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Replay_ The History of Video Games.pdf
About The Author
Tristan Donovan was born in Shepherd’s Bush, London, in 1975. His first experience of video games was Space Invaders and he liked it, which was just as well because that was one of
only three games he had on his TI-99/4a computer that saw him through the 1980s.
He disliked English at school and studied ecology at university, so naturally became a journalist after graduating in 1998. Since 2001 he has worked for Haymarket Media in a number
of roles, the latest of which is as deputy editor of Third Sector . Tristan has also written for The Guardian , Edge , Stuff , The Big Issue , Games TM , Game Developer , The Gadget Show
and a whole bunch of trade magazines you probably haven’t heard of.
He lives in East Sussex, UK with his partner and two dachshunds.
REPLAY
The History of Video Games
TRISTAN DONOVAN
Published by Yellow Ant
Copyright © Tristan Donovan 2010
Tristan Donovan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Yellow Ant. 65 Southover High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1JA, United Kingdom
www.yellowantmedia.com
Cover by Jay Priest and Tom Homewood
Cover photo © Corbis
iBook design by Yellow Ant
ISBN 978-0-9565072-2-8
To Jay, Mum, Dad and Jade
Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series
Foreword by Richard Garriott
Many consider the video games industry a young one. And, indeed, compared to many industries it is. It has developed from being a home-based hobby of the odd computer nerd to a
multi-billion dollar business in just 30 years or so. I am old enough, and consider myself lucky enough, to have worked in the industry for much of its history. Astounding achievements in
technology and design have driven this business to the forefront of the entertainment industry, surpassing books and movies long ago as not only the preferred medium for entertainment,
but the most lucrative as well. Yet, it still has not been recognized as the important cultural art form that it is.
It is important to look back and remember how quickly we got here. Many who consider video game history focus on certain parts, such as consoles and other hardware that helped
propel this business into the artistic medium it is today. However, there are many more aspects that are equally important. I believe that Tristan Donovan’s account is the most
comprehensive thus far. In this book you will see his account of the inception of the video game’s true foundations. He details with great insight the people and events that led to what is
the most powerful creative field today, and he takes a holistic view of the genre. Tristan’s unique approach demonstrates the strength of this field – he focuses on how video games have
become a medium for creativity unlike any other industry, and how those creators, artists, storytellers, and developers have impacted culture in not just the US, but worldwide. That is
quite a powerful influence and warrants recognition.
This book credits the greatest artistic creators of our time but doesn’t limit what they’ve accomplished to a particular platform. The video game genre spans coin-operated machines,
consoles, personal computers, and more recently, the impetus of mobile, web-based, and handheld markets. There are very few venues in life these days you will not see some sort of
influence of a video game – from music to film, to education to the military, games have touched the lives of people all over the world. While some cultures prefer a particular game style
over another, the common denominator is that the art of the video game is not simply synonymous with entertainment, but with life.
Introduction
“Why are you writing another book on the history of video games,” asked Michael Katz, the former head of Sega of America, when I interviewed him for this book.
There are many reasons why, but two stand out. The first is that the attempts at writing the history of video games to date have been US rather than global histories. In Replay: The
History of Video Games , I hope to redress the balance, giving the US its due without neglecting the important influence of games developed Japan, Europe and elsewhere. The second,
and more important, reason is that video game history is usually told as a story of hardware not software: a tale of successive generations of game consoles and their manufacturers’
battle for market share. I wanted to write a history of video games as an art form rather than as a business product.
In addition, video games do not just exist on consoles. They appear on mobile phones, in arcades, within web browsers and, of course, on computers - formats that lack the distinct
generational divides of consoles. Hardware is merely the vehicle for the creativity and vision of the video game developers who have spent the last 50 or so years moulding a new
entertainment medium where, unlike almost all other rival media, the user is an active participant rather than a passive observer.
Hardware sets limits on what can be achieved, but it does not dictate what is created. The design of the ZX Spectrum home computer did not guarantee the creation of British
surrealist games such as Jet Set Willy or Deus Ex Machina . The technology of the Nintendo 64 only made Super Mario 64 possible, it did not ensure that Shigeru Miyamoto would make
it.
The real history of video games is a story of human creativity, aided by technological growth. Replay sets out to celebrate the vitality and vision of video game creators, and to shed
light on why video games have evolved in the way they have. For that reason not all of the games featured in this book will have been popular and conversely some very popular games
are not mentioned. The focus is on the innovative, not the commercially successful.
Finally, a note on terminology. I’ve used the term ‘video game’ throughout this book with the occasional use of ‘game’ when there is no risk of confusion with other forms of game such
as board games. I chose video game in preference to other terms for several reasons: it remains in every day use, unlike TV game or electronic game; it is broad enough to encompass
the entire medium unlike ‘computer game’, which would exclude games, such as Atari’s Pong , that did not use microprocessors; and terms such as ‘interactive entertainment’, while
more accurate, have failed to catch on despite repeated attempts over the years.
Space race: Spacewar! co-creators Dan Edwards (left) and Peter Samson engage in intergalactic warfare on a PDP-1 circa 1962. Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
1. Hey! Let’s Play Games!
The world changed forever on the morning of the 17th July 1945. At 5.29am the first atomic bomb exploded at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert, New
Mexico. The blast swelled into an intimidating mushroom cloud that rose 7.5 kilometres into the sky and ripped out a 3 metre-deep crater lined with irradiated glass formed from melted
sand. The explosion marked the consummation of the top-secret Manhattan Project that had tasked some of the Allies’ best scientists and engineers with building the ultimate weapon -
a weapon that would end the Second World War.
Within weeks of the Alamogordo test, atomic bombs had levelled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs killed thousands instantly and left many more to die
slowly from radiation poisoning. Five days after the destruction of Nagasaki on the 9th August 1945, the Japanese government surrendered. The Second World War was over. The world
the war left behind was polarised between the communist east, led by the USSR, and the US-led free-market democracies of the west. The relationship between the wartime allies of the
USA and USSR soon unravelled resulting in the Cold War, a 40-year standoff that would repeatedly take the world to the brink of nuclear war.
But the Cold War was more than just a military conflict. It was a struggle between two incompatible visions of the future and would be fought not just in diplomacy and warfare but also in
economic development, propaganda, espionage and technological progress. And it was in the technological arms race of the Cold War that the video game would be conceived.
* * *
On the 14th February 1946, exactly six months after Japan’s surrender, the University of Pennsylvania switched on the first programmable computer: the Electronic Numeric Integrator
and Calculator, or ENIAC for short. The state-of-the-art computer took three years to build, cost $500,000 of US military funding and was created to calculate artillery-firing tables for the
army. It was a colossus of a machine, weighing 30 tonnes and requiring 63 square metres of floor space. Its innards contained more than 1,500 mechanical relays and 17,000 vacuum
tubes – the automated switches that allowed the ENIAC to carry out instructions and make calculations. Since it had no screen or keyboard, instructions were fed in using punch cards.
The ENIAC would reply by printing punch cards of its own. These then had to be fed into an IBM accounting machine to be translated into anything of meaning. The press heralded the
ENIAC as a “giant brain”.
It was an apt description given that many computer scientists dreamed of creating an artificial intelligence. Foremost among these computer scientists were the British mathematician
Alan Turing and the American computing expert Claude Shannon. The pair had worked together during the war decrypting the secret codes used by German U-boats. The pair’s ideas
and theories would form the foundations of modern computing. They saw artificial intelligence as the ultimate aim of computer research and both agreed that getting a computer to defeat
a human at Chess would be an important step towards realising that dream.
