WEBVTT - TechStuff Classic: The Rise and Fall of Atari - Part One 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:12.039 --> 0:00:14.520 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:14.640 --> 0:00:17.400 Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio 0:00:17.440 --> 0:00:19.920 and I love all things tech and we are about 0:00:19.960 --> 0:00:25.120 to launch into a series of three classic episodes. So 0:00:25.239 --> 0:00:27.640 for the next couple of weeks, we're gonna have these 0:00:27.640 --> 0:00:32.120 classics play out. These were episodes that I recorded and 0:00:32.240 --> 0:00:35.839 published the week of March second, two thousand fifteen, so 0:00:35.920 --> 0:00:39.040 quite some time ago. Ties into some stuff that I've 0:00:39.400 --> 0:00:42.760 touched on in some other episodes recently, Like I talked 0:00:42.760 --> 0:00:45.879 about the video game crash in Ree, We're gonna talk 0:00:45.920 --> 0:00:49.479 about the Rise and Fall of Atari. Now, this was 0:00:49.520 --> 0:00:52.239 a three part series that I did have a special 0:00:52.320 --> 0:00:55.360 guest on these shows, so I hope you enjoy that. 0:00:55.920 --> 0:00:58.440 But let's listen to the Rise and Fall of Atari, 0:00:58.760 --> 0:01:04.600 Part one, which published March second, two thousand fifteen. Enjoy. Hi, Jonathan, 0:01:04.640 --> 0:01:06.560 since you asked, I do have a suggestion for a 0:01:06.600 --> 0:01:08.800 topic to cover that I don't think you have yet. 0:01:09.080 --> 0:01:11.480 Could you do an episode or two if needed to 0:01:11.560 --> 0:01:14.760 cover the rise and fall of Atari. Actually worked in 0:01:14.800 --> 0:01:18.199 the store that sold only Atari home computers and game 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.759 systems in the early nineties. Uh Atari's products are at 0:01:21.760 --> 0:01:23.920 the time were as good or better than what was 0:01:23.959 --> 0:01:26.640 being put out by their competitors, and yet they failed 0:01:26.640 --> 0:01:29.119 big time. Thank you for the entertaining and educational show. 0:01:29.400 --> 0:01:31.520 I enjoyed part one of the two thousand fourteen review 0:01:31.560 --> 0:01:35.559 this morning. So clearly this request came in some time ago, 0:01:36.160 --> 0:01:38.679 I guess so. But yeah, this was one that when 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:40.640 I brought it up to you, you said, absolutely we 0:01:40.640 --> 0:01:43.280 should do an episode about Atari. Well, you and I 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.679 are the same age roughly, and we are children of 0:01:47.160 --> 0:01:49.920 Atari every way, you know, we grew up in the 0:01:49.920 --> 0:01:53.720 seventies and eighties during the Atari's heyday. Yeah, and it 0:01:53.840 --> 0:01:57.120 was huge, huge in my life. And uh my brother 0:01:57.200 --> 0:02:00.960 actually uh has set his up recently and I was 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:05.800 just playing uh Combat last week. That Combat and we'll 0:02:05.840 --> 0:02:08.720 get to this obviously was the game that shipped with 0:02:10.160 --> 0:02:11.800 and it kind of holds up. You know what it 0:02:11.880 --> 0:02:15.239 really does. I it's it's an incredibly simple game and 0:02:15.360 --> 0:02:20.240 has incredibly simple graphics, but it's the playability comes in 0:02:20.280 --> 0:02:24.000 the fact that it's a two player game and uh, 0:02:24.480 --> 0:02:29.200 trash talking galore can happen. We had a blast. It 0:02:29.360 --> 0:02:31.799 really was a lot of fun, and not just for nostalgia. 