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.
