How curiosity keeps Pong creator Al Alcorn on the innovation path (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
July 20, 2013
Updated June 18, 2025
9 min

Allan Alcorn is back making a game for the first time in more than a decade — Seriously?!

Alcorn is one of the legendary wizards of Silicon Valley icon Atari and one of the fathers of the video game industry. Back in the early 1970s, he got together with Nolan Bushnell to create coin-operated video games, such as an arcade version of the early game Spacewar! Bushnell asked Alcorn to make a simple Ping-Pong game, a version of the Magnavox Odyssey’s tennis game, under a contract from General Electric. Alcorn’s Pong was the result.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.