The board game’s appeal as a tool for artificial intelligence research was simple. While rules of Chess are straightforward, the variety of possible moves and situations meant that
even if a computer could play a million games of Chess every second it would take 10 108 years for it to play evepossible version of the game. [1] As a result any computer that could
defeat an expert human player at Chess would need to be able to react to and anticipate the moves of that person in an intelligent way. As Shannon put it in his 1950 paper Programming
a Computer for Playing Chess : “Although perhaps of no practical importance, the question [of computer Chess] is of theoretical interest, and it is hoped that a satisfactory solution of this
problem will act as a wedge in attacking other problems of a similar nature and of greater significance.”
In 1947, Turing became the first person to write a computer Chess program. However, Turing’s code was so advanced none of the primitive computers that existed at the time could
run it. Eventually in 1952, Turing resorted to testing his Chess game by playing a match with a colleague where he pretended to be the computer. After hours of painstakingly mimicking
his computer code, Turing lost to his colleague. He would never get the opportunity to implement his ideas for computer Chess on a computer. The same year that he tested his program
with his colleague, he was arrested and convicted of homosexuality. Two years later, having been shunned by the scientific establishment because of his sexuality, he committed suicide
by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
Despite Turing’s untimely exit, computer scientists such as Shannon and Alex Bernstein would spend much of the 1950s investigating artificial intelligence by making computers play
games. While Chess remained the ultimate test, others brought simpler games to life on a computer.
In 1951 the UK’s Labour government launched the Festival of Britain, a sprawling year-long national event that it hoped would instil a sense of hope in a population reeling from the
aftermath of the Second World War. With UK cities, particularly London, still marred by ruins and bomb craters, the government hoped its celebration of art, science and culture would
persuade the population that a better future was on the horizon. Herbert Morrison, the deputy prime minister who oversaw the festival’s creation, said the celebrations would be “a tonic
for the nation”. Keen to be involved in the celebrations, the British computer company Ferranti promised the government it would contribute to the festival’s Exhibition of Science in South
Kensington, London. But by late 1950, with the festival just weeks away, Ferranti still lacked an exhibit. John Bennett, an Australian employee of the firm, came to the rescue.
Bennett proposed creating a computer that could play Nim. In this simple parlour game players are presented with several piles of matches. Each player then takes it in turns to
remove one or more of the matches from any one of the piles. The player who removes the last match wins. Bennett got the idea of a Nim-playing computer from the Nimatron, an electro-
mechanical machine exhibited at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York City. Despite suggesting Ferranti create a game-playing computer, Bennett’s aim was not to entertain but to show off
the ability of computers to do maths. And since Nim is based on mathematical principles it seemed a good example. Indeed, the guide book produced to accompany the Nimrod, as the
computer exhibit was named, was at pains to explain that it was maths, not fun, that was the machine’s purpose: “It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are
wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical
problems.”
Work to create the Nimrod began on the 1st December 1950 with Ferranti engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams turning Bennett’s designs into reality. By the 12th April 1951 the Nimrod
was ready. It was a huge machine – 12 feet wide, five feet tall and nine feet deep – but the actual computer running the game accounted for no more than two per cent of its size. Instead
the bulk of the machine was due to the multitude of vacuum tubes used to display lights, the electronic equivalent of the matches used in Nim. The resulting exhibit, which made its public
debut on the 5th May 1951, boasted that the Nimrod was “faster than thought” and challenged the public to pit their wits against Ferranti’s “electronic brain”. The public was won over, but
few showed any interest in the maths and science behind it. They just wanted to play. “Most of the public were quite happy to gawk at the flashing lights and be impressed,” said Bennett.
BBC radio journalist Paul Jennings described the Nimrod as a daunting machine in his report on the exhibition: “Like everyone else I came to a standstill before the electric brain or, as
they prefer to call it, the Nimrod Digital Computer. This looks like a tremendous grey refrigerator…it’s absolutely frightening…I suppose at the next exhibition they’ll even have real heaps
of matches and awful steel arms will come out of the machine to pick them up.”
After the Festival of Britain wound down in October, the Nimrod went on display at the Berlin Industrial Show and generated a similar response. Even West Germany’s economics
minister Ludwig Erhard tried unsuccessfully to beat the machine. But, having impressed the public, Ferranti dismantled the Nimrod and got back to work on more serious projects.
Another traditional game to make an early transition to computers was Noughts and Crosses, which was recreated on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) at
the University of Cambridge in England. Built in 1949 by Professor Maurice Wilkes, the head of the university’s mathematical laboratory, the EDSAC was as much a landmark in
computing as the ENIAC. It was the first computer with memory that users could read, add or remove information from; memory now known as random access memory or RAM. For this
Wilkes, who incidentally also tutored Bennett, is rightly regarded as a major figure in the evolution of computers but it would be one of his students who would recreate Noughts and
Crosses on the EDSAC. Alexander Douglas wrote his version of the game for his 1952 PhD thesis on the interaction between humans and computers. Once he finished his studies,
however, his Noughts and Crosses game was quickly forgotten, cast aside as a simple programme designed to illustrate a more serious point.
Others tried their hand at Checkers with IBM employee Arthur ‘Art’ Samuel leading the way. As with all the other games created on computers at this time, Samuel’s computer versions
of Checkers were not about entertainment but research. Like the Chess programmers, Samuel wanted to create a Checkers game that could defeat a human player. He completed his
first Checkers game in 1952 on an IBM 701; the first commercial computer created by the company, and would spend the next two decades refining it. By 1955 he had developed a
version that could learn from its mistakes that caused IBM’s share price to leap 15 points when it was shown off on US television. By 1961 Samuel’s programme was defeating US
Checkers champions.
* * *
At the same time as the scientists of the 1940s and 1950s were teaching computers to play board games, television sets were rapidly making their way into people’s homes. Although
the television existed before the Second World War, the conflict saw factories cease production of TV sets to support the war effort by producing radar displays and other equipment for
the military. The end of the war, however, produced the perfect conditions for television to take the world by storm. The technological breakthroughs made during the Second World War
had brought down the cost of manufacturing TV sets and US consumers now had money to burn after years of austerity. In 1946 just 0.5 per cent of households owned a television. By
1950 this proportion had soared to 9 per cent and by the end of the decade there was a television in almost 90 per cent of US homes. While the shows on offer from the TV networks
springing up across the US seemed enough to get sets flying off the shelves, several people involved in the world of TV began to wonder if the sets could be used for anything else
beyond receiving programmes.
In 1947, the pioneering TV network Dumont became first to try and explore the idea of allowing people to play games on their TV sets. Two of the company’s employees – Thomas
Goldsmith and Estle Mann – came up with the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Based on a simple electronic circuit, the device would allow people to fire missiles at a target,
such as an aeroplane, stuck onto the screen by the player. The device would use the cathode-ray tube within the TV set to draw lines representing the trajectory of the missile and to
create a virtual explosion if the target was hit. [2] Goldsmith and Mann applied for a patent for the idea in January 1947, which was approved the following year, but Dumont never turned
the device into a commercial product.
A few years later another TV engineer had a similar thought. Born in Germany in 1922, Ralph Baer had spent most of his teenage years watching the rise of the Nazi Party in his home
country and the subsequent oppression of his fellow Jews. Eventually, in September 1938, his family fled to the US just weeks before Kristallnacht, the moment when the Nazis’
oppression turned violent and Germany’s Jews began to be rounded up and sent to die in concentration camps. “My father saw what was coming and got all the paperwork together for
us to go to New York,” he said. “We went to the American consulate and sat in his office. I spoke pretty good English. I guess being able to have that conversation with the consulate
might have made all the difference because the quota for being let into the US was very small. If we hadn’t got into the quota then it would have been…[motions slicing of the neck].”
