Pong inventor made Steve Jobs work night shift because of his bad B.O. - New York Post

Atari, the fledgling computer games company he worked for, was scrambling to staff up after the sudden success of its first game, Pong.

“It was 1973 and there was this kid, maybe 18, who was just so passionate about technology – said his name was Steve Jobs,” Alcorn told The Post “So I hired him.”.

“He was kind of a pain to work with and he had this real problem with body odor, so we made him work nights,” Alcorn recalled of the man who would go on to found Apple computers.

November 29 marks 50 years since Pong, the groundbreaking computer game that Alcorn designed, first rolled out across California and, later, the world — taking computer games from laboratories to the mainstream.

But I just thought, ‘I’ll go along with it until it blows up,’” said Alcorn, who was paid $250 a week.

“Back then it was just me, left to my own devices for two months and there was Pong at the end of it.”.

Alcorn left the game between a pinball machine and a jukebox and waited.

“It didn’t surprise me it was broken because it wasn’t built to last,” said Alcorn, who went to the bar to check it out.

When old employee Steve Jobs co-founded a new home computer company, Apple, in 1976, with his buddy Steve Wozniak, they offered Alcorn equity in return for ironing out some technical issue!

“I told them to just give me one of their computers instead,” he recalled of his costly misstep.

“After they left, I told my wife that I could make this computer do anything.

“They had money and marketing expertise but they didn’t understand games – and they didn’t understand Silicon Valley,” said Alcorn.

In 1985, he was appointed an Apple Fellow by Steve Jobs, for his work in digital video compression, but Alcorn admitted he had reservations about working with Jobs again.

“My wife told me to clear out the garage and it was just sitting there,” he said with a shrug

“I was at a games convention and there was this kid playing on an old arcade Pong machine by himself,” Alcorn said

What Alcorn didn’t tell the kid: “Actually, for a few months I was the only Pong player in the world.”