Development on "Gotcha" began in July 1973, as Atari's fourth game after "Pong", "Space Race", and "Pong Doubles". The company was interested in producing a very different game from their previous success of "Pong", as they felt that innovative design was what would separate them from their competitors, which they saw as flooding the market with "Pong" clones rather than making new video games. After the release of "Space Race", development immediately moved on to "Gotcha". The design of the game was done by Allan Alcorn, the designer of "Pong" and developer for "Space Race". Alcorn had the idea for the game from a defect he sometimes saw when testing "Pong" machines: if part of the circuit that converted scores to images on the screens was broken, then parts of the numbers would be scattered across the screen. Alcorn thought that combining that defect intentionally with a motion circuit could create dynamically changing mazes. A prototype design was developed by Steve Mayer of Cyan Engineering, which had recently become a semi-independent research and development subsidiary of Atari.