At the same time, he wanted to develop and sell his own machines. For that purpose he hired engineer Al Alcorn, who ended up designing one of the best arcade game machines ever - the PONG. The machine was a result of a ruse Bushnell played to test Alcorn's engineering abilities. Here's how "The Ultimate History of Video Games," by Steven Kent describes this accident of greatness,
Shortly after hiring Alcorn, Bushnell gave him his first project. Bushnell revealed that he had just signed a contract with General Electric to design a home electronic game based on ping-pong. The game should be very simple to play—“one ball, two paddles, and a score…. Nothing else on the screen.”
Bushnell had made up the entire story. He had not signed a contract or even entered into any discussions with General Electric. In truth, Bushnell wanted to get Alcorn familiar with the process of making games while he designed a more substantial project.An excerpt from an interview with Alcorn in the same book,
found out later this was simply an exercise that Nolan gave me because it was the simplest game that he could think of. He didn’t think it had any play value. He believed that the next winning game was going to be something more complex than Computer Space, not something simpler.
Nolan didn’t want to tell me that because it wouldn’t motivate me to try hard. He was just going to dispose of it anyway.
Pong proved to be extremely successful and put Atari on the world-wide technology map. One of the low-ranking employees at Atari later co-founded a famous "fruit" company. The guy's name was Steve Jobs.
tags: innovation, silicon valley, stanford, luck, history
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