0:02:32.400 --> 0:02:34.359 The gameplay, like you said, still holds up to a 0:02:34.400 --> 0:02:36.679 certain degree. I think, yeah, yeah. I mean it's obviously 0:02:36.720 --> 0:02:38.840 for someone who's like, no, I need to have you know, 0:02:38.880 --> 0:02:41.440 the fourteen different controls mapped out on my keyboard and 0:02:41.520 --> 0:02:44.880 my my gaming mouse and everything, it's not gonna appeal 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:49.440 to you. But but it's still a compelling experience. So 0:02:49.600 --> 0:02:52.560 we wanted to go through the rise and fall of Atari, 0:02:52.680 --> 0:02:56.120 and it is an epic story. I mean, it has 0:02:56.400 --> 0:02:58.639 so many different elements to it, and it's at least 0:02:58.680 --> 0:03:00.680 gonna be two episodes. We're gonna see how how far 0:03:00.800 --> 0:03:03.120 we can go before we have to take a break 0:03:03.160 --> 0:03:07.120 and replenish our our, our vital bodily fluids before we 0:03:07.160 --> 0:03:12.480 break out. Exactly. Good good reference there, Mr Chuck. So, 0:03:13.080 --> 0:03:16.799 starting off a little little information before we get into 0:03:16.800 --> 0:03:20.480 the actual Attari days. Computer games have been around pretty 0:03:20.600 --> 0:03:25.000 much since the days that computers were first built. You know, 0:03:25.080 --> 0:03:28.600 you you have computer programmers who often had these analytical 0:03:28.639 --> 0:03:32.720 minds that were also fond of things like puzzles and games, 0:03:32.720 --> 0:03:37.600 and so naturally, when those early computer programs were being designed, 0:03:38.160 --> 0:03:40.520 programmers were thinking, huh, I wonder if I could actually 0:03:40.560 --> 0:03:44.400 make this machine do something fun, not just something functional. Yeah, 0:03:44.440 --> 0:03:46.160 I think that's one of the things you probably heard 0:03:46.160 --> 0:03:48.120 a lot in the early days. But well, maybe they'd 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:51.320 be fun if dot dot dot and before you know what, 0:03:51.360 --> 0:03:53.760 they were playing some you know, to us an archaic 0:03:54.040 --> 0:03:57.040 form of a video Yeah, maybe like a game version 0:03:57.040 --> 0:03:59.520 of like Tic Tac toe, you know, but instead of 0:03:59.520 --> 0:04:02.840 it having a video screen, because video screens were late 0:04:02.880 --> 0:04:05.600 in the game in the computer days, they would print 0:04:05.680 --> 0:04:08.960 this stuff out like you would have maybe a tape printer, 0:04:09.760 --> 0:04:12.600 and it would print each move, so every time something changed, 0:04:12.640 --> 0:04:15.200 it had to print a new piece of paper to 0:04:15.320 --> 0:04:17.479 look at or a new strip of tape. Really, because 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:22.080 a friend of mine, his name's Richard Garriot, and he's 0:04:22.560 --> 0:04:26.839 a big game developer. He created one of the big 0:04:27.279 --> 0:04:29.800 computer game successes and then in the eighties and nineties 0:04:29.800 --> 0:04:32.400 called Ultima, and he talks about in his days when 0:04:32.440 --> 0:04:35.560 he was in computer programming classes in high school, it 0:04:35.640 --> 0:04:37.359 was all printed to tape and it was like a 0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:39.839 little adventure game and we'll talk about adventure in a 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:43.279 bit too, where it would print out the room and 0:04:43.360 --> 0:04:45.760 your little position, like you'd be a little X in 0:04:45.800 --> 0:04:48.080 the room and you'd say, go left. It would to 0:04:48.120 --> 0:04:50.200 print a new version of it where the X was 0:04:50.279 --> 0:04:54.359 just slightly to the left. In the pre eco friendly 0:04:54.440 --> 0:04:58.640 days as well, these days such a game would probably 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:02.760 be frowned upon. So uh, but you know, it sets 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:05.719 the stage to show that that people realize there was 0:05:06.320 --> 0:05:10.280 potential or electronics in the game world. And that gets 0:05:10.360 --> 0:05:13.760 us up to ninety eight when a man named William 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:20.520 Higginbotham of Brookhaven National Laboratory developed an electronic game called 0:05:20.760 --> 0:05:25.359 Tennis for two on a Donner Model thirty analog computer. 