The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (8 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Always aware of the importance of presentation, Bushnell put special emphasis on creating an elaborate futuristic cabinet to hold his game. In his mind, the cabinet would be the huckster convincing people that they wanted to play—the same job he’d performed on the midway at the amusement park.
He ended up sculpting a cabinet with rounded corners out of modeling clay. Engineers at Nutting molded the final version out of fiberglass.
Because of its complex game play,
Computer Space
had pages of instructions explaining how to maneuver ships, steer clear of gravity, and jump into hyperspace. Nutting used the Dutch Goose, a bar just off the Stanford University campus, as a test site. No one in the bar had ever seen such a thing. Although
Computer Space
attracted some curious stares, it did not attract many players.
Whether he had succumbed to Bushnell’s salesmanship or simply believed in the project, Bill Nutting went on to make 1,500
Computer Space
machines. Bushnell personally demonstrated the game to coin-op distributors at the 1971 Music Operators Association
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convention in Chicago.
It was called
Computer Space
, and I saw it in 1971 at the MOA show in Chicago. As a reporter for
Cash Box
[a vending machine trade publication], I was strolling up and down the aisles where the machines were exhibited, with my camera and notepad. I ran into a great big, long, skinny hiker individual who appeared summarily to be known as Nolan Bushnell, who worked for a company named Nutting Associates.Nolan was hired on at Nutting Associates to fool around developing a game that had a television monitor in it. In those days the general public didn’t call them monitors, they called them TV tubes.
Nolan came up with a game called
Computer Space.
It was a wonderful try that went absolutely nowhere. It had a bizarre sculpted fiberglass cabinet, hourglass shape, lots of curves. I never played the game. All I can remember is that Nolan Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game, describing it so much that I was backing up, trying to get away, while he was talking.—Eddie Adlum
The music operators at the convention saw little potential in
Computer Space
, and very few of them bought machines at the show. In the end, the game
turned into a marginally expensive gamble for Nutting. The company didn’t sell all of the original 1,500 machines and never built more.
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Computer Space
pulled in huge amounts of quarters at the Dutch Goose. But it would earn almost no money in a workingman’s bar. The Dutch Goose is really a Stanford University hangout….Computer Space
obeys the first law—maintenance of momentum. [Bushnell is probably referring to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law—objects maintain constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force.] And so that was really hard for people who didn’t understand that.—Nolan Bushnell
Bushnell admits that the instructions were too complex: “Nobody wants to read an encyclopedia to play a game.” He also blames Nutting for marketing the game badly.
Nutting was literally about to go bankrupt. I mean, they really had some problems. And it [
Computer Space
] did okay, but it really didn’t do nearly as well as it could have. Companies that are in trouble … when you get inside them, you figure out why they’re in trouble.In some ways it was a blessing to have worked for Nutting. It didn’t take very long to figure out I couldn’t possibly screw things up more than these guys had. Seeing their mistakes gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to do better on my own.
—Nolan Bushnell
After the failure of
Computer Space
, Bushnell decided to start his own company. He formed a three-way partnership with Ted Dabney, an Ampex engineer he’d brought to Nutting Associates, and Larry Bryan, also from Ampex. Each partner agreed to contribute $250. Bryan later dropped out of the partnership before contributing his money.
The company’s first step was to select a name. Looking through a dictionary, Bryan came up with
Syzygy
, a word describing the straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies—a solar eclipse is the syzygy of the earth, moon, and sun. When Bushnell applied for the name, the state of California responded that it was already in use. “A candle company already had it. They were sort of a hippie commune in Mendocino. We subsequently tried to find it out of curiosity. I think it had gone defunct by that time. I never did find it.”
Because he could not use Syzygy, Bushnell turned to a word from the Japanese strategy game
Go.
He chose the rough equivalent of the chess term “check,” naming his company Atari.
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The Music Operators Association was later renamed the Amusement and Music Operators Association (AMOA), to reflect the importance of video games to the industry.
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Arcade historian Keith Feinstein located sales and shipping documents proving that Nutting Associates began shipping
Computer Space
in 1971.
And Then There Was PongThere were perhaps only five important game manufacturers and five pool table manufacturers and four jukebox manufacturers, and for all intents and purposes, that was the manufacturing side of the amusement machine business.
It stayed that way for quite some time—until 1972. In 1972, Nolan Bushnell, a rather clever electronics engineer from Northern California, adapted Ralph Baer’s Magnavox toy for playing ping-pong on the television screen into a coin machine. As the world knows, he called it
Pong.—Eddie Adlum
My kid came home from school one day and said that Nolan Bushnell’s daughter told the teacher that her father invented
Pong.
Well, I told him to go to Nolan’s daughter and say, “If your daddy invented
Pong
, how come he had to ask my daddy to come fix his machine when it broke down?”—Al Alcorn, former “sort of” vice president of engineering, Atari Corporation
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n 1972, President Richard Nixon had all but locked up his re-election by visiting the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union; the Supreme Court deemed the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment and ruled it unconstitutional; and an investigation by White House counsel John Dean found the Nixon administration innocent of any involvement in the attempted burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 1000 points for the first time on November 14, 1972, and the economy looked brighter than it had in five years. Along with a healthy economy came thousands of start-up companies.
