All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  Yet whether the boisterous founder was unconsciously motivated by Baer’s idea or blatantly pilfered it ultimately didn’t matter when it came to marketing the game and getting it out to arcades beyond the Bay Area. With Pong, Bushnell, Dabney, and Alcorn were stepping into a shaky car for a wild roller-coaster ride that no videogame could ever imitate, even today. Something inside Bushnell needed to ride that ride more than anyone. He wanted so badly for Atari to show “Jack and the Beanstalk”–like growth. At night, he schemed: “If we do this right, it could take off. But if this really takes off, I’m not certain we’re prepared.”

  Early in the gestation of Atari, Bushnell, who many thought wasn’t a good manager, sent a lucid eight-point document to the engineering staff. There was no joking and no spin; it was serious business in which he laid down the law. Bushnell’s one-page charter, as he called it, asked the slim staff to build four or more Pong machines by December 31, along with a Chicago-style coin box for those machines; to add more staff for emergency projects; to design packaging for Doctor Pong for dentists’ offices; and to create packaging for a possible home version of Pong. At the end, he wrote, “Statements concerning our manufacturing capacity are inapplicable to the above design schedule.”

  The pragmatic Alcorn wrote back, “Is the fact that we have no money a reason not to do this?” Manufacturing costs were indeed huge bugaboos.

  Bushnell quickly replied with a handwritten “NO!!!” and sent the memo back.

  Once it hit the arcades and was distributed beyond the borders of California’s Bay Area, Pong took off around the country. From town to town, Bushnell preached his gospel of selling machines. At the peak of Pong mania, there were thirty-five thousand of Atari’s machines in the United States. Each machine brought in an average of $200 weekly, a staggering amount. Merely carrying the quarters from a machine on Atarite Steve Bristow’s Berkeley arcade route was a pain in the, well, back. Seven days of quarters could equal one hundred pounds from each machine.

  With each phone call and pitch he made, Bushnell refined his amazing gift of gab along with his trademark shooting-from-the-hip style. Beyond the bs, he kept learning more tenets of the fine art of human manipulation. He enjoyed taunting the competition, and he wasn’t above spreading impressive rumors about Atari’s future products that were downright false. He wasn’t a snake oil salesman, because what he sold was tangible entertainment. But he wasn’t afraid to exaggerate like the best of salesmen. Because they didn’t trust Bushnell, both Midway and Nutting Associates refused to manufacture Pong for Atari.

  The word “no” rarely daunted Bushnell. It was like a fly to be batted away. Though he had no infrastructure for it, Bushnell decided to have Atari itself begin to make the machines, from 1972 onward, with a local Wells Fargo bank on board. First, he began to search for larger digs. Then the few folks who made up Atari went to an unemployment office in Santa Clara and randomly hired a slew of slackers who were down on their luck, to build machines and try to meet an ever-increasing demand. The workers were Hells Angels, parolees, addled high school dropouts, alternative-minded hippies, and drug addicts, who earned $1.75 an hour and who were put on an assembly line of sorts for up to eighteen hours a day in an old roller skating rink on Martin Avenue. Employees were found just about everywhere. Ted Dabney picked up a hitchhiker and ended up hiring him.

  One day during a deadline crunch, Dabney saw Bushnell smoking some ultra-fragrant skunkweed with the “potheads and hippies.” He was livid, furious. “Nolan!” cautioned Dabney, “you can’t smoke that stuff with those guys.”

  “Why not?” asked Bushnell, calm from the pot.

  “Because we have machines to make. We have orders to fill. We can’t afford getting busted by the cops. It would ruin us.”

  “OK, I won’t smoke it on company property.” To Dabney’s dismay, Bushnell still got stoned with the workers—away from the office. Over time, a few employees would move up the ranks to become engineers. And some would be found in the bathroom, shooting up with needles.

