Al Alcorn was a New Year’s baby, born January 1, 1948. He was Atari’s first full-time engineer and an early casualty of Ray Kassar‘s management style after the Sock King took over as Atari CEO.
Arguably, Alcorn is famous for two things. He was the engineer who designed Pong, and he was also the engineer who hired a young Steve Jobs.
Pong
It is trendy to say that Atari stole the idea for Pong. Magnavox, after all, released their version first. But Atari fans are quick to point out that the Atari version was more fun. Al Alcorn took a good idea and added some additional elements that kept it interesting longer. For example, the ball traveled differently if you hit it on the end of the paddle rather than in the center.
In some ways, it was an accident. Nolan Bushnell gave him the assignment as an exercise. But his implementation was so good, they decided to make it into a product. It was so successful, it did more than put Atari on the map. It launched an entire industry of video games that connected to your TV. If Magnavox had been the only company with TV game in 1972, it’s possible the whole home video game industry would have been delayed several years.
Hiring Steve Jobs
The second thing Al Alcorn did was hire Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs showed up at Atari headquarters unannounced and told the front desk he wasn’t leaving until they gave him a job. The front desk called Alcorn and asked if he wanted to interview Jobs or if he wanted them to call the police.
Alcorn interviewed Jobs, and liked his passion, even though he had no engineering background to speak of.
His co-workers found Jobs difficult and unpleasant to work with, a problem Alcorn managed by having Jobs work at night.
Steve Jobs famously created the game Breakout at Atari. Or at least he took credit for creating Breakout. He actually farmed much of the work out to his friend Steve Wozniak, and then he lied to Wozniak about how much money he received from Atari, keeping more than half of the proceeds.
The fallout
Al Alcorn’s final project at Atari was a new and different type of game console called Cosmos, with a built-in LED display. The console, which never went into production, could have sold alongside the Atari 2600, and potentially provided a bridge to whatever ended up succeeding the Atari 2600. Alcorn was thinking ahead, but Ray Kassar wasn’t having it.
There were merchants interested in selling the console, including JCPenney, and they altogether ordered 250,000 units. But Atari canceled the console in 1980, so Alcorn opted for early retirement, much like Nolan Bushnell had taken. Atari tried to give Alcorn a less generous retirement package, but Alcorn was able to litigate his way to something comparable to what Bushnell received.
Ray Kassar seemed to think that getting rid of troublemakers like Alcorn was key to transforming Atari into a $2.2 billion company. The problem was, without visionaries like Alcorn to figure out what was next, Atari hit the wall in the fall of 1982. With nothing new and compelling to counter increased competition from competitors like the Coleco Vision and Vectrex, Atari went from being the greatest acquisition in the history of acquisitions to being sold in desperation at a price that suggested it was only a $28 million company going forward, rather than the $75 million company Warner Bros. had purchased 1978.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.