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
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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.
* The Music Operators Association was later renamed the Amusement and Music Operators Association (AMOA), to reflect the importance of video games to the industry.
* Arcade historian Keith Feinstein located sales and shipping documents proving that Nutting Associates began shipping Computer Space in 1971.
And Then There Was Pong
There 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
In 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
Simply an Exercise
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
From his tenure at Ampex, Alcorn was already familiar with the transistor-to-transistor logic (TTL) involved in creating electronic games. He tried to work from the schematic diagrams that Bushnell had drawn while designing Computer Space but found them illegible. In the end, Alcorn had to create his own design, based on what he knew about Bushnell’s inventions and his own understanding of TTL.
As he worked, Alcorn added enhancements that Bushnell had never envisioned. He replaced the expensive components with much less expensive parts. Bushnell’s original vision included paddles that simply batted the ball in the direction it had come from. Feeling that this was inadequate, Alcorn devised a way to add English to the game and aim the ball with the paddles.
Instead of using solid lines to represent paddles, Alcorn broke the paddles into eight segments. If the ball hit the two center segments of the paddle, it flew straight back at a 180-degree angle. If the ball hit the next segments, it ricocheted off at a shallow angle. Hitting the ball with the outer edges of the paddle would send the ball back at a 45-degree angle.
Alcorn also added ball acceleration. The original game simply buzzed along at the same speed until someone finally missed the ball. Alcorn found the game dull and thought that speeding the ball during extended rallies might lend some excitement. He wrote the game so that after the ball had been hit a certain number of times, it would automatically fly faster.
A certain mythology has arisen about the creation of Pong. People have written about the meticulous effort that went into creating the resonant pong-sound that occurred whenever the ball struck a paddle. According to Alcorn, that sound was a lucky accident.
Here I was developing this thing and feeling kind of frustrated because it already had too many parts in it to be a successful consumer product. So I felt like I was failing, and Nolan didn’t mention that the game had come off better than he’d expected.
Now the issue of sound … People have talked about the sound, and I’ve seen articles written about how intelligently the sound was done and how appropriate the sound was. The truth is, I was running out of parts on the board. Nolan wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands—the approving roar of cheering people when you made a point. Ted Dabney told me to make a boo and a hiss when you lost a point, because for every winner there’s a loser.
I said, “Screw it, I don’t know how to make any one of those sounds. I don’t have enough parts anyhow.” Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in a half a day. They were the sounds that were already in the machine.
—Al Alcorn
Pong played more like squash than ping-pong. Thanks to Alcorn’s segmented paddle, it had become a game of angles, in which banking shots against walls was an important strategy. Players controlled inch-long white lines that represented racquets, which they used to bat the small white square that represented the ball. The background was black.
The game was streamed through a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television that Alcorn picked up at a nearby Payless store. He set the television in a four-foot tall wooden cabinet that looked vaguely like a mailbox. Since the printed circuit boards hadn’t been made, Alcorn had to hard-wire everything himself. The inside of the cabinet had hundreds of wires soldered into small boards and looked like the back of a telephone-operator’s switchboard.
It took Alcorn nearly three months to build a working prototype. His finished project surprised Bushnell and Dabney. Instead of giving them an interesting exercise, Alcorn had created a fun game that became their flagship product. Bushnell named the game Pong and made a few changes, including adding a bread pan for collecting quarters and an instruction card that read simply, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” To test the game’s marketability, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a location along the Atari pinball route.
Our initial idea was to go into business as a contract design firm and sell our ideas to others for licensing. We had a contract with Bally to design a video game for them, and we saw it as being a big, pretty long project.
So I had Al do this Pong game, this ping-pong game. And, dammit, it was fun. We tweaked it a little and it was more fun, and we thought to ourselves, we’ll get Bally to take this. We’ll complete our contract way, way, way ahead of schedule and life will be happy in the Valley.
So I took Pong and offered it to Bally. I said, “Hey, you know we contracted to do a driving game but we got this game instead. Do you want this instead? Will this fill our contract for you?” They played it and said, “This is kind of fun, but it requires two players and if a guy’s there all by himself he can’t play it.” And I said, “Well, we could probably put a one player version in.” I sold them pretty hard.
—Nolan Bushnell
Andy Capp’s Tavern
Andy Capp’s was a peanut-shell-on-the-floor beer bar in Sunnyvale, California. It was nothing special, other than it had a game room in the back that was larger than any that you would see in a bar at that point in time.
—Nolan Bushnell
Once, when feeling particularly generous, Bushnell described Andy Capp’s Tavern, the location where Atari first tested Pong, as a “rustic location.” It was a shabby bar located in Sunnyvale, a much smaller town in the pre–high technology days of the early 1970s. Alcorn, who visited the bar while running the pinball route, remembers it as having four or five pinball machines, a jukebox, and a Computer Space machine. They installed the prototype in late September 1972.
We put it [the Pong prototype] on a barrel. He had old wine barrels to use as tables and we just put it on top of the table. It wasn’t even a full size.
—Nolan Bushnell
Nolan and I sat there the first night and watched people play, and here’s the scene. We’re sitting there with a couple of beers, and a young man goes up and plays Computer Space while his friend plays Pong. While we’re watching, the first guy goes over and tries Pong with his friend.
We went over to him afterward and asked, “Well, what did you think of that machine?” And the guy says, “Oh, it’s a great machine. You know, I know the guys who designed it.”
“Really! What are they like?”
So [he tells us] this whole bullshit story. I think h
e was practicing a line for picking up babes.
—Al Alcorn
One of the legends of video games is that two days after installing Pong in Andy Capp’s Tavern, Alcorn got an angry late-night call from Bill Gattis, the tavern manager. According to the story, the machine had stopped working and Gattis wanted it hauled out of his bar.
In truth, Alcorn received the call from Gattis two weeks after installing the machine. It was a friendly call in which the bartender suggested that they fix the machine quickly, since it had developed quite a following. Alcorn frequently visited Andy Capp’s while making maintenance runs on Atari’s pinball route. He and Bushnell had selected the bar as a good test site because Gattis had always been cooperative.
He said to me, “Al, this is the weirdest thing. When I opened the bar this morning, there were two or three people at the door waiting to get in. They walked in and played that machine. They didn’t buy anything. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
I went to fix the machine, not knowing what to expect. I opened the coin box to give myself a free game and low and behold, this money gushed out. I grabbed handfuls of it, put it in my pockets, gave the manager my business card, and said, “Next time this happens, you call me at home right away. I can always fix this one.”
—Al Alcorn
Nolan Bushnell left for Chicago to visit a couple of pinball manufacturers a few days before Alcorn received the call from Andy Capp’s Tavern. He had brought a portable Pong game to demonstrate to executives at Bally and Midway. Though Bushnell already had an inkling that Pong was doing good business at the test site, he had no idea how well it had done. When he returned, an excited Al Alcorn told him that the machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern had stopped working because the quarters had overflowed. The news struck Bushnell like a revelation.