50 years ago, Atari released the original Pong as an arcade game. To mark the anniversary, Atari co-founder and Pong designer Allan Alcorn spoke with NPR to reflect on the game's development.
A display at the Computer Game Museum in Berlin, Germany features a standing console of Pong, one of the earliest commercially successful video games.A display at the Computer Game Museum in Berlin, Germany features a standing console of Pong, one of the earliest commercially successful video games.Two lines move on either end of the screen, a pixelated dot volleys between them and a score displays at the top.
50 years ago, Atari released the original Pong as an arcade game. To mark the anniversary, Atari co-founder and Pong designer Allan Alcorn spoke with NPR about the game's development, its success and its connection to a big name in the tech world.Well, it came from Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of Atari. The idea was to give me something to practice on because I had never designed a video game before. No one else ever had either, except Nolan.
I didn't think the company would last long because most startup companies didn't. And so I thought it would fail after a while, but it'd be a lot of fun, and I'd learn a lot doing it, and then go back to work for a real company. But that never happened and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.Nolan said he wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands. And I didn't know how to do that. So I said, okay, I'll be right back.
Remember, this was 1972. There was no Internet, there was nothing. And so I just poked around, and it took me about 2 hours and Nolan said"I don't like it." I said,"Well, if you don't like it, Nolan, you do something better." So he said,"okay, okay." That's how the sounds were done.We were a rapidly growing company, and I needed a technician. And one day the personnel lady came in, says,"You like to get these strange ones. So here's one.
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