The inside of a Pong coin-op. (The main PCB is mounted on the left side, a regular television set on top, and the sliver colored depression is the coin-tray.)

Atari's initial success had been founded by it's Pong coin-op. Designed by Alan Alcorn, the coinop that spawned the video game industry was in effect, quite simple in it's design. Basicly it was a custom board full of logic chips, hooked up to an actuall TV set and coin mechanism.

Bob Brown

In 1973, after the success of the original Pong coinop, an Atari engineer by the name of Harold Lee came up with the idea of a home pong unit. Since the pong coinop that Alan Alcorn designed was nothing more than the game board (pcb) connected to an actuall televsion set, he thought it would be possible to scale it down a bit and modify it for use at home. This would be a new direction for the fledgling Atari - consumer electronics. If they could pull it off, they would be one of the pioneers of using high tech custom IC's (integrated circuits) in the consumer industry.

Discussing it with fellow engineer Bob Brown, the two proposed the idea by 1974 and original Pong engineer Al Alcorn was added to the team with the idea of putting the original board design in to single chip form. The wire wrapped prototype was completed by 1974, and had been codenamed "Darlene" after a busty female emplyee of the time. By the time the first IC fabrication was completed in late 1974, it had been renamed Home Pong.

With no retail/consumer division to speak of, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell realized they needed to get help in marketing this home version of pong. So he, Gene Lipkin (VP of sales), and some of the others took the prototype - a mass of wires encased in a black box with a white logo and two big knobs - and started shopping the console around to toy store chains with a suggested retail price of about $100.