0:05:26.279 --> 0:05:30.839 And uh, it would simulate table tennis, and it simulated 0:05:30.880 --> 0:05:34.760 velocity and changes in direction, all this kind of stuff. Um, yeah, 0:05:34.800 --> 0:05:36.440 I looked it up just to see what it looked like. 0:05:36.480 --> 0:05:40.160 It looked like sort of like a like a ship's 0:05:40.200 --> 0:05:44.080 sonar or something. Yeah, exactly. It was taking an oscill lator, 0:05:44.200 --> 0:05:45.760 I mean, the same sort of thing that you might 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:49.400 see as like a heart monitor in hospital, kind of 0:05:49.600 --> 0:05:52.599 kind of like that. And by you change by fiddling 0:05:52.600 --> 0:05:57.279 with the voltage, essentially he could change the different images 0:05:57.320 --> 0:06:00.760 so that you would have essentially to paddle like things 0:06:01.279 --> 0:06:04.400 and the ball like thing and play a very basic game. 0:06:04.400 --> 0:06:06.599 And he said that he had made it because people 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:09.159 would come to visit the lab and there wasn't a 0:06:09.200 --> 0:06:11.880 whole lot of stuff that was actually interesting to look 0:06:11.920 --> 0:06:13.599 at the bar, and so this was the way to 0:06:13.680 --> 0:06:16.640 entertain them. That's pretty funny to like to impress people. 0:06:17.160 --> 0:06:19.560 He had stuff that was far more advanced, but he's like, oh, 0:06:19.640 --> 0:06:22.159 but look at this tennis for two and people probably, oh, yeah, 0:06:22.240 --> 0:06:26.960 exactly like hisn't cutting edge. So have you ever seen 0:06:27.000 --> 0:06:30.960 the mel Brooks films Silent Movie? All right? In Silent Movie, 0:06:31.000 --> 0:06:34.440 there's actually a scene where Sid caesar Is is in 0:06:34.520 --> 0:06:37.800 the hospital and his character is in the hospital and 0:06:37.880 --> 0:06:41.200 to uh, Dom Deloise and Marty Feldman who walk up 0:06:41.240 --> 0:06:43.560 to his heart monitor and turn it into this game 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:46.400 and they play a game of Pong on his heart monitor, 0:06:46.440 --> 0:06:48.920 which totally forgot about causes him to totally freak out. Yeah, 0:06:49.000 --> 0:06:51.840 but it's this game which is interesting because the original 0:06:51.920 --> 0:06:55.839 well we'll get into pong, but the original pongs were silent. Yes, yeah, 0:06:55.960 --> 0:06:59.479 that's actually true. And in nineteen sixty two, that's when 0:06:59.480 --> 0:07:01.040 we get up to the time when m i T. 0:07:01.160 --> 0:07:05.599 Professor Steve Russell developed a game called Space War, which 0:07:05.640 --> 0:07:08.000 is one of the earliest video games. He did this 0:07:08.040 --> 0:07:10.800 with two of his students, and they built it for 0:07:11.480 --> 0:07:13.960 a big mainframe computer. Yeah. It was the only way 0:07:14.000 --> 0:07:17.320 they could really at the time exactly. So if you 0:07:17.360 --> 0:07:19.200 wanted to play a computer game, you had to go 0:07:19.320 --> 0:07:24.880 someplace where essentially a room is dedicated to that computer. Yeah. 0:07:25.440 --> 0:07:27.760 They were largely still using vacuum tubes for a lot 0:07:27.800 --> 0:07:31.040 of this technology. I mean, transistors had had started to 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:34.720 come out, but they hadn't been integrated into computers deeply 0:07:34.760 --> 0:07:39.320 at this point. Uh. And that's when around this times 0:07:39.320 --> 0:07:44.240 when an electrical engineering student named Nolan Bushnell, the probably 0:07:44.240 --> 0:07:48.280 the most important person in this story, that's when he 0:07:48.440 --> 0:07:53.520 discovered space war because the computer lab at the university 0:07:53.560 --> 0:07:56.280 was going to the University of Utah College of Engineering, 0:07:56.920 --> 0:07:59.880 had Space War on one of its computers. Yeah, he was. 