Allan Alcorn

Allan Alcorn (born January 1, 1948) is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating Pong, one of the first video games.

Pong was a hit in the 1970s.

In addition to direct involvement with all the breakout Atari products, such as the Atari 2600, Alcorn was involved at some of the historic meetings of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (at that time an Atari employee) presenting their Apple I prototype.

Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1971.

He worked for the pioneering video company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people that would end up being constants through the Atari, Inc., Apple, Cyan Engineering and Pizza Time Theater (now known as Chuck E. Cheese's) companies.

Alcorn was the designer of the video arcade game Pong, creating it under the direction of Nolan Bushnell and Dabney.

Alcorn was the person who hired Steve Jobs when he applied for a job at Atari in 1974.

Jobs had seen a help-wanted ad in the San Jose Mercury newspaper for Atari that said "Have fun, make money."

He showed up in the lobby of the video game manufacturer wearing sandals and disheveled hair, and told the personnel director that he wouldn't leave until he was given a job.

Al Alcorn, then chief engineer at Atari, was called and told, "We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?"

Alcorn said to send him in.

Despite Jobs's startling appearance, Alcorn hired him.

As Alcorn described it, "He just walked in the door and here was an eighteen-year-old kind-of a hippy kid, and he wanted a job, and I said ‘Oh, where did you go to school?’ and he says ‘Reed,’ ‘Reed, is that an engineering school?’ ‘No, it’s a literary school,’ and he'd dropped out. But then he started in with this enthusiasm for technology, and he had a spark. He was eighteen years old so he had to be cheap. And so I hired him!"

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell noted that Jobs was "brilliant, curious, and aggressive," but soon it was apparent that Jobs could also be very difficult to work with, openly mocking other employees and making several enemies in the process.

To make matters worse, he had significant body odor.

Jobs adhered to a fruitarian diet, and believed (incorrectly) that it prevented body odor, so he did not shower regularly or use deodorant.

Unfazed by the complaints, Alcorn resolved the problem by having Jobs work only at night.

When Ray Kassar replaced Bushnell as president, Atari became a marketing company.

The old leadership took risks and pioneered new technologies.

Instead of developing new technologies, Kassar preferred to push existing ideas to their fullest.

Alcorn wanted to begin work on the next generation of home video-game hardware, but Kassar didn't even want to consider an alternative to the Atari VCS.

Toward the end of 1978, Alcorn assembled a team of engineers and began designing a game console called Cosmos.

Unlike the VCS, Cosmos did not plug into a television set.

It had a light-emitting diode display.

Both systems played games stored on cartridges, but Cosmos's tiny cartridges had no electronics, simply a four-by-five inch mylar transparency that cost so little to manufacture that the entire cartridges could retail for $10.

Alcorn's team included two new engineers.

Harry Jenkins, who had just graduated from Stanford University, and Roger Hector, a project designer who had done some impressive work in the coin-op division.

Both were assigned to work directly under Alcorn on the Project.

Borrowing a page from Odyssey, the Cosmos used overlays to improve the look of its games.

Cosmos's overlays, however, were among the most impressive technologies ever created by Atari engineers.

Atari negotiated a deal with a bank for access to patents belonging to Holosonics, a bankrupt corporation that controlled most of the world's patents for holograms- a technology for creating three-dimensional images using lasers.

Alcorn brought in two specialists, Steve McGrew and Ken Haynes, to develop a process for mass-producing holograms that could be used with his game.

McGrew developed a process for creating holograms on mylar.

In later years, Haynes expanded the technology for other uses, such as placing 3D pictures on credit cards.

Alcorn used their mylar technology to create an impressive array of 3D holographic overlays for the Cosmos.

One of the first games developed for the system was similar to Steve Russell's Spacewar- an outer-space dogfight in which two small ships battled.

The game took place in empty space with no obstructions, but the holographic overlay created an extremely elaborate backdrop with whirling 3D asteroids.

The overlay did not affect the game.

The ships could not interact with the backdrop, but the visual effects were spectacular.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.