AN INTERVIEW WITH AL ALCORN

Atari’s first engineer remembers bringing Pong to England

Can you recall when you first met Alistair?

He and his business partner [Phil Smith] came to visit Atari in the very early days when we were in a small office in Santa Clara. They were one of the first people to really see the potential of Pong and start a company to manufacture, sell and distribute the machines in England. In those days it was far more difficult to start up a company in England than America. If you hired employees it was very difficult to fire them so if things didn’t go well, it could be very difficult to shut things down.

Were you very involved with Atari UK?

I was totally engrossed in engineering and tended to stay out of the sales and distribution side. I did come over to Europe a few months after that initial meeting [with Alistair and Phil] to visit several of our new European customers and help them with building Pong in their country. I visited Alistair a few more times after that and we became lifelong friends.

Alistair mentioned a football game Atari was working on back in the early Seventies…

I do know something about that! Many of our overseas customers wanted us to produce a football/soccer game so one was designed, based on customer input, and prototypes were made. They were terrible! It was the last time we let our customers design our games for us.

How did you feel when Atari UK went bust?

I was disappointed when the company failed, but by that time my focus had shifted to creating the home version of Pong. Alistair and I remain friends to this day, though.