As the creator of Pong, an original boardmember of Atari, the hirer or Steve Jobs, and colleague of Nolan Bushnell and Steve Wozniak, Al Alcorn was literally there as it all happened. Originally (and unknowingly) given the specifications for Pong by Bushnell as a training project, Alcorn managed to create one of the biggest gaming memes in existence, get sued in the process, and help create one of the most recognised brands in games. He went on to lead Atari's Research and Development field, later working at Apple and going on to create the standard technology behind electronic slot machines.
PALGN: So I gather that you're not working in any games-related fields at the moment ...
Alcorn: No, I'm a serial entrepreneur - I've done a slot machine, I've done a kid's toy, I got MPEG started, QuickTime at Apple, digital video editing stuff, you know - you've got to keep moving around. I'm there as an industry emerges - at one point I was the best Pong player in the world and it was the same with slot machines, I was the smartest guy in the industry because I was the only guy in the industry! Now, I'd be terrible if I tried to develop videogames - it's just way more updated.
PALGN: Do you still play video games?
Alcorn: I certainly hang around on the Internet, I have a Nintendo Wii, my wife likes that. My wife doesn't really want videogames in the house, but she likes that. I like that it's a new idea. I watch my kids play shoot-em-ups, but I don't really play them.
PALGN: There's been a lot of crazy stories about the history of Atari, I mean the management hot-tub parties, all that kind of stuff ...
Alcorn: I deny the allegations. I deny the allegator!
PALGN: Were the roller-rink manufacturing facilities really as crazy as everyone said they were?
Alcorn: I don't know ... I'll tell you about it. First thing that happened, we started building the Pongs in a little shop. It wasn't a whole lot bigger than this area, but we ran out of space. And so, they got this rollerskating rink, and that was really cool - I was like 25 years old and I had a Triumph 650 motorcycle. I figured wow, I've got this huge place with this hardwood floor, I can go blast around on my motorcycle and no-one will pick me up! Well, I didn't account for the fact that it had been vacant for about a half a year, and there was like this layer of dust all over it - I almost dumped the bike, that would have been great, going down in flames on this thing ...
So here's what happened. We were so young and so naive, we had like no rules because hey, were were young. It was like, "get it built", so we had no documentation. But, as long as all you're doing is building Pong, saying, "I do this and you do that", that's OK. All of a sudden, we had another game come out - it was either Space Race or Gotcha - and all hell broke loose. It was like, "we've got these parts on this", and we had to get documentation together. We were so naive that we hired people from the unemployment office - we had trustees paroles, addicts, and crooks, but we were making so much money and were so profitable, we could tolerate that sort of stuff, a little bit. We had to put rules in after a while, but it was a crazy time. We eventually learned how to do interviews and hire competent people.
PALGN: Given the lack of history, did you just make it up as you go?
Alcorn: Yeah, absolutely! I mean there were no rules. As Allan Kaye, a great scientist I worked with at Apple, said, "the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself." So you just go and build it.
PALGN: How did it feel to see the place change after Warner took it over?
Alcorn: It was kind-of sad. I mean, I was again very naive. We had built this company, and I didn't realise how unique the experience was with Nolan, Drew Keenan, Steve Bristow, and our management team. We were all friends, we all trusted each other, and there was absolutely no politics going on. It wasn't until I went to other companies that I realised that politics is at play and it was much better to go stab somebody in the back than it was to make something good. At Atari, you could actually go to a meeting with some other guys and say, "I've really got a trouble, I need help", and instead of "ah, we'll get him", they'd help you. So when Warner took over and got very professional and officious it was, "ew, it's time for me to leave". In fact that's when I did the Cosmos holographic game.
PALGN: Games have become so mainstream today - it seems like the big companies keep swallowing up the smaller ones for lots of money ...
Alcorn: Maybe someone will swallow me up!
PALGN: Does this continual acquisition concern you at all? Do you think it hurts innovation?
Alcorn: It's technology, that's what drives it - video games are the technology driver for the consumer electronics industry. They have the highest performing stuff. So if somebody comes out with a better thing, a clever idea, they're going to win. Look at Nintendo - they were in the third place, and they had a better idea. If you're talking about an industry like grain, then yeah, you can get away with that approach because things aren't changing in making grain, but things are changing in video games. There's a lot of room for improvement, a lot of room for new stuff, and so there's still opportunity out there for new startups. It's wonderful that there's so much money out there - if you did start a company with a great idea, you get swallowed up and get rich. Put me in that camp!
PALGN: You mention innovation in technology - was R&D in Atari technology driven or concept driven?
Alcorn: It was a little bit of both. I mean, for example, when we started the company we had coin operated games, and after about a year of that, it got kind of boring. You're managing engineers, and it's people - it no longer became creative, it became managing people. So, the idea came out - let's do a home game, let's put Pong on a chip. Like, "aw that's cool, that's something we haven't done before!" We figured it would sell, we didn't have any plans to sell it, but hell, let's go try it. Now poeple make chips for everything, but people didn't do that back then. That was great, three guys, me and two other guys went off and we pulled it off, and that was fun. It happened to do very well, but we had other technologies that flopped, and that's OK, that's part of it - if you don't have mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.
PALGN: Speaking coming up with good ideas, I gather that Nolan had a bit of a "hands-on" approach to engineering management ...
