Return to the Little Kingdom (14 page)

 

Jobs became one of Atari’s first fifty employees and had his first prolonged taste of corporate life in a company where a succession of novel ideas managed to withstand any number of managerial torpedoes. The company was started and dominated by Nolan Bushnell, son of a Utah cement contractor whose first business coup took place at the University of Utah where he sold ink blotters framed by advertisements. In 1972, at age twenty-nine, Bushnell introduced his first video game. Computer Space appealed to engineers but was too complicated for the general public.

As the game failed Bushnell decided to start his own business to make video games and operate pinball machines. He called the company, which he based in a rented garage space, Syzygy, for no better reason than it was the last word in the dictionary that began with the letter
S
. Within weeks Bushnell discovered that Syzygy had been used by another firm and so he changed the name to Atari (taken from the Japanese game Go and roughly equivalent in meaning to
check
) but early advertisements read FROM ATARI INC., SYZYGY ENGINEERED.

Bushnell viewed business as “a type of war” and employed pinches of diplomacy and charm, cunning and force to cajole his employees and bamboozle the competition. Dressed in sharp suits, flowery shirts, and polka-dot ties, he became Atari’s six-foot-four-inch juju man. “It was life in the fast lane with Nolan,” one of the founders recalled. “He always wanted everything at once.” To persuade Chief Engineer Alcorn to design Pong, Bushnell pretended it had been ordered by General Electric. “I’d never even had any negotiations with General Electric,” Bushnell recalled, “but I wanted to test out Al’s skills.” Nobody, let alone Bushnell, placed any great hopes in Pong. “I didn’t perceive it as a big marketable item.”

The first game, with a coin box bolted to the outside, was placed in Andy Capp’s Cavern, a popular Sunnyvale pool parlor. Almost immediately it became clear that the electronic game was making more than the bar’s pinball machines. A few days after it was installed, the rush of quarters backed up and jammed the coin box and within weeks people wanting to play Pong lined up outside the bar.

While Pong came to enjoy popular success, the people who mattered treated the company with suspicion. Some bankers thought it was an offshoot of the Mafia. Suppliers were leery about extending credit to a firm that looked as if it might take to the air any day. To quell complaints, Bushnell started an offshoot, Kee Games, which he furnished with designers, managers, and plans from Atari. According to Bushnell, the new company was formed to produce a parallel line of games and to sop up the money that might have flowed to potential competitors. A series of contrived press releases charted the formation of Kee Games, and Bushnell later chortled, with something bordering on contempt, “There are just so many ways you can use the press for strategic advantage.” When Kee Games began to prosper and there were rumors that it wanted to shrug off ties with Atari, Bushnell issued a bland statement that read “We are happy that the people at Kee and Atari have been able to resolve the problems that led to the original split.”

Bushnell’s control of the press was more refined than his control of the company. Many of his early employees were eager to dispense with routine corporate drudgery like memos and staff meetings. Attracted by the unconventional, Bushnell fueled brainstorming sessions with marijuana and made no secret of his belief that drugs and alcohol helped spark ideas. Recruitment was equally unpredictable. One candidate was startled when Bushnell strolled into the room, posed one question—“Are you a spy for Bally?”—and then disappeared, satisfied he wasn’t about to hire a quisling. Easily bored by daily chores, Bushnell hired his brother-in-law, a psychiatrist, to manage the company. Financial controls were so lax that a three-month supply of one game, Trak Ten, was virtually given away before an accountant discovered that it was being sold for $100 less than it cost to build. Bushnell admitted that “we wrote contracts guys were able to weasel out of.” He also was reluctant to cede control to a strong board of directors and made sure he always owned more than half the outstanding shares.

Nevertheless, during its first three years Atari managed to sell $13 million worth of video games and capitalized on the popularity of Pong by selling variants that included Dr. Pong, a wood-grained version aimed at physicians, dentists, and hospitals, and Puppy Pong, which was clad in a Formica doghouse. On the rush of its early success Atari built a large factory only to find there weren’t enough orders to keep it busy. More money disappeared when Bushnell attempted to start a manufacturing offshoot in Japan. Life wasn’t made any easier by seasonal swings, the nationwide recession, a shortage of venture capital or the popular perception that a leisure business was a frivolous enterprise.

