The Ted Dabney Experience The Ted Dabney Experience

For this episode we speak with none other than Allan Alcorn, Atari employee number three after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, and the engineer of Pong, one of the very first video arcade games.

Senior corporate executive, serial entrepreneur, automotive designer and fine artist. Roger Hector is not only a successful businessman but a bona fide creative polymath. A long time ago, Roger sharpened his pencils at Atari Inc, working alongside co-founder Nolan Bushnell and creative director George Opperman on a vast range of videogame projects. Hector became R&D manager at Atari, before leaving to co-found his own games company, Videa, with Howard Delman and Ed Rotberg, programmer of Atari’s Battlezone.

Part 2: Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed with George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed by George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

Dr Alan Meades teaches the undergraduate and post-graduate game design courses at Canterbury Christ Church University and is the author of Arcade Britannia, published by MIT Press. After dedicating so many episodes of the show to the mythic American arcade of the late Seventies and early Eighties (in some ways perhaps more a figment of our collective imagination than we might care to admit) it was wonderful having Alan provide a much wider historical context of the amusement arcade, actually dating back hundreds of years and all via a uniquely British lens.

Dave Sherman joined Atari shortly prior to Nolan Bushnell’s departure and was at the company through its precipitous near-collapse and subsequent restructuring during the infamous market crash of ’83 and ’84. Sherman worked alongside Dave Theurer on iconic such as I, Robot and Missile Command, and shares many an anecdote about those early days, including soundly beating Bushnell at his own predilection, the strategy board game, Go. After Atari, Dave engineered a dual-purpose CAD system, generating fluid, texture-mapped polygon graphics for videogame application a good eight years before Sony ruled the roost with the Playstation.