Alcorn: God bless him, Nolan's one of the most creative, entrepreneurial men alive, but he has a very short attention span. He'd go into engineering and see a project underway, and he'd change it. I wouldn't know about it and I'd have a meeting and they'd say, "Nolan said to change it", and I'd say I write the checks, come on! I couldn't kick him out of engineering, so I had this pager system - whenever Nolan entered the lab, I'd get paged and I'd just walk around behind him and stop that. Eventually he cut me off - he grabbed my lowest engineer, the lowest guy in the engineering totem pole, the guy wasn't even on my radar, to go do this game called Breakout. The guy was Steve Jobs. So, he pulls him off, and I didn't know about this, and one day I come into work and Woz is there. They say, "Hey Al, you've got to see this!", and there's this fully functional game called Breakout. Like, where'd this come from?! It takes three or four months to do something, and it's hard enough getting what you want to try to do to work, and there's this game and it wasn't even on the schedule! And, there it is running! I mean, "What!?" Great game, but it wasn't supposed to happen.
PALGN: Do you ever feel like Atari was almost the nexus of modern consumer electronics? I mean, you were there, Bushnell was there, Jobs was there, Wozniak was there ...
Alcorn: Understand that the way it works in Silicon Valley that people have this misconception that innovation or invention comes from out of nowhere. It doesn't - it comes from your previous experience. For example, all the semiconductor companies came out of Fairchild. We came out of Ampex and a lot of other video companies came out of Ampex. They'd never have done video games, but the first Pong was built with parts left over from Ampex, and indeed I'm honoured that the first Apple II was made from parts and technology that they got from Atari. And, that's the way it works - it evolves from that sort of stuff. I mean, you see that sort of evolution, and you're part of it. At Google today, if you're lucky enough to work at Google, you're allowed 5% of your time for "other". In fact, a friend of mine was being interviewed to be "Vice President of Other". It's important to do that because it's free spirited, and if the company is making you do stupid stuff you'll quit and start your own thing. You may succeed, you may fail, but that's how innovation happens, you can't stop it, it's going to happen.
PALGN: I gather that bringing Jobs in was a rather atypical hiring process ...
Alcorn: He was an 18 year old drop-our from Reed college. "Oh, is Reed an engineering college?" "No, it's a literary college ..." "And you dropped out, and you want to work here because?" "Well, I've got this buddy Wozniak who's really great ..."
He was really cheap, and this engineer was bugging me for a tech, and I was like, can you solder? Hey, you're hired! He was ... a non-traditional employee, shall we say.
PALGN: Where did the idea of splitting the market into different groups to increase marketshare come from?
Alcorn: Nolan was the entrepreneur businessman. It was clear that we could only sell to one third of the market at Atari because the distribution channels for coin operated games was built along the jukebox line - there were three distributors in every major market, and you could only get one of the them, so we were limited to one third of the market. People were copying our games like fury and they were selling them to the two thirds, so we figured we could double our market if we created our own competition. It was great fun - Nolan hired his next door neighbour Joe Keenan to start a company called Key Games, he hired a few engineers, and they stole our driving game, those bastards! We'd tell our distributors and they'd be, "oh my god - we can buy it over there, let's buy it over there!" So, we were both selling the same game and the fact that we never sued them never occurred or bothered these people, or the fact that we were on the board! So, we had a lot of fun teasing our distributors in coin-ops - they were all independent businessmen, cigar smoking businessmen that would cut a deal with the big wad of money in their pocket. We enjoyed teasing them a lot.
PALGN: Given all the controversy lately around sex in videogames, do you think there's any irony in Atari's original adventurous management approach?
Alcorn: No, I think they're two different things. We avoided that kind of game, we thought that was a desperation play - the first game of bad taste that came out was a thing called Deathrace 2000, and it got attention, but we just didn't want to go there. We partied, we weren't prudish or anything, we just wanted to just make it family, get as many people playing as possible.
PALGN: What are your thoughts about the Atari / Magnavox lawsuit?
Alcorn: Ralph Baer had truly created the first home videogame console and filed patents on that product in 69 / 68, but as you see from their model upstairs of the PDP1, if you read the packing, that predated the Magnavox Odyssey so there was an argument whether it was patented or not. It's a long story, but basically, the interesting thing was that it was kind-of like the movie The Producers - the idea was that Nolan was going to give me a test game that wasn't very good because the Odyssey version didn't sell very well. So, let's go have a play with that and we'll throw it away - no harm, no foul. Well, guess what, we got hit in the ass by lighting by this thing - it's a big hit, it's like The Producers! Now we're building a game that sort-of wasn't ours - we stole their game, and we were like, oh well. We learned something about business though - they'll write you a letter saying, "oh you can't do that", but just do it. If you make money, you can split the money. We wound up settling a very fine deal with them. We got a paid up license because they wanted us first, and everyone else had to pay royalties - it was very good for us in a way.
PALGN: Atari's come and gone over the years - do you think this is representative of the industry as a whole?
Alcorn: It's the ecology of it. I look at it like a redwood forest. Some trees get really big and then they fall over and little trees come up from them, and when companies get big and old and calcified, they resort to suing people and stuff like that when the real way to do it is, "hey, make a better product." Go out and make money, don't take money from someone else.
PALGN: Is there anything you don't you like about modern games?
Alcorn: In a business sense, it's about the money. So, if they make a lot of money on these games, you can't argue with that. I can have my personal taste and judgements, but part of the problem there is that when you're designing videogames with engineers, you wind up making games that only nerds like. So, you have to be really really careful to make games that other people really really want, and that's tough because engineers left to their own devices will make games that they like. But, that may not be what everyone else likes.
PALGN: As a final question, is R&D in video games a closed chapter in your life, or do you think you'll ever return to it?
Alcorn: Oh god no, I'd be terrible. The technology is way beyond I can barely understand how they're doing this stuff now. I mean, like I say, I want to be the only guy in the industry so I be the smartest guy for a while before I get the hell out before they find out. That way I can do something else.
PALGN: Thanks for your time!
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