In the US, Baer studied television and radio technology and eventually ended up working at military contractors Loral Electronics, where in 1951 he and some colleagues were asked
to build a TV set from scratch. “We used test equipment to check our progress and one of the pieces of equipment we used put horizontal lines, vertical lines, cross-hatch patterns, and
colour lines on the screen,” he said. “You could move them around to some extent and use them to adjust the television set. Moving these patterns around was kind of neat and the idea
came to me that maybe we wanted to build something into a television set. I don’t know that I thought about it as a game, more something to fool with and to give you something to do
with a television set other than watch stupid network programmes.” Baer’s idea proved fleeting and he quickly ca it aside. But a seed had been sown.
* * *
By the start of 1958, the video game was still an elusive concept. Computer scientists still saw games as foil for their research and the engineers who saw potential for TV to be a two-
way experience between screen and viewer had failed to develop their ideas further. Bennett’s reporter-scaring Nimrod was still the nearest thing to a video game anyone outside the
engineering workshops or university computer lab had seen. But 1958 would see the concept of the video game come one step closer thanks to William Higinbotham.
Higinbotham had worked on the Manhattan Project, building the timing switches that made the bomb explode at the correct moment. Like many of the scientists who created the
bomb, he harboured mixed feelings about what he had done and would spend much of his post-war life campaigning against nuclear proliferation. After the war, he became head of the
instrumentation division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory – a US government research facility based on Long Island, New York. Every year Brookhaven would open its doors to the
public to show off its work. These visitor days tended to contain static exhibits that did little to excite the public and so, with the 1958 open day looming, Higinbotham decided to make a
more engaging attraction.
He came up with the idea for a fun, interactive exhibit: a tennis game played on the screen of an oscilloscope that he built using transistor circuitry with the help of Brookhaven engineer
Robert Dvorak. The game, Tennis for Two , recreated a side-on view of a tennis court with a net in the middle and thin ghostly lines that represented the players’ racquets. The large box-
shaped controllers created for the game allowed players to move their racquets using a dial and whack the ball by pressing a button. Brookhaven’s visitors loved it. “The high schoolers
liked it best, you couldn’t pull them away from it,” recalled Higinbotham more than 20 years later. In fact Tennis for Two was so popular that it returned for a second appearance at
Brookhaven’s 1959 open day. But neither Higinbotham nor anybody else at Brookhaven thought much of the game and after its 1959 encore it was dismantled so its parts could be used
in other projects. With that Higinbotham went back to his efforts to stop nuclear proliferation, eventually forming a division at Brookhaven to advise the US Atomic Energy Agency on how
to handle radioactive material.
The 1950s had been a decade of false starts for the video game. Almost as soon as anybody started exploring the idea they walked away, convinced it was a waste of time. Computer
Chess had proved a fruitful line of inquiry for artificial intelligence research – indeed many of the principles pioneered by Shannon and others would later be used by video game
designers to create challenging computer-controlled opponents for game players – but remained steadfastly about research rather than entertainment.
But as the 1960s dawned, the idea that computers should only be used for serious applications was about to be challenged head on by a group of computing students who rejected
the po-faced formality of their professors and saw programming as fun and creative rather than staid and serious.
* * *
The Tech Model Railroad Club lived up ts name. Based in Building 20 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students in the club were united by an interest in building elaborate
model railroads using complex combinations of relays and switches. Many of the club members also shared a love of computing and trashy sci-fi books such as Buck Rogers and, in
particular, the work of E.E. Smith. Smith wrote unashamedly trashy novellas telling stories of romance, war and adventure in outer space that were packed with melodramatic dialogue
and clichéd plot twists. His Lensman and Skylark series of books, written in the 1920s and 1930s, helped define the space opera genre of science fiction and fans such as Tech Model
Railroad Club member Steve Russell lapped up his trashy tales.
The club members’ attitude to computing was in stark contrast to that of their professors and the computer scientists of the previous two decades. They saw merit in creating anything
that seemed like a fun idea regardless of its practical value. Club member Robert Wagner’s Expensive Desk Calculator was typical. Written on MIT’s $3 million TX-0 computer, it did
what a desktop calculator of the day did only on a machine worth thousands more. Wagner’s professors were unimpressed by what they saw as a contemptible misuse of advanced
computer technology and gave him a zero grade as a punishment. Such disapproval, however, did little to quash the playful programming spirit of the club’s members and in late 1961,
their unorthodox attitude really got a chance to shine when the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT its latest computer, the PDP-1.
The $120,000 PDP-1 may have been the size of a large car, but with its keyboard and screen it was in many ways the forerunner of the modern desktop computer. The imminent
arrival of the cutting-edge machine caught the imagination of the Tech Model Railroad Club. “Long before the PDP-1 was up and running Wayne Witaenem, Steve Russell and I had
formed a sort of ad-hoc committee on what to do with it,” club member Martin Graetz told Edge magazine in 2003. After some debate the students hit on the idea of making a game.
“Wayne said: ‘Look, you need action and you need some kind of skill level. It should be a game where you have to control things moving around on the screen like, oh, spaceships’,”
recalled Graetz.
And with that comment Spacewar! , a two-player spaceship duel set in outer space, was born. Russell took on the job of programming the game, but his progress was slow. He would
repeatedly make excuses about why the game was still not finished when questioned by other club members. Eventually Russell’s excuses ran out when he told club member Alan Kotok
that he could not start work on the game until he had some routines that could carry out sine-cosine calculations. [3] Kotok went straight to the Digital Equipment Corporation, got the
routines and handed them to Russell. “Alan Kotok came to me and said: ‘Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines. Now what’s your excuse?’,” said Russell.
Out of excuses, Russell finally got to work and completed the first version of Spacewar! in late 1961, complete with a curvy rocket ship inspired by the stories of Smith and another
based on the US military’s Redstone Rocket. [4] But the club’s members felt Spacewar! needed improvement and quickly started adding enhancements. Russell’s use of real-life space
physics meant there was no inertia in the game, making it hard to play. So Dan Edwards inserted a star into the play area that had a gravitational pull that players could use to swing their
rockets around. The lack of any background in the game made it hard for players to judge how fast the rocket ships were travelling, so Peter Sampson added the star map from another
of the club’s professor-annoying programs: Expensive Planetarium . Kotok and Bob Saunders then created a dedicated controller to replace the PDP-1’s in-built bank of 18 switches
that made Spacewar! uncomfortable to play. By spring 1962 Spacewar! was finally finished.
Word of the club’s groundbreaking game quickly spread among PDP-1 users at MIT and soon students were staying at the lab well into the night for a fix of Spacewar! . For a brief
moment Russell and the others thought about trying to sell the game but concluded that since you needed a $120,000 computer to play it there wouldn’t be much interest. So they gave it
away, handing copies of the game to any PDP-1 user who wanted one. Soon word spread beyond the confines of MIT. In computer labs without a PDP-1, programmers recreated the
Tech Model Railroad Club’s game for their systems, spreading its reach even further. DEC began using the game to demonstrate the PDP-1 to potential customers and eventually
included a copy of the game with every PDP-1 it sold. And despite attempts by computer administrators to delete the time-wasting program that they saw as an affront to the seriousness
of computing, Spacewar! continued to thrive, growing in influence and popularity all the way.
But while computer students got to sample the delights of Spacewar! , few expected it to go any further. After all, computers were simply too big and too expensive for anyone who
didn’t have some serious application in mind. Few expected the situation to change. When film director Stanley Kubrick consulted more than 100 experts about what the technology of
2001 would look like for his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey , he came back with tales of intelligent machines that would play Chess to grandmaster standard and would be capable
of voice recognition. But they would still be huge. Spacewar! , it seemed, was destined to remain a treat for the computing elite.