0:08:00.080 --> 0:08:02.280 I saw an interview with him earlier today on YouTube 0:08:02.320 --> 0:08:05.280 where he was talking about at the time. He said 0:08:05.280 --> 0:08:08.280 there were only like four universities in the entire country 0:08:08.320 --> 0:08:12.600 that had graphical displays period, and University of Utah just 0:08:12.640 --> 0:08:15.040 happened to be one of them. And it seemed like 0:08:15.640 --> 0:08:17.960 when you start hearing about the story and how it 0:08:18.000 --> 0:08:20.120 all just fell into place, it's I don't know if 0:08:20.120 --> 0:08:22.760 I'm a believer in fate, but all these little puzzle 0:08:22.760 --> 0:08:25.480 pieces came together in just the right way to get 0:08:25.560 --> 0:08:29.640 his motor running. Basically, if if they hadn't, if any 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:33.480 of the elements that took place, then the whole arcade 0:08:33.520 --> 0:08:36.959 industry could have been delayed by several years if he 0:08:37.000 --> 0:08:38.880 had just gone to a different university that didn't have 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:42.120 computer screens. Right, Yeah, because the University of Utah was 0:08:42.160 --> 0:08:45.040 a pioneer in that space, and so he really got 0:08:45.080 --> 0:08:48.959 his introduction to it. Uh. Another interesting thing about him 0:08:49.000 --> 0:08:51.720 is that he would work in his off time, like 0:08:51.760 --> 0:08:56.680 when whenever school was out at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Yeah, 0:08:56.720 --> 0:09:00.080 that was a huge deal because that inspired the thought of, 0:09:00.760 --> 0:09:02.880 you know what, people are shoving quarters in the ski 0:09:02.960 --> 0:09:07.160 ball games and pinball and you know all manner of 0:09:07.440 --> 0:09:10.680 sort of boardwalk arcade games. And he obviously had some 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:12.680 sort of business sense to him because he thought, why 0:09:12.679 --> 0:09:15.080 not try and do this really fun thing that I've 0:09:15.120 --> 0:09:17.320 been sneaking into the lab and doing every night and 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:19.719 charge people money for it? Right? What if we were 0:09:19.760 --> 0:09:23.440 to create an experience using an electronic game where on 0:09:23.480 --> 0:09:26.760 a per coin basis you would get either an allotted 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:30.200 amount of time to play or some other metric like 0:09:30.280 --> 0:09:32.160 in pong. It might be the number of lives. In 0:09:32.200 --> 0:09:33.960 most video games as number of lives, but in a 0:09:33.960 --> 0:09:37.920 few it's time. Um. And that that would determine how 0:09:38.040 --> 0:09:40.480 much of that experience you could have before you had 0:09:40.480 --> 0:09:43.880 to plunk in another quarter. And if I find it 0:09:44.360 --> 0:09:47.160 so compelling that I'll sneak into the to the lab, 0:09:47.559 --> 0:09:49.680 people be willing to pay a quarter for it. Yeah, 0:09:49.760 --> 0:09:52.719 it was a stroke of genius. It was absolutely, I 0:09:52.760 --> 0:09:55.040 mean you. There are a lot of criticisms that are 0:09:55.120 --> 0:09:58.840 leveled against Bushnell and Cord, including people who used to 0:09:58.880 --> 0:10:02.319 work with him. Um. And a lot of people claim, well, 0:10:02.360 --> 0:10:06.200 he never invented anything. I have to object to that 0:10:06.280 --> 0:10:11.280 because he took two separate ideas and turned them into 0:10:11.360 --> 0:10:15.280 something that spawned an entire industry. And if that's not invention, 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:17.400 I don't know what is. Yeah. And whether or not 0:10:17.440 --> 0:10:19.680 he was um, I guess it wasn't coding, but whether 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:23.160 or not he was soldering the games and inventing the 0:10:23.200 --> 0:10:26.839 games themselves. Those games are