From PONG to the Metaverse: Game Design & Creative Technology Careers

At 24, fresh out of college, Al Alcorn took a job at a tiny startup called ATARI for $100 a month less than he was already earning. The company had three engineers, no roadmap, and no industry to join, because video games didn’t exist yet. As Al put it during the webinar, “We didn’t know much about how you’re supposed to do this, and we kind of made things up as we went along.”

His boss Nolan Bushnell, a Video Game Hall of Famer, handed him what was supposed to be a training exercise: build a simple electronic version of table tennis, learn from it, and apply it to the next project. But Al kept improving it instead. He sped up the ball to make the game more fun. He figured out how to add sound. ATARI released the prototype to see if anyone would play it. Millions did, first in arcades and then at home.
Fifty years later, Al joined Jeri Ellsworth, founder and CEO of Tilt Five, and Giselle Muriel, a 2023 Game Academy graduate now in her senior year studying computer science at Barnard College, for the webinar, From PONG and Atari to Today’s Generation of Game Creators. The conversation spanned three generations of game creators, from PONG in 1972, to the technology being built right now, to a student who learned to code by making games.

From playing games to building them

Giselle loved video games but doubted she could do computer science. Access changed that. Urban Arts lent her a laptop and gave her a program where she could start creating. “Thanks to Urban Arts, I feel like it became more accessible to me because at the time I didn’t have a laptop to work with. So they let me borrow one.”

She started small. In her first game, pressing the space bar made an animated bomb explode. Getting it to work hooked her. “I remember when I first got that working, it was my first video game. I was so happy. I went around my house and showed my parents and my sister.”

That first win moved Giselle from player to creator. She went on to study computer science at Barnard and land an internship at Nintendo.

That pathway drives Urban Arts’ work. The national nonprofit uses game design to open doors to coding, computer science, design, and creative technology through its Game Academy, Game On, and Creative Coders programs. Game Academy students achieve a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and Urban Arts students have earned more than $71 million in college scholarships since 2020.

The technology changes. The building stays the same.

Jeri’s path also started with PONG, on a home unit that was one of the first video games she ever played. “Being able to interact with anything on a television was mind-blowing for me, and I was hooked from that point on.”

That spark carried her through engineering, toy design, and Valve Software, and ultimately to Tilt Five, where she builds augmented-reality glasses designed for tabletop, collaborative play. Her tools look nothing like what Al had in 1972, but Jeri sees a straight line between them: “One thing comes to mind about video games that I think has always been true—video games are always on the bleeding edge of technology.”

Today that edge includes augmented reality, AI, and game engines, and students can get their hands on these tools younger than ever.

Schools are adopting Tilt Five, too. “We’ve been deploying into schools and seeing a wide range of students use it, and just this excitement to do something more than do a book report,” Jeri said. Rather than isolating players at individual screens, Tilt Five puts students around a shared augmented-reality environment where they collaborate, solve problems, and create together.

Make things. Learn from failure. Find mentors.

Al delivered one of his clearest messages on failure. Not every Atari game worked. The company made mistakes, competitors copied PONG, and Atari jumped into businesses it never planned to enter, figuring things out along the way. Al sees all of that as part of creating something new. “In Silicon Valley and in startups, failure is a really important thing. If you say you can’t have any failures, you can’t be creative.”

Jeri echoed that lesson from her years at Valve and as an entrepreneur, and she urged young people to seek out guidance. She counts Al among her own mentors. “I think my piece of advice to younger folks in the audience is really go out and hunt for those mentors that will take you under their wing.”

Giselle tied that advice directly to her Urban Arts experience. “I was a part of [the mentorship program], and I’m still in connection with my mentor, from NBCUniversal. She’s incredible. She’s been a great support.” She added: “I second the fact that mentors like Al and Jeri are incredible for young engineers and for young entrepreneurs that are just starting their careers.” Urban Arts gave Giselle technology, instruction, mentors, and a community where she could start building.

From PONG to what students can create today

Al was asked which games he’d enjoyed playing over the years. His answer: playing was never the point. “The fun was designing the things, not playing them.” He offered young people the same advice. “I hope young people can get a lot of pleasure out of creating a game, especially with the new tools.” Make something that’s yours, he said, show it to friends and family, and then put it out into the world.

Giselle closed the webinar on the same note: “Game design has changed enormously, but the basic opportunity is still the same. Take the technology that exists, experiment with it, and create something new.”