  Atari’s new home had the feel of a carnival midway. It was ensconced within a skating rink so expansive that the young Alcorn even tried revving up and riding his Triumph 650 motorcycle on the polished floors (which resulted in a minor spinout due to a layer of dust on the floors). Bushnell kept returning to the unemployment office until Atari had more than seventy employees who ultimately made about a dozen machines daily—if they weren’t too stoned. It wasn’t as if Atari was a dope lover’s paradise. The line workers worked hard. But there were constant parties, rampant hooking up, and nasty next-day hangovers. Despite the pot-churned hazes, Bushnell made some wise decisions. He paid his suppliers immediately, and there was rarely a shortage of parts in the office. And distributors understood Pong; there was beauty in its simplicity. Some bought the machines by the hundreds.

  But mainly, there was something intensely instinctive about playing Pong in a bar that went beyond enjoying the Odyssey at home. Like the pinball and other penny arcade games that came before Pong, the game coaxed adults, not kids, to play it. It vied for your money along with booze, the jukebox, and pinball. Like the sexy new thing in town, its video screen constantly beckoned. Its distinctive sound was familiar and persuasive, extraordinarily mimicking the thwack of a paddle smacked against a plastic ball. And, like a voyeur looking into a window, you had to peer into the game’s hooded cabinet to engage the mystery within. Everything about Pong was alluring, even the way it sucked quarters from your pocket as it dared you to master it. Once you became its master, you could brag about your achievement throughout the tavern—which men and women did constantly. And it wasn’t cheap. Pong broke the coin-op barrier with its quarter-per-game charge; at the time, pinball still gave pin-heads three games for one quarter.

  Pong became super popular super quickly. Like the seventies pop songs by ABBA, it went beyond being successful, earning the company $3.2 million in profits in 1973. It was a superstar on its own, a machine so ubiquitous, forty companies made knockoffs. At Atari, the new executives’ emotions ran the gamut from feelings of angry woe to nervous distress; they found it difficult to meet ever increasing demand for the arcade machines. There were so many demands on Bushnell’s time that he didn’t push hard to hasten the patent on the arcade game. So the knockoffs and rip-offs continued. By the time the trend peaked, there were well over 100,000 Pong-inspired arcade games across the United States. Probably fewer than a third of them were made by Atari.

  Bushnell wanted it all, and that need for world domination ate at him. He even had a licensing deal in Japan. But Atari Japan ended up being a heavy weight upon his shoulders. So many arcade machines were stranded at customs at the docks that it was driving him nuts. Bushnell’s golden rule was, Do it and then fix it if it needs fixing. But the Japanese fiasco was difficult to fix. (Eventually, he ended up selling it for $500,000.) And at home, the company just did not have enough cash on hand to expand in any kind of robust, meaningful way.

  Ironically, not long after Pong became a huge hit, Atari was inching toward the dark precipice of bankruptcy. Even though they were cranking out new coin-operated arcade games along with double-wide pinball machines like Superman, Atari was by no means run with the military-like prowess and might of a Sanders Associates, which allowed Ralph Baer to research and develop the Brown Box over the course of many years. Bushnell’s management style was, in the words of the Big Bopper, loose like a long-neck goose.

  Still, he knew what he had to do with Ted Dabney. Beyond the maddening challenges of managing a new business, Bushnell and Dabney, once very close friends, began to come to blows. Dabney felt Bushnell was not just a fibber; he was sure in his soul that Bushnell was scurrilous and morally bankrupt, the kind of guy who would say anything to anyone just to make a buck. For his part, Bushnell found that one of Dabney’s relatives was dipping into the Atari coffers, taking literally tons of quarters from the local Berkeley routes that were so zealously guarded and coveted by Steve Bristow,
a soft-spoken guy who sometimes carried a hatchet to guard himself should someone jump him while he was carrying $1,500 worth of quarters in his car. Much worse in Bushnell’s mind was that Dabney had no brain for manufacturing, which was the position the older engineer was forced to take on for the burgeoning company. On an early evening in June 1973, Bushnell came into Alcorn’s office/workshop, worried.

  Bushnell didn’t mince words. “I want you to stay on. But I have to fire Ted.”

  Alcorn was stunned. Not Ted. Ted is a founder. Ted is cool.