On June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney applied to have Atari incorporated. They founded their company with an initial investment of $250 each. Within ten years, Atari would grow into a $2-billion-a-year entertainment giant, making it the fastest-growing company in U.S. history.
Atari’s first office was located in a Santa Clara industrial zone—a crude 1,000-square-foot space in an inexpensive concrete building, made to house start-up companies. These were lean times for the company. It existed on a few small contracts and the limited royalties Bushnell received from
Computer Space.
Bally, now a very successful pinball and slot machine manufacturer, became one of Atari’s first customers, signing a limited contract for Bushnell to develop new extra-wide pinball machines. Bushnell also continued working on a multiplayer version of
Computer Space
, which he hoped to sell to his old employers at Nutting Associates.
We had a 2,000-square-foot facility. This was the original garage shop—you know, one of those places with a roll-up door, one office, and a bathroom. It had sort of a little reception area, and part of our requirement to the landlords was that they put in another office. That was Ted’s lab.
Incubator facilities like that are unique to California. They’re cheap and they’re made cheap because … what they really want you to do, and what Cole Properties, the ones that were running the building wanted, was to sign us for a long lease.
Eighty percent of the companies [that sign up] don’t grow or stay there for a long time until the lease is out. But some companies get really big
quickly. And they’ll say, oh, we’ll let you out of the lease. You can just roll it into one of our other properties.—Nolan Bushnell
To create a steadier income base, Bushnell and Dabney started a pinball route that included a local bar, some coffee shops, and the Student Union building at Stanford University. Because they could buy the pinball machines cheaply and knew how to maintain them, the route became a profitable asset. It eventually became so lucrative, in fact, that when Dabney left the company, he accepted the route as part of his settlement.
The first full-time employee of Atari Corporation was Cynthia Villanueva, a 17-year-old who used to baby-sit Bushnell’s children. She needed a summer job so Bushnell hired her as a receptionist. He instructed her to “put on the show,” giving callers the impression that Atari was an established organization rather than a start-up company with more owners than employees.
Nolan didn’t want to answer the phone, he wanted to have somebody else answer it. So he hired a secretary, Cynthia. And when someone would call [she would make them wait and yell], “It’s for you Nolan.” We’d wait a certain amount of time to make it sound like it was a bigger company, you know it would take longer to go get him.
—Al Alcorn
Villanueva’s responsibilities did not stop with answering telephones. Because of the company’s limited budget, she was called upon to do everything from running errands to building electronic components and placing parts in cabinets. She stayed with Atari for more than a decade, remaining long after Bushnell and Dabney left.
Atari’s second employee was a young engineer named Al Alcorn, whom Ted Dabney first met while working at Ampex. Alcorn had just completed a work-study program that allowed him to work summers at Ampex while finishing his engineering degree at Cal-Berkeley.
Short and sturdy, Alcorn was once a member of the same all-city high-school football team as O. J. Simpson. He was naturally gifted when it came to
electronics and had learned how to repair televisions by taking an RCA correspondence course in high school. When he got to college, Alcorn paid for his education by working in a television repair shop.
When Alcorn finished his degree, he found the job market weakening and was hired by Ampex. The company was going through rough times and had a round of layoffs when Nolan Bushnell offered him a job working for Atari. Alcorn agreed to move.
Nolan hired me when Ampex was going through some setbacks. He offered me a job as the VP of engineering or sort of, VP of R & D or whatever title it was of this company called Syzygy.
He offered me $1,000 a month and a chance to own stock in the company. The stock was worthless; most start-up companies fail anyway. I had actually been making a little bit more than that, but I figured what the heck.
Nolan had a company car. This was a concept I’d never thought of before or conceived of. It was an Oldsmobile station wagon, but like, wow, you can drive a car that isn’t even yours and don’t have to pay for it. What a concept!
—Al Alcorn
Shortly after hiring Alcorn, Bushnell gave him his first project. Bushnell revealed that he had just signed a contract with General Electric to design a home electronic game based on ping-pong. The game should be very simple to play—“one ball, two paddles, and a score…. Nothing else on the screen.”
Bushnell had made up the entire story. He had not signed a contract or even entered into any discussions with General Electric. In truth, Bushnell wanted to get Alcorn familiar with the process of making games while he designed a more substantial project. Bushnell had recently sold Bally executives on a concept for an outer-space game that combined the true-life physics of
Computer Space
with a race track.
I found out later this was simply an exercise that Nolan gave me because it was the simplest game that he could think of. He didn’t think it had any play
value. He believed that the next winning game was going to be something more complex than
Computer Space
, not something simpler.Nolan didn’t want to tell me that because it wouldn’t motivate me to try hard. He was just going to dispose of it anyway.
—Al Alcorn