On several occasions, especially between the spring and fall of 1974, when Atari’s future rested on the success of Gran Trak, a driving game, the company came within seven days of bankruptcy. At lunch during one savage week Bushnell broke down in tears thinking all was lost. Suppliers refused to deliver parts and creditors camped out in the hallway. The tempestuous backdrop didn’t escape Atari’s employees. Ron Wayne, a one-time employee, said, “Working at Atari was like driving with a rubber steering wheel.” Steve Jobs formed his own impressions of a company that was hardly a model for the business textbooks. “It was always chaos. It was not a well-run company.”

 

But for all the thrills and spills, most of the Atari employees were conservative and Jobs was considered peculiar. He poked his nose into other engineers’ business and made no secret of his disdain. Bushnell recalled that Jobs “regularly told a lot of the other guys they were dumb shits,” and Jobs himself said, “Some of their engineers were not very good and I was better than most of them. The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad. I wasn’t really an engineer at all.” Yet Jobs’s appearance, his lunches of yogurt, his strict adherence to the mucusless diet, and his belief that a fruit diet meant that he could go without showers, were considered nonconformist. By his own admission Jobs was oblivious to the animosity he stirred up. Finally, to keep peace in the lab, Alcorn arranged for Jobs to work after hours and late at night. “The engineers didn’t like him. He smelled funny.”

Despite his lack of formal electronic training, Jobs quickly bridged the gap between being a technician and being an engineer. One of his early tasks was to add refinements to a game called Touch Me, which sported bulbous rubber suckers. Working within the discipline of specified boundaries Jobs tailored the performance of the chips to what was wanted on the screen. He understood the chips’ subtleties, plotted out a new design, and made substantial improvements to the game. Wozniak admired Jobs’s work. “He did the creative stuff. He realized how he could build the same thing a lot simpler and better. It was engineering.”

 

When Jobs decided to accompany his college friend Dan Kottke to India and see the topography and intellectual scenery for some of Robert Friedland’s elaborate tales, he asked Alcorn to supply the air fare. Alcorn gave the request a blunt reception. “Bullshit, I’m not giving you any money to go see the guru.” The pair arrived at a convenient compromise. Some games Atari had shipped to West Germany were causing interference on television sets, and the German engineers were unable to solve the problem. Alcorn gave Jobs a crash course in ground loops and agreed to pay his air fare to Europe, ordering him to “say hi to the guru for me.”

Jobs’s arrival in Europe caused some consternation among the Germans, who cabled Alcorn wondering what he had dispatched. For his part Jobs (distressed that he couldn’t find the German word for
vegetarian
) adroitly applied the curative to Atari’s troublesome machines.

In the telling, Jobs and Kottke’s trip to India seems crammed with the snapshots of young innocents abroad, faintly credulous Westerners caught in the blank light of ashrams, swamis, and sadhus. Kottke felt “the trip was a kind of ascetic pilgrimage except we didn’t know where we were going.” Before Kottke arrived, Jobs spent a few weeks by himself, and in succeeding years, they were cloaked in surrealistic images. He attended the Kumbhmela, a large religious festival that takes place every twelfth year in Hardwar in north central India. “Seven million people,” Jobs observed, “in a town the size of Los Gatos.” He saw priests emerge from the river, watched the flames of funeral pyres and dead bodies floating down the Ganges. He met a Parisian fashion designer at an ashram, and a guru who, impressed by the smoothness of his skin, dragged him up a hillside and shaved his head. He also spent a nervous night in an abandoned temple sitting near a fire which flickered around a trident. His only companion was a Shivite, with matted hair and a body covered in ashes, who puffed on a chillum until dawn.

