Atari Pong

After Ralph Baer and Magnavox proved that home video game systems were feasible, Atari’s Al Alcorn was eager to do a home version of Pong. His project was code named “Darlene” after a female coworker that worked with Alcorn at the time.  In the fall of 1974, Alcorn began developing the “Darlene” system. Several months later  Atari released Home Pong. Home Pong was aptly named. It only played Pong. If you were to have opened one, you would have found only three LSI’s and a few other distinct components such as transistors, capacitors and conductors. Due to new technologies available, Atari was able to achieve a higher resolution than Magnavox’s Odyssey., thus making the resolution dependent controls more responsive.  While Atari’s profits had been high in the arcade arena, they were not quite financially equipped to permeate the home console market. At the time, the video game companies were either arcade only (such as Baily) or home console only (such as Magnavox). The two markets were dramatically different requiring separate technologies, and distribution networks. Atari’s success in the arcade was sufficient to fund the facilities to produce the alternative technologies, but they required the assistance of Sears, Roebuck to gain access to distribution. This would pave the way for the next generation of video games headed by the Atari VCS/2600.9