Al Alcorn Exclusive Atari & Pong Interview - 2017

[Adriano Arcade]

http://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/al-alcorn/

 

Needless to say, if this guy had ballsed up Pong, the video game industry may not have existed today. Now we’ve blown your mind I’m pleased to see he absolutely smashed Pong so let us introduce the gaming legend, godfather of the industry which we love, Al Alcorn.

 

Enjoy

 

Adrian

[+Nathan Strum]

Nice interview - thanks for sharing!

[Lynxpro]

Al Alcorn rules. Met him at the Sunnyvale Atari Party back in, what, 2014? Had him sign my Lite Sixer.

 

The best thing about the Ashton Kutcher Steve Jobs film was when the fictional version of Al Alcorn tells Jobs that his problem is that he's [Jobs] "an a$$hole".

 

I asked him if he thought it was a strategic blunder not to have purchased MOS and allowed Jack Tramiel to buy them but he thought Warner/Atari did the right thing in not acquiring them. And in retrospect, that's probably 100% accurate. Without MOS, Commodore may have shifted over to the Z80 and bought Zilog and still executed their suicidal 8-bit computer price war with a Z80-based C64.

 

Edit: The Zilog stuff is my speculation; it was never part of my conversation with Al.

Edited December 9, 2017 by Lynxpro