All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (6 page)

Yet in the very near future, one of Baer’s visions would be imitated and reproduced in disturbingly familiar, and spectacularly successful, form. Someone on the West Coast wanted to beat the Seer at his own game by popularizing his own version of Baer’s Ping-Pong game. This small company honcho with an expansive need for success was a savvy, calculating giant of a man who Baer felt was the ultimate bloviator. “He’s a plain old shit. A real son of a bitch,” Baer would say.

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it.

The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was
a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made Pong’s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed-off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.

It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well-crafted myth. “The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work—then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.

Whatever the true story, the age of the videogame arcade was born.

Nolan Bushnell was a master showman from the get-go. It wasn’t just an act; it was part of his very phylogeny. More a smart, calculating marketer than a brilliant game designer, Bushnell was born in Clearfield, a northern Utah town created because people flocked to the region to work at a cannery factory in 1907. Bushnell
was the epitome of a strapping young lad, more than six feet tall before his thirteenth birthday. His Mormon father was a successful cement contractor whose motto was said to be “Work hard. Play hard.” Which is exactly what the younger Bushnell did through much of his life. He loved to play practical jokes with a science twist. One night, he went out into a field and, in a feat that was part Ben Franklin and part P. T. Barnum, attached a battery-operated light to a kite. As it flew high and proud in the night wind, some residents briefly believed the light was an alien spaceship. At Clearfield High, he honed his skills on the debate team and was entranced by board games that required strategy, like Clue. His charming nerdiness bloomed at the University of Utah, where he spent way too much time in a then state-of-the-art computer lab playing Spacewar!, the fascinating precursor to the more well-known Asteroids.

Spacewar! was created by Steve “Slug” Russell and his engineering school friends at MIT as a lark in February 1962. On the then-futuristic, enticingly round screen of a massive PDP-1 computer, two green dots representing spaceships flew in zero gravity. They shot at each other on the ebony background of a star-filled galaxy. Players captained the ships by sitting at a panel and moving switches up and down. It was a transporting, transformative experience, and for players like Bushnell, it was a vision of the future, a future in which you could be Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon in your own imaginary science fiction universe. In Spacewar!, you even had to avoid planets that rushed in your direction as you tried with all the energy your brain and body could muster to annihilate your opponent’s ship. Viewing the minimalist screen with such early graphics, Bushnell’s neurons fired thousands of excited messages to his axons and millions of vesicles struck his synapses. Spacewar! was it for Bushnell. He just couldn’t get it off his mind. When he lost his tuition money in a card game and went to work as a barker and weight guesser on the midway at Utah’s giant Lagoon Amusement Park
(where everyone from Count Basie to the Rolling Stones played), he schemed about it. He thought about it when he was rejected for a job at Disneyland because he didn’t have enough engineering experience. He began work on what he called Computer Space when he toiled at Ampex, which made tape recorders, recording tape, and an early VCR, as a research designer for $12,000 a year. He didn’t like the gig much, feeling that the only way to make real money was to become an entrepreneur who made his own games for an audience that had yet to be targeted or mined.

At Ampex, Bushnell and straight-shooting former navy man Ted Dabney got to know each other during lunches. They ate their brown bag ham sandwiches, turned over a wastebasket, put a Go game table on top, and played the strategy game almost daily. When he created the oddly named Syzygy, his first company, in late 1971, Bushnell’s vision for games was all he could talk about. Syzygy would be primarily based around pinball arcade routes in the Bay Area and a deal to make double-wide pinball machines for Bally in Chicago. Videogames weren’t exactly an afterthought, but they certainly wouldn’t be the primary cash cow in those early months of existence.

Superiors like Charlie Steinberg, a future Ampex president, thought Bushnell had gone mad and tried everything to rid him of the idea of starting his own company. He wanted to keep Bushnell at Ampex as a career man. All this made Bushnell even more obsessed with forging his own path. When he had trouble with his wife and the two divorced, a prime reason was that Bushnell was spending too much time on his plan for world domination through games.

It has been widely written that Bushnell began work on his first arcade machine in 1970 in his daughter’s bedroom. Soon, the story goes, there were pieces of wood, wires, tools, and parts of a black-and-white TV set strewn about everywhere. The work proceeded with such passion and zeal that Bushnell’s child had to sleep elsewhere in the house. In fact, Bushnell worked on the game in
his partner Ted Dabney’s daughter’s bedroom. It was young Terri Dabney who had to bed down in the master bedroom, which she shared with her parents. In that cramped inner sanctum filled with a child’s stuffed animals, the two inventors spent countless hours burning the midnight oil. The elder Dabney, a balding beanstalk of a man with a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and a penchant for plaid shirts, worked hard to make a charily crafted, handsome cabinet for Bushnell’s Computer Space that looked somewhat like an arcade version of Munch’s
The Scream
. It certainly appeared alien. Inside it was, as in Baer’s prototypes, a mess of wires. But a small Texas Instruments computer was in there, too.