* * *
While Spacewar! was imprisoned by the technology needed to run it, the idea Ralph Baer had as an engineer at Loral back in 1951 was about to come of age. In August 1966 Baer, now
head of instrument design at New Hampshire-based military contractors Sanders Associates, went on a business trip to New York City. After finishing his work, he headed to the East
Side Bus Terminal to wait for his ride bk home. And while he waited, Baer had a brainwave. “I remember sitting on a stoop somewhere at the bus station in New York waiting for my bus
to come in. The idea came full-blown:‘Hey! Let’s play games’,” he recalled. The next morning he set about writing a four-page proposal setting out his ideas for a $19.95 game-playing
device that would plug into a TV set. “I was a bit conflicted when writing the proposal,” he recalled. “I am the chief engineer and a division manager at a big military company, so how the
hell do I write this stuff? I start off calling it by some terminology that sounds like military terminology, by the time I get halfway through it changes and by the end I’m calling it Channel LP –
for let’s play.”
Unsure how his bosses would react, Baer used his position as the head of a large division in Sanders to start work on the Channel LP in secret. He acquired a room and brought in
one of his technicians, Bill Harrison, to help out with the project. “My division was on the fifth floor of a large building. On the sixth floor, right opposite the elevator, there was an empty
room that I commandeered and I gave Bill Harrison keys. Later Bill Rusch joined us as chief engineer. Rusch was constructive, creative and a pain in the ass. He’d come in late and
break off for an hour before he got started, no discipline. I hated that, but he was very creative and very smart. There were just the three of us and nobody knew what we were doing in that
room.”
By March 1967 the trio had a working machine and bunch of game ideas. There was a chase game where players controlled dots trying to dodge or catch each other. Another game
was a remake of Ping-Pong where players controlled bats at either side of the screen to deflect a ball that bounced around the screen. Baer and his team also devised a game where
players used a plastic rifle to shoot on-screen targets and another where the player had to furiously pump a plunger-type controller to make the screen change colour. With a working
prototype complete and a selection of games on offer, Baer decided to face the music and show his bosses what he had been doing. He showed his games machine to Herbert
Campman, the corporate director of research and development at Sanders, in the hope of getting funding. Interested, but unsure where Baer’s work would lead, Campman agreed a
small amount of investment. “He gave me $2,000 and five months of labour on it,” said Baer. “It wasn’t very generous, but it made it official.” As the project progressed Campman kept a
close eye on the developments made by the team, becoming a fan of their shooting game in particular. “He would shoot from the hip and was pretty good at it,” said Baer.
Other bosses were less supportive: “I had to tell my boss, who was the executive vice-president at the time, about the project. At regular intervals he would ask me: ‘Are you still
screwing around with this stuff?’. Of course a few years later when the licence money started rolling in, everybody was telling me how supportive they’d been.” Baer also had to
demonstrate his creation, which was now being called the Brown Box, to the company’s executive board, including founder Royden Sanders. “Everybody was stone-faced during the
demonstration, especially Royden Sanders,” said Baer. “But there were two guys among the directors who got very enthusiastic and said ‘that’s great’. Everybody else thought I was nuts.
”
By the end of 1967 the Brown Box was near complete and had attracted the interest of TelePrompter Corporation, a cable TV company that saw it during a visit to Sanders. Sanders’
position as a military contractor meant it couldn’t just start making Baer’s toy, so the hope was that TelePrompter would buy the rights to produce it. But after two months of talks, cash-
flow problems at TelePrompter resulted in the talks being abandoned. And since neither Baer nor Sanders had any idea who else might want to buy the rights, the Brown Box was left to
gather dust.
[ 1 ]. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Far, far longer than the 13.7 billion years estimated to
have elapsed since The Big Bang.
[ 2 ]. Cathode-ray tubes are devices that fire electron beams at TV screens to create a picture and were the basis of every TV set right up to the end of the 20th century, when the arrival of plasma and LCD flat screens made them
obsolete.
[ 3 ]. As part of his studies Kotok created a computer Chess program of his own that in 1962 would become the first one capable of defeating amateur players of the board game.
[ 4 ]. The Redstone Rocket was a direct descendent of Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets and created by many of the same German scientists, who the US government secretly employed after the end of Second World War.
Hand-made: Bill Pitts (left) and Hugh Tuck constructing the first coin-op video game, Galaxy Game . Courtesy of Bill Pitts
2. Avoid Missing Ball For High Score
As a student Bill Pitts lived for life underground. Instead of attending lectures, Pitts spent his time at Stanford University, California, combing the sprawling network of steam tunnels
beneath the 8,000-acre campus for access points into off-limits buildings. “I went to Stanford in the fall of ’64 and for the first two years my hobby was breaking into buildings,” he
recalled.
While Pitts was not the only student exploring the ill-lit and noisy tunnels, his expeditions were mainly a solitary affair. “There were others, but we didn’t really know each other,” he said.
“Sometimes there would be a brick wall and the tunnel would go through and others before me had knocked the bricks out so you could crawl through.” Exploring the tunnels was a risky
business: “It was pretty dangerous. I had a very heavy leather jacket; it was all raggedy, the lining on the inside was falling out. I would wear it in the steam tunnels even though it was
hotter than 120° Fahrenheit down there. If any of the steam pipes broke I thought it would protect me, but actually I would have just cooked a little bit more slowly.”
Pitts’ interest in exploring Stanford’s campus would prove fateful. One evening in 1966, while driving to meet some friends at a bar, he spotted a driveway going up into the hills about five
miles from the centre of Stanford. “I could tell by the sign right at the front that this was a Stanford facility,” he said. “It was also a building I hadn’t broken into yet, so I figured I needed to
come back later that night and break into this building.” Armed with the toolkit he used for picking locks and unscrewing grates on his adventures, Pitts returned to the mystery site at
11pm that night to break into the laboratory. His initial reaction was disappointment. “It’s all lit up and there’s lots of doors and they are all unlocked, but I go inside and what’s inside is the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project. They had a big huge time-sharing computer system called the PDP-6 – one big computer and probably 20 Teletypes connected to it so lots of
people could each be developing code simultaneously and each one thought they had the computer to themselves. Back then it was magical. It was amazing that this single computer
could be servicing 20 people at the same time. I was enthralled by it.” [1]
Pitts had done some introductory computing courses and wanted to get to grips with the space-age computer he had discovered. He persuaded Lester Earnest, the head of the
artificial intelligence project, to let him use the machine when no one else was waiting. “Les said: ‘You can use it as long as no-one else is using it’,” said Pitts. “So I ended up going up
there every night probably at eight or nine o’clock and working through ’til six or seven in the morning when other people showed up. I didn’t go to classes anymore. I couldn’t care less
about classes; I wanted to play with computers. My dad was going crazy, my parents were well aware of the fact that I wasn’t going to classes. My dad would tell me you’re just going to
be a computer bum.”
At the facility Pitts saw first-hand the cutting edge of computer science. He worked with Arthur Samuel, who had quit IBM for academia at the start of the 1960s, on the latest
incarnation of his Checkers game. He heard the first music created by the software that would form the basis of Yamaha’s keyboards. He watched postgraduate students connect robotic
arms and cameras to the PDP-6 and teach it to recognise, pick up and stack blocks. And he got to play Spacewar! .
“ Spacewar! was one of the cool things at the A.I. lab,” he recalled. “I had a friend from high school, Hugh Tuck, and when he was in town I’d take him to the A.I. lab and we’d play
Spacewar! .” And it was during one of these Spacewar! sessions in 1966 that Tuck remarked that if only they could make a coin-operated version of the game they would get rich. With
computers still hugely expensive and large, the idea was little more than a daydream. But then, in 1969, the Digital Equipment Corporation unveiled the $20,000 PDP-11. At that price,
Pitts thought, a coin-op version of Spacewar! might be possible: “I called Hugh up and said we could now build one of these things.”
