Allan Alcorn

Designer of the video arcade game Pong, one of the earliest and most popular arcade video games, Alcorn is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist born and raised in San Francisco, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1971. He then worked for the pioneering video company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people who would end up being constants through the Atari, Inc., Apple, Cyan Engineering, and Pizza Time Theater companies.

Alcorn created Pong under the direction of Bushnell and Dabney, and the game became a hit in the 1970s. In addition to direct involvement with all the breakout Atari products, such as the Atari 2600, he was present at some of the historic meetings where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs—at that time an Atari employee—presented their Apple I prototype.

After he left Atari in 1981, Alcorn consulted on many fledgling companies in Silicon Valley, and was especially involved in the startups of Catalyst Technologies, one of the first technology company incubators, created by Nolan Bushnell and other ex-Atari leaders. He has also been involved in several startups directly, including Cumma, a re-programmable video game cartridge/kiosk system and precursor to the similar Neo Geo system, and has served as an advisor to Etak, one of the first practical, in-car navigation systems.

Alcorn later became an Apple Fellow and led and consulted on a variety of startups during the tech boom. In 1998, he co-founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinoff from Interval Research, where he developed a child's playset with a location system that allowed a PC to respond to the child's play. In 2000, Zowie Intertainment was acquired by Lego. In 2011, he co-founded Hack the Future, a technology festival and hackathon for elementary school children.