worthless unless someone comes along 0:10:26.880 --> 0:10:28.760 and says, you know what, I know how to package 0:10:28.800 --> 0:10:30.959 this right and take it to the public for them 0:10:31.000 --> 0:10:33.840 to enjoy, right, And so I mean so without this 0:10:33.840 --> 0:10:37.120 this vision again, I'm sure we would have eventually come 0:10:37.120 --> 0:10:39.600 around to the arcade industry. Anyway, someone would have come 0:10:39.640 --> 0:10:41.640 up with that idea, but it would have been later 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:46.400 and the story might have been much different. So Bushnell 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:49.280 graduates from college and goes to work for a company 0:10:49.320 --> 0:10:52.679 called Ampex. This is around nineteen sixty nine. Ampex is 0:10:52.679 --> 0:10:55.120 an electronics company, and I got a little bit of 0:10:55.120 --> 0:10:58.600 trivia something I thought you would appreciate, Chuck, you're a musician. 0:10:59.160 --> 0:11:03.920 So Ampex developed a tape recorder that less Paul used 0:11:03.920 --> 0:11:08.480 to pioneer the sound on sound technique. Yeah. Less Paul 0:11:08.559 --> 0:11:11.440 used an Ampex tape recorder which was designed to have 0:11:11.480 --> 0:11:15.120 a secondary writing head that would allow him to record 0:11:15.160 --> 0:11:18.160 a track and then play along with that recorded track 0:11:18.240 --> 0:11:21.240 to create a new mixed track of both of them together. 0:11:21.920 --> 0:11:25.040 So this would allow one musician to essentially back him 0:11:25.120 --> 0:11:29.760 or herself up. However, what it did do also is 0:11:30.120 --> 0:11:33.920 destroy the original track, the original recording, because it records 0:11:34.000 --> 0:11:36.800 over it, so you no longer have that, so you 0:11:36.840 --> 0:11:40.880 have plus yes, and that's the new base. Yeah, which 0:11:40.880 --> 0:11:42.840 is kind of cool. I thought that you would appreciate that. 0:11:42.840 --> 0:11:45.440 So I am tex. Ampex has had a real important 0:11:45.240 --> 0:11:49.000 part in the electronics industry in general. But it also 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:52.439 plays host to the meeting of the two people who 0:11:52.520 --> 0:11:57.120 would really push Atari in the early days. That's uh 0:11:57.559 --> 0:12:01.720 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Yeah, and Dabney they met 0:12:01.720 --> 0:12:04.480 in nineteen nine and like you said, both employees of 0:12:04.520 --> 0:12:10.720 Ampex and both um very much interested in uh pioneering 0:12:11.480 --> 0:12:14.200 Space War as the very first video game. Yeah, they 0:12:14.240 --> 0:12:16.520 were looking at Space War and they thought, how can 0:12:16.559 --> 0:12:20.240 we make this as a coin operated game. Now, clearly 0:12:20.240 --> 0:12:22.599 we can't do the same thing that Space War is 0:12:22.640 --> 0:12:27.120 doing because having a mainframe computer not something you can 0:12:27.200 --> 0:12:30.079 install in your local bar. Yea. So we have to 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:33.080 figure out how to take this same concept but do 0:12:33.160 --> 0:12:35.200 it in a much smaller form factor that could be 0:12:35.240 --> 0:12:37.680 a coin operated game. Yeah, And that turned out to 0:12:37.720 --> 0:12:41.640 be sort of a recurring UM thing in Bushnell's career 0:12:41.840 --> 0:12:45.360 was this guy did something really neat. Let me sort 0:12:45.400 --> 0:12:48.920 of make a very similar version, but in a much 0:12:48.960 --> 0:12:53.400 like sleeker package that's consumer oriented. Yeah. I read a 0:12:53.480 --> 0:12:57.199 transcript of an interview that UM that Ted Dabney did. 0:12:57.440 --> 0:12:59.920 I read a lot of that actually Yeah, it's fascinating. 