  Bushnell continued. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He—”

  At that point, Dabney entered the room, and Bushnell peppered him with questions about manufacturing. “How many machines will be made today? How much will they cost?” Dabney, an engineer, not an MBA, didn’t have the answers. Nor had he seen the possibility of the axe falling. He was shocked and appalled. After the bullying interrogation by Bushnell, it became clear to Alcorn that Dabney couldn’t handle the job.

  Dabney was incensed when Bushnell approached him with a $250,000 buyout and nothing more. After a short, terse conversation, he took the offer. As he left the building, Dabney paused to look back for a moment. Then he revved up his car and got the hell out of there. In a way, Dabney was relieved. He’d been harboring mixed feelings about his participation in the company for some time. He felt Bushnell was hiring minor leaguers to run Atari, and he was hiring them without Dabney’s input. Sometimes, he felt that Bushnell was a “stupid idiot.”

  As he sped faster, he reasoned, “I’ve begun to feel I am important. That’s a terrible feeling. I’m glad I left before it got hold of me. Bushnell is the kind of guy who would sell his soul for money. That’s what he’s doing. I’m getting out before I sell mine.” One of the original minds behind Atari was gone. This generally good man who tempered Bushnell’s grandiose ideas with devil’s advocate honesty didn’t care that the not-so-distant future would be full of pots of videogame gold.

  After Pong took off, Bushnell settled into remaking and spinning off his hit with a kind of banal alacrity. It was as if beyond Ping-Pong, he didn’t think arcades really had legs as a new form of entertainment. There was Gotcha, SuperPong, Pong Doubles, QuadraPong, Space Pong, even a faux dog house–encased Snoopy Pong (based on the stalwart beagle from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip) for physicians’ offices, which was renamed Doctor Pong and Puppy Pong lest it incur the litigious wrath of the popular franchise’s powerful lawyers. Other companies around the world kept producing Pong clones, frantically trying to cash in. The law of diminishing returns had to kick in at some point soon. But that time had not yet come.

  By 1974, Bushnell was almost out of cash, due partially to the bad investment in Japan. GranTrak 10, the arcade racing game that Alcorn really wanted to do when he was first hired, cost too much money to build and was a failure. The poorly paid, exhausted workers on the line were quietly revolting because they hadn’t had a raise. Machines beyond GranTrak 10 were being sent out to arcades—and they didn’t function properly. Atari had become a mess due to growing pains and lackadaisical management.

  For the first time in the history of his new company, Bushnell began to worry hard. Games with four joysticks like Tank (“Cannon fires, shells explode!” said the flyer) fared better than GranTrak 10. But making a new coin-op game every four to five weeks was taxing and full of irritating deadline pressures. Atari had become a sword of Damocles hanging sharp and ready over Bushnell’s head. He couldn’t sleep. He had headaches. He went from believing he was a god who had all the answers to thinking his ideas might not have legs. And he couldn’t stop pushing Pong as his salvation. He went full steam ahead with plans for a console version of the game to be played in the living room.

  The Pong home player was nicknamed “Darlene” by the wolves in the company, in honor of a stunning Atari office assistant with a pretty face, large breasts, and a twenty-inch waist. The nerds might not have been able to coax Darlene into bed, but they sure could objectify her into the status of goddess as machine. At first, no one was interested in the home version, even when the game was shown to retailers at New York City’s famous and chaotic Toy Fair. Part of the Toy Fair debacle was due to Bushnell and his people being wet behind the ears. Their space for Toy Fair wasn’t in the building on Broadway and Twenty-third Street where most business was done. It was far away (in the Jacob Javits Convention Center). Few stopped by. Of those who did, none were interested in making a deal.

  Bushnell kept plugging away, making cold calls to any company he could think of that might consider it. It was then that a savior appeared. This rescuer wasn’t ensconced in the arcade industry. He wasn’t even in toys or electronics. Tom Quinn, a six-foot-four redheaded Irishman who was rarely seen without a suit, worked as the senior buyer for Sears’ sporting goods section. He believed that Sears had done fairly well by selling the Odyssey. Even though Magnavox had made many missteps in marketing the machine, he felt that Sears could do good business selling the Pong console. For the first meeting at the Atari offices, Quinn arrived early, at 8 a.m., the proverbial early bird ready to catch the worm.