While $20,000 was still prohibitive for arcades that were used to buying slot machines for around $1,000, th pair figured they could make one and work out how cheap they would need
to make the machine for it to be commercially viable. With money from Tuck’s wealthy parents, the pair started adapting a PDP-11 to create their coin-operated version of Spacewar! ,
which they named Galaxy Game . They decided to charge players 10 cents a game or a quarter for three games. The winner of each game would get a free game. The idea was to
ensure the machine was in constant use and therefore always taking money.
By August 1971 everything was almost in place: The Tresidder student union on the Stanford University campus had agreed to be the test site for Galaxy Game and the final touches
were being made. Then the pair got a call from a man named Nolan Bushnell, who worked for a company called Nutting Associates. “He had heard of us through mutual contacts,” said
Pitts. “He called me up and said ‘Hey, come on over and see what I’m doing. I know you’re building a version of Spacewar! using a whole PDP-11 and that’s gotta cost a lot of money
and I just want to show you the one I’m doing because I think you’re going to lose a lot of money.”
* * *
Bushnell, like Pitts, discovered Spacewar! during his student days at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s and had fallen in love with the game. But, unlike Pitts, Bushnell had long-
standing interest in the amusements business. At school he wanted to design rides for Disney’s amusement parks and, after gambling away his tuition fees at university, had started
working for the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, a town just north of Salt Lake City where the University of Utah was based. Bushnell’s love of Spacewar! , interest in electrical
engineering and involvement with the amusement business, coupled with his entrepreneurial spirit, caused him to immediately think about turning the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game
into a coin-operated machine. “When I first saw Spacewar! on the PDP-1, I was working summers at Lagoon so I was intimately aware of arcade economics,” he said. “It occurred to me
that if I could put that game on a computer screen and into the arcades, it would make a lot of money. But with the million-dollar computers of the time it wouldn’t work.”
But the idea refused to go away. After graduating in 1968, Bushnell became an engineer for Ampex Corporation, a company best known for its breakthroughs in audio and video
recording technology. While working there he read about the Data General Nova, a computer that cost $3,995, and immediately thought again of Spacewar! . “I thought if I could get that
computer to run four monitors and have four coin slots, it would make enough money to pay for itself,” said Bushnell. Bushnell teamed up with Ted Dabney, another Ampex engineer, to try
and design his Spacewar! coin-op machine on paper. “We were good friends and Ted had a lot of analogue computer skills that I didn’t have,” said Bushnell. “I was a digital guy. I knew
how to deal with bits and bytes and logic and things like that and Ted really understood a lot more about how tonterface with a consumer television set and power supplies and things like
that.”
Using the Nova proved to be a dead end. For a start the computer was so slow it couldn’t update the television screen quickly enough to keep the game moving at the necessary
speed. Bushnell and Dabney sought to ease the demands on the computer by creating separate pieces of hardware to handle jobs such as displaying the stars that formed the backdrop
of the game. It still didn’t work. Even reducing the number of screens supported by the computer failed to get the game working. By Thanksgiving 1970, Bushnell concluded the project
was doomed to failure. “I got frustrated and decided to abandon it,” said Bushnell. “But I kept worrying about the problem and thinking about it and then I had that ‘a-ha’ moment where I
thought I’m going to get rid of the computer and do it all in hardware. From that point, it just flew together.”
Bit by bit Dabney and Bushnell created dedicated circuits to perform each of the functions they originally hoped Data General’s computer would handle. The approach not only
overcame the technological difficulties but also made the machine a lot cheaper to build. So much cheaper that it no longer needed to support multiple screens to justify its price tag to
arcade owners. But the new approach did force a rethink of the game itself. Out went the two-player duelling and the gravitational field of Spacewar! . Instead players controlled one
spaceship that had to shoot down two flying saucers controlled by the hardware. In short it was no longer Spacewar! .
By the summer of 1971 the game was nearing completion and Bushnell was starting to wonder who they could sell the game to. A trip to the dentist solved that problem. “I was at my
dentist and, with a mouthful of cotton, I told him what I was doing and he said ‘you should talk to this guy’,” said Bushnell. “One of his other patients was the sales guy at Nutting
Associates, so he gave me the telephone number and I called him up, told him what I was doing and we went in and negotiated a deal.”
* * *
Nutting Associates started after Bill Nutting, a resident of the Californian city of Palo Alto, invested some money in a local company that made teaching equipment for the US Navy.
Among the company’s products was a multiple-choice quiz machine that projected film with the questions on a screen and then prompted naval trainees to press a button to give their
answer. He figured that if a coin slot was added to the machine it could be popular bar game and turned to his brother Dave Nutting, a former first lieutenant in the Army Corps of
Engineers, to adapt the technology. “It appeared to me as a fun challenge. I re-engineered and repackaged the concept and we then called it Computer Quiz ,” said Dave. “In the
meantime Bill contacted various coin-op distributors who liked the idea.”
With interest high, Dave moved to Milwaukee to start a manufacturing operation closer to Chicago, the hub of the amusements business. “I rented space and began to build up
inventory when Bill announced his wife Claire did not go along with the plan,” said Dave. “Claire was a complete control freak and I was a threat to her.” The clash led the brothers to part
ways and Dave formed his own company Nutting Industries to make the same machine under the name I.Q. Computer while Bill went ahead with Computer Quiz . Both games became a
success with around 4,400 Computer Quiz and 3,600 I.Q. Computer machines being built at a time when a popular pinball table would have a production run of 2,000 to 3,000.
Computer Quiz got Nutting Associates off to a good start, but by 1971 it needed a new hit and Bushnell and Dabney’s radical video game machine looked just the ticket. So in August
1971 Bushnell left Ampex for Nutting Associates to complete work on the game he believed would transform the amusements business. And in a nod to Computer Quiz , the game was
named Computer Space . It was then that Bushnell got word of the video game being made by Pitts and Tuck. [2] He decided to call them up. “I was curious. I didn’t know what was inside
their game and I expected it to be a PDP-8 or PDP-10 at the time. I was curious about what their economics were.”
Pitts and Tuck accepted Bushnell’s invite and headed to Nutting’s building in Mountain View, California. “We went in there and Nolan was literally an engineer with an oscilloscope in
his hand working on Computer Space ,” said Pitts. “It was at a point where he could demonstrate it to us, although it was still in development.” Bushnell’s hopes of learning from the pair
came to nothing. “I thought they were clever guys but I was hoping they had cut costs down somehow and they hadn’t. I left a little disappointed that they hadn’t and yet at the same time
relived because I felt they weren’t going to be competition for me.” Pitts thought Bushnell’s technology was great but believed he and Tuck had a better game: “I was very impressed by
his engineering skills but our game was absolutely true to Spacewar! . It was a real version of Spacewar! . Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardised version.”
A few weeks later, in September 1971, Galaxy Game , the first coin-operated video game, made its debut at the Tresidder Union. From the moment it was switched on the machine
attracted a crowd. “We had people 10-deep, packed around the machine trying to look over each other to watch the guys play the game,” said Pitts. The generous approach to charging
meant Galaxy Game earned nowhere near enough to justify its cost, but the game’s popularity encouraged Pitts and Tuck to persevere.
“Everybody was really excited about it, so Hugh and I decided to build version number two,” said Pitts. The pair went to town on version two, constructing proper fibreglass casing and
reprogramming the computer so it could support two games at once just like Bushnell originally planned to do with Computer Space to cut costs.
By the time vrsion two was complete, Tuck’s family had spent $65,000 on the project – a huge sum in 1971 – but the machine still couldn’t justify its cost and soon the pair had to give
up. “The truth is Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay attention to business issues at all, my driving goal was to recreate Spacewar! with coin receptors on it,” said Pitts.
