Allan Alcorn

Allan Alcorn is an American computer scientist and video game designer, born January 1, 1948, in San Francisco, California, best known for creating Pong, one of the earliest video games, while working at Atari under the direction of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. He earlier worked at Ampex before joining Atari, and in 1978 assembled an engineering team to develop the Atari Cosmos, a handheld console with holographic overlays that drew strong trade-show interest but was never manufactured. After leaving Atari in 1981 he consulted for Silicon Valley startups, became an Apple Fellow, and co-founded Silicon Gaming in 1993 and Zowie Intertainment in 1998, which Lego acquired in 2000. Alcorn earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971.