  Bushnell, who rolled into the office much later, initially blanched at Quinn’s request for exclusivity—even though Sears was the only game in town. Since no other companies were buying, Alcorn packed up the prototype of the home unit in a big protective case and traveled to Chicago. There, he looked like a gawking tourist as he regarded the foreboding 110-story Sears Tower, then the world’s tallest building. That particular stop of the Atari dog and pony show didn’t go well at all. The wooden box and its mass of wires was plagued by interference problems during the demonstration. A nervous, sweating Alcorn had to take the assembly apart and do some emergency mending right on the spot. One of the creaky old executives from the Deep South frowned upon the mass of wires inside the prototype. “Son,” he asked Alcorn, “how you gonna get that dang bird’s nest of wires in there to hook up to a silicone chip?”

  “Silicone?” thought Alcorn. “It’s silicon. If this is what we’re up against, there’s no hope.” But Quinn was still game, more enthused than ever, despite the demonstration’s glitches. He immediately contacted Bushnell.

  “If we go with this, how many can you give us?” asked Quinn.

  Bushnell barely skipped a beat. “I can get you seventy-five thousand units.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Quinn, explaining that Sears cut a wide swath with its nine hundred retail stores. Additionally, there would be an enormous number of sales generated through its popular catalog. Sears would throw in free advertising to sweeten the deal. “But we still want exclusivity for one year.”

  Bushnell’s eyes widened. He salivated. Exclusivity no longer mattered. They had one shot, and that one shot was Sears. “So, how many?”

  “Not seventy-five thousand. One hundred and fifty thousand.”

  Bushnell was enthusiastic, but he kept his cool. Inside, his synapses were firing like he was about to have sex with the most beautiful woman on earth, maybe even Darlene. Soon, though, he had qualms. He thought, “How in the world can I produce so many thousands of consoles with nearly no capital?” It was then that Quinn went from savior to hero. He said Sears itself would help with the manufacturing. Later, Quinn again stepped up to make an early video in Sears’s TV studio, advertising the machine, with a female quiz show host bearing the juvenile moniker of Ima Douche; Quinn himself was a game show contestant. The video was a smash with retailers, so much so that Sears held a place for the console in their coveted catalog, even though it was past their deadline for including a brand-new, full-color page for the merchandise. Said one Sears wag to Alcorn in the company cafeteria, “You know the last time—the only time—we held up the catalog? That was with Marvin Glass slot car racing. We had fifty thousand of them. And none of them—not one—worked.” The pressure was on.

  Tom Quinn had made an audacious, ambitious gamble. If he failed, he would be without a job—and he wo
uld likely have a hard time finding another. Bushnell had bet it all too, but he wasn’t about to worry, at least not publicly or in meetings. For Bushnell it was more guts than business acumen. Bushnell told everyone that Sears would be Atari’s savior. And he claimed Atari was going to make big money for Sears as well.

  Even before the console was released, the very thought of Home Pong had people lining up at Sears stores—just to put their names on a waiting list. Atari was, in the parlance of The Jeffersons, movin’ on up. Home Pong was a fast-selling holiday phenomenon. By the end of 1975, Atari had raked in $40 million in sales from the rabid fans who bought more than 150,000 consoles. And that was just from one retail entity, Sears. Pong was a bona-fide cultural phenomenon, and was even part of an Al Franken skit on the seventh episode of the hottest show on TV, Saturday Night Live. It was also the only arcade game a young Barack Obama ever played.

  Bushnell had created not one, but two revolutions in gaming. When Pong emerged, it started the arcade revolution. Suddenly, the arcade machine was an essential accoutrement in every bar and bowling alley. Pong was more popular than pinball. Not only was it the first arcade game to make money, it was so exciting to play. The heart rate increased just as the on-screen ball sped up. As you stood there, your spastic body moved so much, it was like a workout in itself. People would plan to go out to the local bar just to play Pong. So Pong sold booze for the mom-and-pop tavern. When a few more iconic games, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, were released, the smarter moms and pops started video arcades, which became as essential to American culture as the movie theater.