“Nolan was much more of a businessman than I was. His emphasis was to take Spacewar! and try to drive it down a business path, whereas I was trying to drive it down a geek path by
being honest to the game.”
* * *
In November 1971, two months after the launch of Galaxy Game , the first Computer Space machine was installed at the Dutch Goose bar near the Stanford University campus. Its black
and white TV screen sat encased in colourful and curvy fibreglass that could have come straight from the set of the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella . Computer Space screamed the future and
to Bushnell’s delight the drinkers at the Dutch Goose seemed to like it. “The Dutch Goose was the first location where we tested Computer Space and it did fantastically well. What we
didn’t realise is that it had a very high percentage of college students,” said Bushnell.
With the initial test having gone well, Nutting Associates pushed ahead with the production of Computer Space hoping to woo arcade operators with its revolutionary technology and
lack of moving parts. [3] Nutting Associates produced more than 1,500 Computer Space units expecting a smash hit, but the reaction away from student bars proved less favourable.
“When we put it in a few working man’s beer bars it did no money,” said Bushnell. “It didn’t do anything because it was too complex.”
People in the arcade business were equally confused by the game. “In 1971, my brother Bill came out with Computer Space ,” recalled Dave Nutting. “Empire Distributing was
handling my electro-mechanical game Flying Ace and was also distributor for Nutting Associates. I was at Empire meeting the principals Gil Kitt and Joe Robbins when a call came
through from Bill and Nolan Bushnell asking for their response on receiving their first Computer Space . Gil and Joe had the speakerphone on so I could hear. Joe responded that the
game play was very confusing and his people were having trouble understanding the controls. Nolan came on to say that Computer Space was just the beginning of a new era and the
future of the coin amusement would be video games and pinball would no longer be the industry staple. Gil stood up and loudly stated: ‘There is no future in video games and if the day
comes that video games take over, I will eat my hat’everal years later at a convention I ran into Gil and asked him if he remembered his comment. He blushed and laughed and said: ‘Boy
was I wrong, it is a good thing I retired’.”
Computer Space did have fans though. Owen Rubin, who would later work at Atari, was one: “It was the first video game I ever saw. I was always hooked on pinball and other coin
amusements in arcades near me, so when I saw this, I was immediately hooked.” Another future Atari employee Dave Shepperd also fell in love with the game: “I remember thinking it
was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I loved that space-age, shaped-metal, flaked-fibreglass cabinet too.” Inspired, Shepperd built a video game himself: “Being basically a cheapskate
and not wanting to drop any more quarters into such a thing, I went home and proceeded to design and build my own video game using parts scrounged from junk bins.” For Bushnell,
Computer Space had done well enough: “Compared to the games that came after it looks like a flop. But I had never created a million-dollar product before. It represented a reasonable
royalty stream for me.” His experience at Nutting Associates also inspired him to form his own business: “I got to see Nutting operating and they gave me a huge amount of confidence to
go out on my own because I knew I couldn’t screw it up more than they did.” And with that Bushnell and Dabney, who had stayed behind at Ampex, decided to form Syzygy Engineering
with the goal of delivering on Bushnell’s claim that video games would replace pinball as the mainstay of the arcades. [4]
* * *
Meanwhile, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box was about to finally make it into the shops. Efforts by his employer Sanders Associates to find a licensee for the games console had hit the buffers
in early 1968 when the potential buyer TelePrompter went bust. “Nothing happened for a year and a half because we didn’t know what the hell to do with it,” said Baer. “It finally dawned on
me that television manufacturers were the companies most likely to manufacture, advertise, distribute, and sell something that’s made with exactly the components and manufacturing
techniques as the television sets themselves.” Sanders demoed the Brown Box to the television manufacturers who dominated the US market at the time: General Electric; Magnavox;
Motorola; Philco; RCA; and Sylvania. “When we demonstrated to these companies in ’69 everyone of them went ‘that’s great’, but nobody would offer a dime except RCA and when we
worked out the agreement we said we couldn’t live with that and walked away,” said Baer.
Once again it looked like the Brown Box was destined for the scrapheap. Then Bill Enders, one of the RCA executives who had been involved in the talks with Sanders, left to join
Magnavox and convinced his new employer to look again. The Brown Box’s creators – Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch – headed to Magnavox’s headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
to demonstrate their work once again. This time Magnavox said yes. In January 1971, Magnavox signed a preliminary deal with Sanders and began work on turning the Brown Box into a
marketable product. Magnavox redesigned the casing for the machine and briefly renamed it the Skill-O-Vision before settling on the Odyssey.
The Brown Box’s collection of seven games was built up to 12 titles including the maze-chase game Cat & Mouse , an educational title called States! and the Ping-Pong game
developed back in 1967. The rifle game that convinced Sanders to keep the project alive became the sold-separately Shooting Gallery add-on for the Odyssey. Magnavox then decided
to add paper money, playing cards and poker chips to enhance the games and plastic overlays that attached to the TV screen to make up for the Odyssey’s primitive visuals. And with so
much packed in with the game console, the $19.95 price tag Baer originally hoped for became $99.95. Baer was appalled: “I saw the box and out comes 10,000 playing cards, paper
money and all this crap. I just knew nobody’s ever going to use this stuff.”
With the enhancements in place Magnavox set a launch date of August 1972 for the world’s first games console, which the company decided would only be available through
Magnavox dealerships. In the build up to the launch, Magnavox demonstrated the Odyssey to Magnavox dealerships and the media. On the 24th May 1972 it put the Odyssey on display
at the Airport Marina in Burlingame, California, near San Francisco. One of the people who decided to take a look was Nolan Bushnell.
At the time Syzygy, the company Bushnell founded with Dabney, had struck a deal to create video games for the Chicago-based pinball giant Bally Midway. Bushnell wanted Syzygy to
make a driving video game for Bally Midway, convinced this would win over the punters alienated by Computer Space . Seeing the Odyssey and its Ping-Pong game in Burlingame did
little to change his mind and so the following month Syzygy, which had been getting by repairing broken arcade machines and running Computer Space machines in arcades near its
rented offices in Santa Clara, started preparing to create Bushnell’s driving game. Dabney and Bushnell agreed to invest $250 each in the company to incorporate it only to find that
another company already had the Syzygy name. Bushnell turned to his favourite game – the Japanese board game Go – for inspiration and suggested the company’s new name should
be Atari, a term from Go similar to check in Chess. Dabney agreed and on 27th June 1972 Atari Incorporated was born.
That same day Atari hired Al Alcorn, a young engineer who had worked for Dabney and Bushnell at Ampex as a trainee. Bushnell wanted to give Alcorn a very simple game to get him
used to the basics of video game technology and thought of Ping-Pong , the Odyssey game he had played the month before. He described the game to Alcorn and told him it was a part
of a deal he had done with General Electric. “I thought it would be a good way of getting him through the whole process because the circuits I’d designed were pretty complex,” said
Bushnell. There was no deal, however, and Bushnell had no intention of doing anything with the game. He thought the bat-and-ball action was too simplistic to be popular and saw it as no
more than on-the-job training for the young employee. Alcorn, however, threw himself into the project. He improved on Bushnell’s brief by making the ball bounce off the player’s bats at
different angles depending on which part of the bat it hit. He also added scores and crude sound effects. The result had just one instruction: “Avoid missing ball for high score”. These
minor improvements did not drastically change the game, but were enough to make Bushnell and Dabney change their plans. “My mind changed the minute it got really fun, when we
found ourselves playing it for an hour or two after work every night,” said Bushnell, who named Alcorn’s game Pong .
