TDE EP42 - Atari UK Cofounder Alistair Crooks

Despite lacking any knowledge whatsoever of the amusement industry, Kellogg’s sales manager Alistair Crooks and eccentric former RAF airman Phil Smith convinced a young Nolan Bushnell that they were the right men to introduce Atari’s Pong to the United Kingdom in 1973. Swiftly moving from importing to manufacturing, the company arguably grew too fast and was ill positioned to weather the perfect storm of the OPEC Oil Crisis and the Three Day Week, ultimately lasting only fourteen months. This is a nuts-and-bolts yet captivating tale of what might have been, recounted with modesty and good humour.

Doug Macrae founded General Computer Corporation in 1981 with Kevin Curran whilst still an MIT student and would go on to employ many other MIT students, including previous guests Steve Golson and Jonathan Hurd. We talk with Macrae at length about the disruptive business model and general chutzpah of the fledgling company, and what can only be described as GCC playing high-stakes chess with the biggest videogame company in town, Atari Inc. They went on not only to make such inventive arcade titles as Food Fight and Quantum for Atari, but also created one of the most successful coin-ops of all time for Bally Midway, Ms. Pac-Man.

John Ray joined Atari Inc in 1977 as a hardware engineer, learning the ropes with 1978’s Fire-Truck, arguably the first truly co-op arcade game and a distinctive arcade presence due in no small part to his analogue circuitry audio. Ray was also involved with the Atari-licensed versions of Namco’s Dig Dug and Xevious, the awesome arcade version of Tetris and — into the 1990s — the hugely popular San Francisco Rush racing series.

The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander - A Journey to The Top of an Arcade Classic). We host in-depth conversations with the creative leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming.

Rob Quinn joined Stern just as the company was branching out from it's core pinball business to explore the brave new world of videogames. Rob talks about his involvement with the company's early hit, Berzerk, his experiments with laser disc technology and his personal misgivings about how the company was managed.

Mark Pierce was a game designer at Atari and Bally Midway. We talk to him about the protracted development of Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters, the axonometric, somewhat baroque B-movie arcade adventure, and the conversely swift creation of the tile-stacking puzzler classic, KLAX. Pierce also shares some amusing anecdotes about scouting for muscular male models for the visually ground-breaking arcade beat-em-up, Pit Fighter, and provides us with a unique insight into why Atari faltered and ultimately folded in The Noughties.

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.