

Soon after the founding, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn because of his experience with electrical engineering and computer science Bushnell and Dabney also had previously worked with him at Ampex. The first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation for a driving game. After producing Computer Space, Bushnell decided to form a company to produce more games by licensing ideas to other companies.

Pong was the first game developed by Atari. Pong is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., due to its cultural impact.Ītari engineer Allan Alcorn designed and built Pong as a training exercise. The game was remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release. The home version was also a commercial success and led to numerous clones. During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a home version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores.

Eventually, Atari's competitors released new types of video games that deviated from Pong's original format to varying degrees, and this, in turn, led Atari to encourage its staff to move beyond Pong and produce more innovative games themselves.Ītari released several sequels to Pong that built upon the original's gameplay by adding new features. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that closely mimicked its gameplay. Pong was the first commercially successful video game, and it helped to establish the video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. It was one of the earliest arcade video games it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972.