0:12:59.640 --> 0:13:02.200 I mean there's clearly some bad blood between the two 0:13:02.280 --> 0:13:06.040 of them. But Dabney talked about how what would happen 0:13:06.080 --> 0:13:08.480 is Bushnell would come up to him and say, I 0:13:08.520 --> 0:13:11.560 want to do this. How is that possible? Dabney would 0:13:11.600 --> 0:13:13.800 figure it out, tell him, and then Bushnell would go 0:13:13.800 --> 0:13:17.760 off and do it. So Bushnell had skills, but Dabney 0:13:17.920 --> 0:13:20.640 always dismissed it as saying he wasn't an engineer. He 0:13:20.679 --> 0:13:22.920 could do something if you told him how to do it, 0:13:22.960 --> 0:13:26.600 but he couldn't engineer it himself. Yeah, he he was. 0:13:27.760 --> 0:13:30.200 He's sort of like a producer almost, Yeah, and really 0:13:30.200 --> 0:13:34.319 get at getting super talented people together to create a vision. Yeah, 0:13:34.440 --> 0:13:36.800 sort of like you could think of other pairings that 0:13:36.920 --> 0:13:40.480 this this applies to, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 0:13:40.600 --> 0:13:43.760 who will come up later, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates. 0:13:43.800 --> 0:13:46.640 I mean, there are a lot of Ben and Jerry, 0:13:46.960 --> 0:13:50.000 uh Itchy and Scratchy. We can just keep throwing out 0:13:50.040 --> 0:13:52.520 pair of names out there. Uh So, yeah, it was 0:13:53.280 --> 0:13:57.160 it wasn't. It was the beginning of a partnership that 0:13:57.200 --> 0:14:02.520 would end up launching this arc caid industry idea. Yeah, 0:14:02.760 --> 0:14:05.600 so they got together and they they said, well, let's 0:14:05.720 --> 0:14:08.880 sort of copy that game in a in a cabinet version. 0:14:10.160 --> 0:14:11.720 But we don't really have the money to fund this, 0:14:11.760 --> 0:14:13.960 so they took it to a few different people. Finally 0:14:14.040 --> 0:14:17.480 landed at a place called Nutting Associates, who agreed to 0:14:17.559 --> 0:14:22.480 finance a game, which was really the very first arcade 0:14:22.520 --> 0:14:26.000 game called Computer Space. Yep, yep. They got a programmer 0:14:26.000 --> 0:14:28.160 by the name of Larry Brian to come on board. 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:31.600 Larry Brian had also worked at Ampex. Uh. They formed 0:14:31.680 --> 0:14:35.800 a company that they originally called Scissor G. Yeah. They 0:14:35.840 --> 0:14:38.200 just said the name kind of sounded and look cool. Yeah, which, 0:14:38.240 --> 0:14:40.120 by the way, if you if you don't know how 0:14:40.120 --> 0:14:42.880 to spell it, it's it's of course one of those 0:14:43.080 --> 0:14:45.360 uh spelling B words. It's s y z y g 0:14:45.680 --> 0:14:50.000 y and it refers to the planetary alignment and things 0:14:50.000 --> 0:14:52.240 come into alignment there in sissy G. I didn't even 0:14:52.280 --> 0:14:53.760 know that. Oh yeah, that real meaning. It was one 0:14:53.760 --> 0:14:56.560 of my my father's one of my father's favorite words, 0:14:56.600 --> 0:14:59.360 no joke. Uh, so I was instilled in my brain 0:14:59.400 --> 0:15:01.960 at an early age. Uh. They come up with this name, 0:15:02.000 --> 0:15:05.200 which they wouldn't stick with for reasons. We'll get to Uh. 0:15:05.240 --> 0:15:07.760 They thought about using a computer called the Data General 0:15:07.800 --> 0:15:11.080 Nova eight hundred, but it's pretty expensive and it still 0:15:11.200 --> 0:15:14.880 wasn't really going to fit their needs, so they weren't 0:15:14.880 --> 0:15:17.720 really sure how they were going to do this. Originally, 0:15:18.120 --> 0:15:20.880 the idea was that all three of the initial founding 0:15:20.920 --> 0:15:24.400 members Dabney, Bushnell, and Brian were going to contribute a 0:15:24.480 --> 0:15:28.280 hundred dollars into a group fund to be like the 0:15:28.320 --> 0:15:33.600 owner operating capital. Only Dabney and Bushnell did. Brian never did. 0:15:33.680 --> 0:15:35.720 So do you know why did he? Was it because 0:15:35.720 --> 0:15:38.600 he didn't want to throw I don't know, I I 0:15:38.760 --> 0:15:40.680 never came across. It was just a lot of matter 0:15:40.720 --> 0:15:44.680 of fact of Brian