After it was made at Nutting Industries, where Dabney and Bushnell consulted, the machine was sent to pinball arcades in the region. However, the black-and-white Computer Space was ahead of its time and deemed too tricky for an industry that was just being born. It needed a joystick, not those confusing buttons, to make it easier to play. Yet the game had a tantalizing pitch line: “A simulated space battle that pits computer-guided saucers against a rocket ship that you control.”

Computer Space wasn’t the key to the kind of Ali Baba—type riches Bushnell knew were within his grasp. Only three thousand machines were made and fewer than a thousand were distributed. Few at the penny arcades and bars wanted to play. The fact that the saucers made an annoying, high-pitched whine when they emitted laser beams probably didn’t help the game’s popularity. Yet the fifties retro futuristic machine made it to the silver screen to be forever part of the B-grade science fiction message movie
Soylent Green
. In its thirty seconds of fame, there was much sexual innuendo as a giggling and ravishing Leigh Taylor-Young begged her much older gift giver to “come on and play” Computer Space. Then she begins to kiss him. It was the kind of scene that led a young moviegoing nerd to fantasize.

Bushnell and Dabney each put $250 into their Syzygy company, but a California roofing contractor already bore the odd moniker. Undaunted, Bushnell changed the name immediately. He loved Go, the strategy-oriented game from ancient China—everything from the way the smooth stone game pieces felt to the way the board looked. So for his company’s name, Bushnell settled upon a word from Go, the game he loved so much: Atari. The definition is the equivalent of the word “check” in chess but also means “you are about to become engulfed.”

The twenty-seven-year-old’s first employee was a former Ampex engineer, twenty-two-year-old Allan Alcorn. Alcorn was a genial, hefty award-winning high school football player with a carefully trimmed beard. Obsessed with learning, he was an engineering whiz with a bachelor of science degree out of the University of California Berkeley, who worked his way through college by fixing TVs while the older guys in the local shop got drunk and played cards in the back room. Alcorn, who grew up on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, enjoyed the San Francisco psychedelic music scene, and fell in love with computers in college. But he had a mischievous side and almost got in trouble for hacking into and using a college professor’s access, which was very expensive at the time.

Bushnell impressed Alcorn with a free lunch and his turquoise Buick station wagon. He offered Alcorn a $1,000-a-month salary, which Bushnell hoped to pay from the contracts he was aggressively seeking. Alcorn’s pay was $200 less than he made at Ampex, but the package included a generous 10 percent of the company. At their meeting, Bushnell started telling Alcorn of all the contracts he had suddenly amassed. In actuality, he had only
planned
on getting those deals. Alcorn took it in stride, understanding that there was something entrepreneurial about Bushnell that made him utter the most outrageous things. While some were offended by that, Alcorn saw it as a talent. In their small office lab in one of the shabbier districts of
Santa Clara, Bushnell walked back and forth and gestured with his hands as he told Alcorn, “I want to make a game that any drunk in any bar can play. Simple. Simple enough for a drunk to play.”

Alcorn thought the idea was simplistic, not simple. He had believed that their first project was going to be a spiffy driving game, maybe with sleek-looking cars. After all, Bushnell had originally recruited the computer expert by saying he was doing a racing game for Bally in Chicago. Alcorn also dreamed of doing something computer-based that was a bit more of a challenge. The arcade game the Atari founder proposed was primitive, not cutting edge: It included no computer whatsoever. Instead, it would just use old-fashioned TTL logic, a series of transistors and resistors with a different circuit for each function of the game.

“Get started on this. We want to make it for the arcade and then for the home. So keep the costs down.” Bushnell gave Alcorn some tortured, haphazard schematics to help, and Alcorn complained, “What the heck is this? I can’t read these.”

“Look, everyone’s on board with this,” said Bushnell. “I’m almost sure I have GE on board. Just do this and more will come out of it. Everything’s going great. Don’t worry, because we’re on our way.”

“OK, boss, OK.” Bushnell’s magical enthusiasm continually won Alcorn over. The boss’s most valuable quality was to make people believe in him and in his sweeping vision. During the gestation of Atari, Alcorn loved listening to Bushnell as he espoused his grand hopes. Alcorn, who didn’t come from money, looked to the Utahan as a philosophizing mentor more than a peer in engineering, because Bushnell’s design chops were middling. But as he listened to the founder’s big plans, Alcorn began to dream big dreams himself. Just as important, he worked extremely hard on the three-month project, although years later, he thought, “It’s got one moving spot. It’s got scoring digits. It’s got basically one sound. It’s the de minimis
of a game. It’s really lifted from what Nolan saw in the Magnavox Odyssey game.”

But at the time, Alcorn hadn’t seen or played Baer’s tennis game—the Odyssey wouldn’t appear on retail shelves until later that fall—nor was he aware of Bushnell’s early knowledge of the device. Bushnell sometimes stated to the press that he never saw the precursor to Pong. But Baer, the ultimate stickler for detail, had squirreled away a signed attendee log that proved that Bushnell viewed a demonstration of the invention—along with Baer’s table tennis game—on May 24, 1972, at the Airport Marina in Burlingame, California. Atari was formed a month later, on June 27. A pattern was forming: Bushnell was being inspired by (or possibly taking) ideas for games he had seen and even loved in the past and trying to distill them for a mass audience.
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