That September Atari decided to test Pong on the customers of Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. At the same time Bushnell headed to Chicago to show Bally Midway the
game, hoping it would fulfil Atari’s contract with the pinball manufacturer. Bally Midway, however, was unimpressed. “They didn’t want it,” said Bushnell. “First of all, it was only two-player
and no coin-op game at the time was only a two-player game, some had two-players but there had to be a one-player option. That was the big veto in their minds.”
Back in California, Alcorn also got some bad news from the owner of Andy Capp’s – Pong had stopped working. Alcorn drove over to the bar to investigate. On arrival he opened the
coin box so he could give himself free games while trying to diagnose the problem and out gushed a flood of coins; spilling, spinning and sliding all over the barroom floor. The sheer
amount of coins put into the Pong machine had caused it to seize up. The customers at Andy Capp’s had gone crazy for Pong , people had even begun queuing outside the bar waiting
for it to open just so they could play the game.
At the time when the average coin-op machine would make $50 a week, Pong was raking in more than $200 a week. Atari now knew it had a hit on its hands; the only problem was
how to get it into the arcades. Hoping the game’s takings would persuade Bally Midway to change their mind, Bushnell went back to the pinball firm. Worried the company wouldn’t
believe the real figure, Bushnell told them it was making a third of what it actually was. Bally Midway once again rejected the game. Atari then offered Pong to Nutting Associates in
exchange for a 10 per cent royalty, only to be rejected again on the grounds that the royalty demand was too high.
With options drying up, Atari decided to make the game itself. It was a big leap for the young firm: it had next-to-no money, no production line and no links with arcade machine
distributors. Bushnell was nervous about the move but figured the game’s simple design meant it would be easy to build. Atari gambled everything on its first run of Pong machines. “Our
first run was 11 units, which was 100 per cent of the money that we had,” said Bushnell. Each machine cost $280 to make but sold for $900.
“We sold the 11 units immediately for cash, so all of a sudden we had our cash back. The next release was 50 units and we completely ran out of space,” said Bushnell. Luckily for
Atari, the company in the business unit adjacent to their offices went bust just as space got tight. “We went from 2,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet and knocked a hole in the wall to
link the two,” said Bushnell.
By now word about Pong had spread through the arcade business. “We had distributors all over the country who were just screaming for the units,” said Bushnell. Atari needed a
proper production line fast if it was going to meet the soaring demand for Pong , but lacked the cash needed to set up a proper manufacturing facility. So Bushnell headed to the banks to
ask for a credit facility. The banks were, however, disinterested – put off by Bushnell’s long hair and the dubious image of the amusements business, which had become linked in the
public mind with gangsters and gambling. Back in the 1930s gangsters had close ties to the amusements business, none more famously than Frank Costello – a notorious mobster
nicknamed ‘the prime minister of the underworld’. Costello owned a network of 25,000 slot machines located in cafés, gas stations, bars, restaurants and drug stores across New York
City that earned him millions of dollars every year and helped bankroll his less legitimate activities.
The authorities had long been worried about the connection between the Mafia and the slot machine industry, so when several manufacturers started producing pinball machines that
offered cash prizes they decided to act. New York City’s Republican mayor Fiorella La Guardia led the charge. A year after becoming mayor in 1934, La Guardia began petitioning
courts for a ban on pinball, arguing it was an extension of gambling. After years of legal battles, La Guardia got his way in 1942 when a Bronx court sided with him and banned pinball – a
ban that would stay in force until 1976. To celebrate his victory La Guardia held a press conference by the city’s waterside where he smashed up a confiscated pinball machine with a
sledgehammer before throwing it into the East River. Over the next three weeks police impounded more than 3,000 pinball machines, dealing a severe blow to Costello’s slot machine
empire. Other US cities and towns began to follow New York’s lead, fixing the idea that pinball and arcades were inextricably linked with gangsters, gambling and moral decline.
So when Bushnell asked banks for a loan to help build his amusements machine business, they showed him the door. Eventually Bushnell persuaded the bank Wells Fargo to lend
Atari $50,000 on the back of an order for 150 Pong machines. It was less than Atari had hoped for, but enough to get a production line going.
With funding in place, the company turned a disused roller-skating rink into its new manufacturing arm and headed to the local unemployment office to recruit an instantly available
workforce. “They were horrible,” said Bushnell of the staff they hired to man the Pong production line. “We had a bunch of heroin addicts and things like that. They were stealing our TVs.
We were young and dumb is what I like to say. But we learned quickly. They didn’t last very long.”
Soon Pong had taken the nation by storm, introducing millions to the idea of the video game. Other amusement machine manufacturers quickly started producing their own versions of
the game, hoping to cash in on the new craze. Pinball firms such as Chicago Coin and Williams released thinly veiled remakes of Atari’s hit. Bally Midway went back to Atari and signed
a licensing deal that gave the Californian start-up a 5 per cent cut from sales of its Pong clone. Nutting Associates, doubtless regretting its decision to turn dwn Bushnell’s offer of Pong ,
released Computer Space Ball . Some of these clones achieved sales comparable to the 8,000-plus Pong machines sold by Atari. Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney transformed the
fortunes of Florida-based Allied Leisure, increasing its annual sales of $1.5 million in 1972 to $11.4 million in 1973. Pong soon went global.
In Japan, Taito, an amusements manufacturer built off the back of jukeboxes, peanut vending machines and crane games, looked at Pong and produced Elepong – the first Japanese
arcade game. French billiards table makers René Pierre jumped on the Pong bandwagon with Smatch and in Italy, Bologna-based pinball company Zaccaria entered the digital age with
TV Joker , a Pong copy produced under licence from Atari. “In 1972, Pong arrived in Italy and it was a great success,” recalled Natale Zaccaria, co-founder of Zaccaria. “Zaccaria
produced pinballs and sold them all over the world, so we had a wide net of contacts. When the video games started, we were ready to start selling and producing them under licence.
Zaccaria assembled a cabinet for Italy and called it TV Joker . At the start we were buying the motherboards from the US and building just the cabinets.”
Pong also helped Magnavox sell its Odyssey console and by 1974 some 200,000 had been sold, largely on the back of its Ping-Pong game. “Everybody played Ping-Pong and that’s
it,” said Baer. “It was a good game but what made it really popular was Pong . That’s when we realised ‘hell, all we had to do was stop after game number six’.” Magnavox eventually
threatened to sue Atari for infringing Baer’s patents but, feeling the young company didn’t have much money, it agreed to give the firm the rights to make the game for a one-off payment
of $700,000. Magnavox’s lawyers were less forgiving of Atari rivals such as Allied Leisure, Bally Midway, Nutting Associates and Williams.
By September 1974 an estimated 100,000 coin-operated video games were in operation across the US, raking in around $250 million a year. For the amusements business, long
shamed by being connected to gambling and gangsters, the video game offered a new start, attracting a new demographic to the arcades. “For years, our games – pinballs, shuffle alley,
pool – appealed mainly to, you know, the labouring class. Now with the video games you have a broader patronage,” Howard Robinson, the manager of an Atlanta coin-op distributor,
told The Ledger newspaper in September 1974. “A lot of lounges will take a video game that never would have let a pinball machine in the door.”
As Frank Ballouz, sales manager for Atari, remarked a couple of years later: “Many arcades used to be in rat-hole locations. Now they have turned into family amusement centres
where you can take your wife and six-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.”
thing to do because we thought it was better marketing,” said Bushnell.
The idea that video games were somehow separate from the seedy arcade machines of old was something Atari deliberately pushed. “We fostered that it was a more sophisticated
Bushnell had delivered on his promise that Computer Space was just the start of a new era for the amusements business. The only question now was how to follow up such a megahit.
[ 1 ]. Teletypes were a brand of teleprinter. Teleprinters were electric typewriters that connected to early computers and were used in place of screens. Users would type out their commands on a roll of paper in the teleprinter, which
would then print out responses to their commands. Teleprinters also formed the basis of newswires, allowing news agencies such as Reuters to send news reports over the wire to teleprinters in newspaper offices.