never put his under. It's just 0:15:44.800 --> 0:15:50.600 never an explanation. Yeah, And so eventually both Bushnell and 0:15:50.600 --> 0:15:52.680 and uh Damney would put in an extra two hundred 0:15:52.680 --> 0:15:54.520 and fiftyes, so that brought the owner's equity up to 0:15:54.560 --> 0:15:59.960 a incredible seven hundred dollars princely some for this company. Uh, 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:04.320 like you were saying, Chuck. They went to Nutting to say, like, uh, 0:16:04.360 --> 0:16:07.680 maybe you can help us by manufacturing this thing. We'll 0:16:07.720 --> 0:16:10.600 retain the rights to the game, you'll be able to 0:16:10.640 --> 0:16:13.560 manufacture it and sell it, but we get royalties for 0:16:13.640 --> 0:16:16.240 it as well, and it's the next big thing. Yeah, 0:16:16.280 --> 0:16:19.200 they convinced Nutting that it's the next big thing. So 0:16:19.280 --> 0:16:23.120 Nutting Associates has no clue about this stuff. They essentially 0:16:23.160 --> 0:16:26.000 give them the space to do whatever they want to do, 0:16:26.720 --> 0:16:29.520 thinking like, all right, well we we can't do this ourselves. 0:16:29.560 --> 0:16:31.600 We're gonna let this group do this. And if it 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:34.280 pays off, it's huge. We'll be making lots of money. 0:16:34.280 --> 0:16:37.040 And if it doesn't, well it will just call it 0:16:37.080 --> 0:16:40.840 a loss. So the agreement included a five percent royalty 0:16:40.840 --> 0:16:43.840 on unit sales, so that's what the group would get 0:16:44.360 --> 0:16:48.880 um and the units were relatively inexpensive. They were like 0:16:48.920 --> 0:16:52.240 a thousand dollars, which in today's money is about six 0:16:52.320 --> 0:16:55.920 grand a piece. But it was it was not for 0:16:55.960 --> 0:16:59.440 the home consumer. It was this, yeah exactly. This would 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:02.640 be like a restaurant, you know that's or maybe a 0:17:02.720 --> 0:17:06.320 bowling alley something like that. Uh. But remember there's no 0:17:06.480 --> 0:17:08.800 market for these yet. Yeah, no one knows because they 0:17:08.800 --> 0:17:11.840 didn't exist. It's just crazy to think about. No one 0:17:11.920 --> 0:17:13.720 knew if it was going to work at all, and 0:17:13.760 --> 0:17:15.679 it sort of didn't sort of didn't It wasn't a 0:17:15.720 --> 0:17:17.919 big success for them at all, right, Right, And the 0:17:18.040 --> 0:17:21.280 one of the problems was that this game that was 0:17:21.320 --> 0:17:24.520 based off Space War, just like Space War, was kind 0:17:24.560 --> 0:17:29.520 of complicated. It was a game built by engineers for engineers. 0:17:30.640 --> 0:17:32.600 So you see like all these buttons and dials and stuff, 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:35.280 and you think, all right, uh, this does not appear 0:17:35.320 --> 0:17:38.000 to be intuitive in any way. No one really understood 0:17:38.040 --> 0:17:41.280 how to play it. It looked a little like Asteroids. Yeah, um, 0:17:41.320 --> 0:17:43.520 as far as just the look of the game, yeah, 0:17:43.640 --> 0:17:45.600 And it's one of those that when you look at 0:17:45.720 --> 0:17:48.240 you think, uh, you know, I I don't even know 0:17:48.359 --> 0:17:51.439 what it is, like how I control the things, nor 0:17:51.520 --> 0:17:53.960 do I know what I'm supposed to do. So it 0:17:54.040 --> 0:17:57.960 had some limited success, but it wasn't a runaway hit. 0:17:58.040 --> 0:18:02.879 It just wasn't that simplistic experience that the average person 0:18:02.960 --> 0:18:06.440 could immediately identify. Well yeah, plus it was I mean, 0:18:07.119 --> 0:18:09.480 I mean people are used to seeing a pinball machine, maybe, 0:18:09.840 --> 0:18:12.560 but if you look up this thing online, there's all 0:18:12.560 --> 0:18:15.440 of a sudden it seems there. You know, arcade games 0:18:15.440 --> 0:18:19.760 to us, now there were so ubiquitous, the