How Pong was born: Allan Alcorn's "practice assignment" that started a $70B industry

While building Pong Echo, I dug into Pong's origin story. This is the true starting point of commercial video gaming. Before 1972, video games barely existed. After 1972, the path to becoming a $70 billion industry (2024 estimate) was set. It all began with a "practice assignment" from a boss to a new hire.

Atari in 1972

Atari was founded in June 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Bushnell had already made Computer Space (1971), a Spacewar!-inspired arcade game. Computer Space flopped commercially — too complex controls (8 buttons, 3 separate directional controls); ordinary players couldn't learn it in half an hour.

Bushnell learned one thing from this failure: arcade games must let an average adult learn in 30 seconds without a manual. He later called this "Bushnell's Law."

June 1972, Atari hired its first engineer — Allan Alcorn. Allan was 24, fresh from Berkeley, with prior TV hardware design experience. Bushnell gave him his first task, per Alcorn's own recollection:

"Make the simplest electronic ping-pong. Two paddles, a ball, bouncing. It's a practice assignment; the real project starts after this."

What Bushnell didn't tell Allan: this was actually a real commercial assignment. He felt telling a newcomer would make him nervous. This well-meaning lie freed Allan from any pressure and let him work freely.

Three months of development

Allan spent three months building Pong using 1972's standard TTL chips. The prototype was assembled from a wooden cabinet, a CRT TV, and about 70 TTL chips. No microprocessor (the first one came out in 1972 too), no programming — all logic was hardware circuits.

Key design decisions:

1. Paddle position affects bounce angle. Allan wanted the game to be more than "block the ball" — he wanted control. He designed: ball hitting the paddle edge bounces sharply; ball hitting the paddle center bounces flat. This one detail turned Pong from a reflex test into a strategy game.

2. Ball speed increases over time. Round starts slow; each bounce adds a bit of speed. This made "surviving longer" a real challenge, not just an endurance test.

3. Sound effects. An accident. Bushnell wanted "a sound when ball hits paddle." Allan tapped a TV sync signal at a frequency and piped it to a speaker — getting that signature "boop" sound. It was a technical shortcut, but it sounded satisfying and became one of Pong's souls.

Day 3 at Andy Capp's Tavern

August 1972, the Pong prototype was done. Bushnell and Allan moved the wooden machine to Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale for testing. They told the bar owner: free placement, see how customers react. Machine had a coin slot — 25 cents per game.

Three days later, the bar owner called Atari, urgent:

"Your machine is broken."

Allan rushed over, fearing a short circuit. He opened the cabinet — the coin slot was completely jammed with quarters; the machine mechanically stopped working.

This story is famously quoted, but the fact: Allan confirmed it in multiple interviews (including the 2017 IEEE oral history). At the time, the bar's daily Pong revenue exceeded the bar's combined jukebox and pinball revenue.

From practice assignment to 19,000 units

Bushnell instantly knew: this is the product. They industrialized Pong over the next months — turned the wooden cabinet into proper arcade hardware, set up a production line. Commercial Pong launched November 1972 at $1,095 per unit.

Early 1973, orders outpaced capacity. By end of 1972, they'd shipped 19,000 Pong arcades. Each machine earned shop owners about $6,000/year (vs. typical pinball at $1,500/year), payback in ~2 months.

1974 saw the home version (connected to TV); 150,000 units sold. 1975, Sears sold 150,000 of "Tele-Games" (Pong's home variant), making Atari a household entertainment brand overnight.

When Atari was acquired by Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million (Bushnell personally cashed out ~$15 million), Pong was globally famous.

Pong's two real contributions

50 years later, Pong's place in game history isn't about "it's fun" (contemporary players said you'd tire of it after 3 rounds), but about these two things:

1. It proved "video games are a real business." Before Pong, no one knew if normal adults would pay to play screen blocks. Pong's tavern numbers were the first proof: yes, eagerly. All subsequent investment — from 1977 Atari 2600 to 1985 NES to 2000 PS2 — rests on this proof.

2. It established "simple + immediately learnable" as core design. Bushnell's Law remains a foundational principle in mobile and casual gaming today. Candy Crush's 30-second entry, Angry Birds' "aim and shoot," Wordle's "5x5 grid input" — all modern variants of Pong principles.

Pong's success wasn't about being complex; it was about — in that unprecedented moment — Allan Alcorn taking a simple idea and polishing it perfectly.

On "practice assignments"

This story taught me, as a developer, several things:

1. "Practice assignments" can be the real projects. Bushnell disguising Pong as practice let Allan work without commercial pressure, freely. Had he started with "this is the make-or-break product," Allan likely would have over-engineered — added more features, used more complex hardware, tried to "get every detail right," and dragged on indefinitely. Simplicity is often accidental.

2. Put your work in "the real environment." Pong wasn't validated at the Atari office; it was validated by Andy Capp's customers. Any game product can be demoed 100 times internally without the value of 10 real strangers playing for 10 minutes. Leo and I sent BverGame's 24 games to a 50-person WeChat group before launch and asked which they played most — data was wildly different from our expectations. No internal review can match this loop.

3. Don't underestimate "good enough" sound effects. Allan's accidental "boop" became Pong's signature. The best designs often emerge from technical shortcuts — not deliberate by the designer, but better than deliberate.

Closing

Allan Alcorn later designed other games, including Touch Me (1974, flop) and Atari Football (1978, hit). He left Atari in 1982, briefly working at Apple, Lucasfilm, etc. IEEE awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 2018. He's now 76, mostly retired.

That original Andy Capp prototype machine reportedly survives at the Computer History Museum in California. Visitors pass it daily without realizing they're looking at the origin of a $70B industry.

Next time you play Pong Echo, listen for that "boop" sound. It's essentially the same one that played in Andy Capp's Tavern in 1972 for 25 cents a game.

Max is BverGame's co-operator. Sources: Allan Alcorn's 2017 IEEE oral history; multiple Nolan Bushnell interviews; Steven Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games (2001). Specific numbers are partly industry estimates.