From the collection of Pong creator Allan Alcorn—an extremely rare circa 1980 prototype design mock-up of the Atari Cosmos, an unreleased tabletop electronic game system designed to utilize holographic cartridges overlaid against an LED array display. The system was intended to have nine built-in games—Asteroids, Basketball, Dodge 'Em, Football, Outlaw, Road Runner, Sea Battle, Space Invaders, and Superman—which would be activated by a low-cost cartridge containing the holographic image and a notch by which the system would identify which game to load. The low-cost holography process developed by Atari for the Cosmos would go on to be adopted by the American Banknote Corporation for use in credit cards and other high-security financial applications. The Atari Cosmos project was ultimately cancelled by Atari's president, Ray Kassar, after the product was announced but before it was released—making any Cosmos hardware exceedingly rare.
The unit measures approximately 8˝ x 13˝ x 6˝ and features the standard "Third Dimension" graphics, with "Atari Cosmos" label below. It features a bright red circular button marked "Fire," three black square buttons for "Start," "Expert," and "2 Player," and a central set of four directional arrow buttons. The 7-by-6 grid of red LEDs is intact in the rear of the unit, as are the pair of dual non-reflective incandescent lights designed to illuminate the "A" and "B" Holoptic scenes. The logic board is absent, rendering the unit non-functional. Includes an original Atari-branded AC adapter, although the prototype does not power up.
Accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from Alcorn, in full: "In 1980 Atari was now being run by Ray Kassar, an executive that Warner had put in charge of Atari who previously worked at Burlington Industries, and knew nothing about startup companies or the game business. Atari was selling about $1 billion a year of the VCS game system, but had no new products in the pipeline. I decided to go back to doing engineering and design a low-cost game system that would use holography as a technology for the system. At that time, the only way to make holograms was by exposing high resolution film with a laser on an optical bench. This meant that the cheapest hologram would be at least five dollars and we needed something far cheaper. So we figured out how to make holograms by embossing metallized Mylar so they could be stamped out for pennies, a process that American Bank Note, subsequently, copied and used in credit card and other security applications.
The game consisted of a dual image hologram that was in front of an LED array, driven by a low-cost microprocessor that contained programs for all the games. The hologram was in a cartridge that could be inserted into the unit and bumps on the bottom of the cartridge would tell the microprocessor which game to play. There were two lightbulbs in the unit that would display two different images depending which one of the lightbulbs was lit. There were several games like Space Invaders built into the unit that were selected by the bumps on the bottom of the cartridge. Thus the cartridges contained no electronics and had a very low cost mylar hologram making it the lowest cost cartridge game ever designed.
There was much effort involved in getting a license to use holography in the product, since there had been many early failed efforts to commercialize holography. We were finally able to obtain a license to use holography.
The marketing department at Atari was not interested in pursuing sales of the product since they were selling all the Atari VCSs they could make. So, our engineering team showed the product at the toy fair in New York City where Atari was showing the VCS product. We think we had several thousand of them sold but in the end Ray Kassar refused to release the product. It was at that point that I decided there was no future for me at Atari and I resigned."
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