Dressed in light, white cotton pants and vests, Kottke and Jobs used New Delhi as their base. Nightly walks took them through shantytowns of corrugated iron and cracked packing cases, past cows eating garbage and people sleeping on cots on the sidewalks. Their sorties from Delhi were made on buses with worn shock absorbers and small metal seats, and they spent several days trekking to see a number of yogis. They hiked along dried riverbeds, carrying water bottles, their feet rubbed raw by sandals. Enticed by the promise of Tibet they journeyed into the foothills of the Himalayas but wound up at the old spa town of Menali, where they both contracted scabies from greasy bedsheets.

Though Neem Kardie Baba and his plaid blanket had been consumed by a spectacular funeral pyre, Jobs and Kottke dutifully trooped to Kainchi. They strolled among the gaudy icons and plastic Krishnas and found the ashram perverted by musicians who were being paid to perform devotional chants. Despite the changes, the pair stayed in Kainchi for about a month and rented a one-room cement hut from a family who ran a potato farm. It was convenient enough, allowed them to read in peace and quiet, and had one other advantage: It was close to a field of marijuana plants which they dried and smoked. They also had rudimentary room service supplied by the wife of the potato farmer who sold them water-buffalo milk which she heated and stirred with sugar. On one occasion Jobs took issue with the way she watered down the milk. Gestures bridged the language barrier and the woman wound up denouncing Jobs as a criminal. At the Kainchi market where merchants sold vegetables from donkey carts, Jobs also drove a hard bargain, Kottke recalled. “He looked at prices elsewhere, found out the real price, and haggled. He didn’t want to get ripped off.”

The hot, uncomfortable summer made Jobs question many of the illusions he had nursed about India. He found India far poorer than he had imagined and was struck by the incongruity between the country’s condition and its airs of holiness. He spotted a crucial lesson wrapped up in the blur of yogis and yellow health cards, darshan and pranas, sadhus and puja tables. “We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karolie Baba put together.”

By the time Jobs returned to California he was thinner, thanks to a bout of dysentery, had closely cropped hair, and was dressed in an Indian attire that was a millennium away from Pong and oscilloscopes. Nancy Rogers remembered: “He was so weird when he got back. He was trying to live more detached and spiritually. He would look at me with his eyes wide apart and stare and wouldn’t blink. He would invite me over to eat and then play guru. He would come over and look at all the little gifts he had given me and ask, ‘Where did you get this?’ It was as if he was breaking all ties.”

 

Jobs’s return from India in the fall of 1974 also marked the start of an eighteen-month period during which he played hopscotch. He flitted between Atari and the crumbling edges of consumer electronics and a three-hundred acre Oregon farm that Robert Friedland was managing for a wealthy relative. But first he headed north to an old hotel in Eugene, Oregon, that a student of the California psychiatrist Arthur Janov had converted into the Oregon Feeling Center. Jobs, who had read Janov’s best seller
Primal Scream,
paid a thousand dollars and enrolled in a twelve-week course of therapy that was supposed to provide solutions to deeply rooted problems. Janov and his students at the Oregon Feeling Center seemed to be offering an emotional spring cleaning. “Feeling is what this therapy is all about. . . . We are after the feelings which say ‘Daddy, be nice. Mama, I need you.’” Jobs’s curiosity was piqued. “It seemed like such an interesting thing. You could gain some insight into your life and experience some new realm of feeling. This was not something to think about. This was something to actually go do: to close your eyes, hold your breath, jump in and come out the other end more insightful.”

For Jobs Janov’s writings appeared to hold the key for an immensely personal quest. As he turned twenty, the question of his adoption and the whereabouts of his natural parents came to assume more prominence. Nancy Rogers recalled: “He was sometimes in tears to see his mother.” Robert Friedland had his own interpretation: “Steve had a very profound desire to know his physical parents so he could better know himself.” Questions about his natural parents spawned hours of private speculation. His friends gently teased him that he was probably Armenian or Syrian. Jobs began an extensive search for his natural parents and learned a little about them. “Both were teaching at a university. My father was a visiting maths professor.” Jobs reckoned that his adoption had at least one effect: “It made me feel a little bit more independent.” After about three months in Eugene, Jobs’s infatuation with Janov’s work and methods dulled. “He offered a ready-made, button-down answer which turned out to be far too over-simplistic. It became obvious that it wasn’t going to yield any great insight.”