Ted Dabney a standard television set rather than acquire an expensive computer, while Bushnell designed its cabinet and worked with Nutting Associates to manufacture the game at scale. Bushnell used this to convince Al Alcorn, another Ampex employee, to leave and join Atari to help program more of these games. Under Bushnell's direction, Alcorn used Dabney's video circuit concept to create the programming for Atari's next game, "Pong". Dabney constructed the coin slot mechanism portion of the cabinet. Once their one-off version proved successful, they ramped up production for scale, with Dabney overseeing the manufacturing process. "Pong" became the first successful arcade
Ted Dabney their military products section. This work led to him becoming involved in early video imagery products within Ampex, including vidicon systems. By around 1969 Ampex had also hired Nolan Bushnell, who worked alongside Dabney and where they became friends. Bushnell, prior to joining Ampex, had come up with the idea of making a carnival-like pizza place with animatronics and games, and discussed this idea with Dabney. After seeing a computer system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the two came up with the concept of using a smaller computer or video systems, adding coin slots, and allowing people to pay