Management sought assembly workers at the local unemployment office, but was unable to keep up with demand. The first arcade cabinets produced were assembled very slowly, about ten machines a day, many of which failed quality testing. Atari eventually streamlined the process and began producing the game in greater quantities. By 1973, they began shipping Pong to other countries with the aid of foreign partners. In Japan, Pong was officially released in November 1973 by Atari Japan, which would later become part of Namco. However, Pong had been beaten to the market by two Japanese Pong clones released in July 1973: Sega's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong. Home version After the success of Pong, Bushnell pushed his employees to create new products. A new electronic technology, the large-scale integration (LSI) chip, had recently become available, which Bushnell believed would "allow pioneering in new" game concepts. Atari began working on the reduction of Pong from a large arcade printed circuit board (PCB) down to a small LSI chip for use in a home system. The initial development cost for a game on a single LSI chip was expensive, costing around , but once the chip was developed, it became significantly cheaper to mass-produce the game as well as more difficult to reverse-engineer. In 1974, Atari engineer Harold Lee proposed a home version of Pong that would connect to a television: Home Pong. The system began development under the codename Darlene, named after an employee at Atari. Alcorn worked with Lee to develop the designs and prototype and based them on the same digital technology used in their arcade games. The two worked in shifts to save time and money; Lee worked on the design's logic during the day, while Alcorn debugged the designs in the evenings. After the designs were approved, fellow Atari engineer Bob Brown assisted Alcorn and Lee in building a prototype. The prototype consisted of a device attached to a wooden pedestal containing over a hundred wires, which would eventually be replaced with a single chip designed by Alcorn and Lee; the chip had yet to be tested and built before the prototype was constructed. The chip was finished in the latter half of 1974, and was, at the time, the highest-performing chip used in a consumer product. Bushnell and Gene Lipkin, Atari's vice-president of sales, approached toy and electronic retailers to sell Home Pong, but were rejected.