[ 2 ]. It should be noted that at this time, and throughout most of the 1970s, ‘TV games’ was the more common term. The term ‘video game’ eventually came to the fore later in the 1970s and the term ‘TV game’ faded away in the early
1980s. ‘Computer games’ were also sometimes talked about but, since most video games did not use microprocessors before the late 1970s, it’s a misleading term. As Ralph Baer put it: “People began calling them computer
games. They weren’t. There were no computers!”
[ 3 ]. Electro-mechanical arcade games were notoriously prone to breaking down due to the various moving parts they were built out of.
[ 4 ]. Syzygy is the term for a straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies, such as when the Earth, Moon and Sun line up during a solar eclipse.
Fun Inc.: Nolan Bushnell watches Gran Trak 10 games roll off the Atari production line, July 1974. Tony Korody / Sygma / Corbis
3. A Good Home Recreation Thing
Pong ’s popularity sent shockwaves through the amusements business. In less than six months Atari had gone from an unknown start-up to the leaders of a revolution in the arcades. For
the game-playing public, video games embodied the technological dreams of the Cold War in a way pinball tables and electro-mechanical games never could. No longer was TV just for
watching, now the viewer could take control. As Florida’s Ocala Star-Banner newspaper put it: “What better evidence is there that Americans are living in the space age than the growing
application of electronics in games that are played?”
The success of Pong restructured the amusements business. Arcade owners turned their backs on the cranky and unreliable electro-mechanical games that once filled their game
rooms and embraced the video game. “Video games offered a wider assortment of entertainment and, since video games had fewer moving pieces, they were more reliable,” said Bob
Lawton, who founded the Funspot Arcade in Wiers Beach, New Hampshire, in 1952. “Ask anyone who ran electro-mechanical games back in the day and they will tell you the same
thing. You can do so much more with a video game than you can with a plastic car, electric motors and relays.”
Within a year of Pong ’s debut in Andy Capp’s Tavern, more than 15 companies had piled into the coin-operated video game business that once was Atari’s alone. Not that these
companies strayed far from the bat-and-ball formula of Pong . Instead they produced barely disguised copies and various new twists on Atari’s game such as Chicago Coin’s TV
Pingame , a fusion of Pong and pinball where players used the bat to hit the virtual ball into digital pins to score points, and Ramtek’s Clean Sweep , where the goal was to clear dots
from the screen by hitting the ball over them. With competition intensifying, Atari knew it needed to expand its range of games beyond Pong remakes. [1] “We knew that we understood
the technology and everybody else pretty much just xeroxed our technology,” said Atari boss Nolan Bushnell. [2] “I felt we could out-innovate them.”
To encourage this innovation, Bushnell sought to mould Atari into a business based on egalitarian values and fostered a working culture based on fun and creativity. He spelled out his
thinking in a two-page company manifesto that drew on the ideas of the hippy movement of the late 1960s. The manifesto declared “an unethical corporation has no right to existence in
any social framework” and promised that Atari would “maintain a social atmosphere where we can be friends and comrades apart from the organizational hierarchy”. It also stated that
Atari would not tolerate discrimination of any kind including “the short hairs against the long hairs or the long hairs against the short hairs”. “This is slightly after the days of Aquarius and
the hippy revolution and we all wanted to create this wonderful, idealistic meritocracy,” explained Bushnell.
In practice, these values translated into a lack of fixed working hours, an anything-goes dress code and parties with free beer that the company threw if targets were met. “We were all
very young,” said Bushnell. “The management team were all in their late 20s to early 30s and most of the employees were in their early 20s. With that kind of demographic, a corporate
culture of fun naturally evolves. Then we found out our employees would respond to having a party for hitting quotas as much as having a bonus. We became known as a party company
because we’d have beer kegs on the back lot all the time because we were hitting quotas all the time.”
Steve Bristow, who joined Atari as an engineer in June 1973, felt the company’s attitude was a world away from the big technology firms of the day. “At Atari it didn’t matter if you had
tattoos or rode in on a motorcycle,” he said. “At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something. At Atari
the work people did counted more than how they looked.”
The company also turned a blind eye to the use of illegal drugs by employees. “There was absolutely no drug use in the factory, but we did have parties and, along with beer, some
people preferred marijuana and we closed our eyes to it. It was pretty wild,” said Bushnell. Bristow felt it reflected the times: “This was California in the 1970s. It wasn’t company policy or
anything, but at company parties one could detect certain odours and some people had sniffles. It was more of the times than of Atari.”
Despite Atari’s laid-back management style its staff worked hard, putting in long hours because they enjoyed their jobs. “It was quite common to have people working through the night.
Sometimes we’d work 24 hours just because we were excited about what we were doing,” said Dave Shepperd, who became an Atari game designer in 1976. Noah Anglin, who quit
IBM to become manager at Atari in 1976, remembered being impressed by the commitment of Atari’s employees: “What I saw was these absolutely brilliant hard-working guys. They
redefined hard working and the ability to work hard.”
This blurring of work and life, coupled with Bushnell’s non-conformist management, helped Atari stay one step ahead of the bigger manufacturers now seeking to conquer the video
game business. While other companies rehashed Pong , Atari began releasing new types of video game. It challenged arcade goers to steer through meteor storms against the clock
with Space Race . Pong creator Al Alcorn’s Gotcha got people playing virtual kiss chase in a maze, using joysticks encased in pink rubber domes designed to look like breasts. In Qwak!
, Atari handed players a rifle-shaped light gun for a virtual duck hunt. All three sold thousands.
Only Nutting Associates, Bushnell’s former employer, tried to explore what more could be done with video games in the immediate wake of Pong . It produced Missile Radar , a game
where players had to shoot down incoming missiles. Atari later reworked the idea to create Missile Command. In March 1974 Atari’s experiments with video games resulted in the
release of Gran Trak 10 – the first driving video game. Gran Trak 10 showed a bird’s eye view of a racecourse and asked players to drive their virtual racing car round the track using a
steering wheel, gear stick and the game’s accelerate and brake pedals. It became Atari’s biggest-selling game since Pong but, thanks to an accounting error, the company underpriced
the machine and lost money on every one sold. The resulting losses pushed Atari to the brink of collapse.
Matters were not helped by Atari’s decision to go global in 1973 by opening Atari Japan in Tokyo. “The Atari Japan excursion was an unmitigated, unbridled disaster,” said Bushnell.
“We were young and thinking that everything was possible. We probably violated every international trade law with Japan. We actually funded the thing with cash and bought a factory
without worrying about permits and things like that, which are so difficult to get in Japan.” Like many foreign companies that tried to enter the Japanese market, Atari found itself
hampered by a legal system and business culture that openly conspired against overseas firms. In the early 1960s, Ikeda Hayato, the Japanese prime minister who played a crucial role
in the nation’s post-Second World War economic success, had introduced laws that restricted the activities of foreign companies in a bid to protect Japanese businesses. On top of this,
Japanese coin-op distributors refused to work with the cocky American business. “The distribution over there was really closed to us,” said Bushnell. “Sega didn’t like us. Taito didn’t like
us. They were doing everything they could to throw obstacles in our way. They were entrenched and they were Japanese. We were American and stupid.”
Taito in particular was working hard to turn itself into the Japanese answer to Atari. After the success of its 1973 Pong clones Elepong and Soccer , the company started to explore
new video game concepts. In 1974 Tomohiro Nishikado, the designer of Soccer , created the company’s first truly original game: the racing game Speed Race . As with Gran Trak 10 ,
the action was viewed from above but instead of squashing a whole track into one screen, Speed Race created the impression of a larger course by having rival cars move down the
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