nova mini computer – it was the smallest you could get, cost about $2000 at the time. He knew it was uneconomical, but he still wanted to do it; he figured the price would come down at some point. So he designed this game called Computer Space… and that was kind of a rip-off of the Spacewar! game.He quit Ampex first. There was only one coin-op manufacturer west of the Mississippi, a company called Nutting Associates… he brought that to them and they said 'cool, we'll build this'... Anyhow, the game didn't do very well, maybe sold a thousand units at most, but he wanted to do another game and got into an argument with Nutting. Nolan wanted to be part owner of the company, Nutting said no… so Syzygy was born as a company, and he came over and he hired me from Ampex because… being young and out of college I was hip to the new digital electronics, even though I was an analogue engineer. At Cal, my degree had to be in electrical engineering and computer science, so I learnt a lot about – more than I wanted to at the time – computers, thank god.We couldn't use the name. That was our first choice, our second was Atari. Atari is a word from the Japanese game Go.I'd never seen a videogame, other than Nolan [had] showed me his prototype of the Computer Space game.Yeah. 'It's the simplest game. One moving spot, two paddles, score digits' – that was one of the harder things to actually make, to try to make those seven segment numerals, y'know – and that was it. It was an idea, but he told me he had a contract from General Electric for a consumer product, which meant that it had to be, like, maybe ten chips, and I was up to seventy chips… but he told me that to get me to work hard at it and do a good job. So I tried to make it a good game. I added things like speed up. When you played the first one it was obvious that without the ball speeding up it wasn't fun to play. Then the reflection off the paddle was kind of tricky to do…Well, I sort of had to. If you didn't have it it would be boring! Have you seen the Youtube video that's out there of me and Ralph Baer playing the Magnavox Odyssey game prototype at the Game Developer's Conference last week? Take a look at it, it's really something – you'll see he has a prototype of the original Brown Box, and it's impossible to play. It was a dog of a game! And Nolan got the idea from that, but it's like the movie The Producers, because he figured we'd rip off the idea for a game, but so what? It's no good, we're not going to sell it, we'll throw it away, so what harm is there, right? So, it didn't work out that way… they sent us a letter.So the idea for the [angles] was just to make the game playable – it had to be fun! It was just obvious. There was no market testing, there was no research, there was no business plan, none of that crap. And I added sound – you've heard that story?