The Ted Dabney Experience The Ted Dabney Experience

From 1975 to present day, Jack Guarnieri has seen and done it all; from servicing mechanical pinball machines in the dive bars and laundrettes of Seventies New York, bearing first-hand witness to the inflation - and rapid deflation - of the video game bubble of popular lore, running his own operator route during the ‘80s and then to selling video and pinball machines directly to consumers. All of this led him to found one of the most innovative pinball manufacturers, Jersey Jack.

Jeremy Saucier is Assistant VP at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Jeremy talks to us about the history and evolution of the Strong Museum and its pedagogical remit - from American history and Industrialisation to a focus on play - and gives us a fascinating insight into the day-to-day management of a museum.
With a doctoral degree in history and a degree in American Studies, Jeremy was a natural fit for his role at The Strong, with its extensive archive of original material, from concept art and design documents to internal company memos from Video Arcade stalwarts such as Williams, Bally and most notably Atari.

Jeff Bell was a hardware engineer in Atari Inc’s coin-op division and officially the longest serving employee of the company; literally the last person to switch off the lights in 2004. Jeff walks us through his formative years learning the basics of electronics at his father’s desk, the brotherhood of Atari Inc, suspected mob involvement in the early videogames industry and Nolan Bushnell’s Bermuda shorts.

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.