game cabinet itself, 0:18:19.760 --> 0:18:21.400 but when you look at this thing at the time, 0:18:21.440 --> 0:18:23.320 no one knew what the heck it was. Right, there 0:18:23.359 --> 0:18:28.679 was this weird looking yellow pod with a TV screen 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:31.119 in it in the corner, and I have no idea 0:18:31.240 --> 0:18:33.320 with all the this little game pad on the front 0:18:33.320 --> 0:18:35.119 of it, and what am I even supposed to do 0:18:35.119 --> 0:18:36.840 with that on my way to the bathroom. I mean, 0:18:36.840 --> 0:18:40.280 the whole thing wouldn't have even been possible except for 0:18:40.320 --> 0:18:42.840 the fact that Dabney made a breakthrough while he was 0:18:42.920 --> 0:18:46.280 he was tooling around in his home. According to the 0:18:46.320 --> 0:18:49.720 interviews I've seen, in his daughter's bedroom, he used that 0:18:49.760 --> 0:18:52.760 as his work space. He moved one of his daughters 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:54.879 in with the other. He had two daughters. He's like, 0:18:55.080 --> 0:18:57.960 I need your room. This is going to be my lab. 0:18:58.800 --> 0:19:01.840 And uh. He started playing with cathode ray to video 0:19:01.920 --> 0:19:06.120 screens without the use of a computer as as an input, 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:10.960 and he used counters and gates basic electronic components to 0:19:11.080 --> 0:19:14.639 manipulate that CRT display to create the images on a 0:19:14.680 --> 0:19:19.520 screen that you can control by changing the values directly. So, uh, 0:19:19.720 --> 0:19:23.720 think of you know, you remember the tracking on a 0:19:23.760 --> 0:19:25.720 TV when the screen would be rolling and you have 0:19:25.760 --> 0:19:28.840 to adjust the tracking snature. Because we're old, we remember 0:19:28.920 --> 0:19:32.000 this stuff. That was the basis of him being able 0:19:32.000 --> 0:19:35.520 to control vertical movement on the screen. He just essentially 0:19:35.840 --> 0:19:38.680 he manufactured a way of doing that where by using 0:19:38.680 --> 0:19:42.520 a control you could change the the input into the 0:19:42.560 --> 0:19:46.240 television and make that vertical movement possible. For horizontal, we 0:19:46.240 --> 0:19:49.600 had to change voltages in a really interesting way so 0:19:49.640 --> 0:19:51.719 that you could get horizontal movement. Otherwise you would only 0:19:51.720 --> 0:19:53.399 be able to move up and down. Now, was that 0:19:53.440 --> 0:19:56.439 the spot in motion circuit? Yes, okay, and that changed 0:19:56.520 --> 0:20:00.600 everything because this meant for the first time that well, 0:20:00.680 --> 0:20:04.080 not I, he could create a game that didn't need 0:20:04.200 --> 0:20:07.320 a computer attached to it, right, you could do a 0:20:07.400 --> 0:20:10.359 home version of this game, yes, exactly, and then everything 0:20:10.400 --> 0:20:12.240 that you would need for the game you could build 0:20:12.280 --> 0:20:15.399 onto the circuit. And that meant that every circuit for 0:20:15.480 --> 0:20:19.080 every game was unique, right, Like like one, if you 0:20:19.080 --> 0:20:23.480 look at two different arcade games from this era, the 0:20:23.520 --> 0:20:26.840 game is all hardwired on the circuit try and those 0:20:26.880 --> 0:20:30.080 circuit boards are going to look different because it's those 0:20:30.119 --> 0:20:34.800 physical components that create the assets of each game. Which 0:20:34.840 --> 0:20:36.680 is kind of cool to think about because these days 0:20:37.000 --> 0:20:39.680 we're used to the general purpose machine, right, the computer, 0:20:40.240 --> 0:20:43.000 and then everything else is controlled on the software. Side. 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:47.120 But this was all hardware, which you know for such 0:20:47.160 --> 0:20:50.120 in every game was a little different from the next two. Yeah. Yeah, 0:20:50.200 --> 0:20:52.200 and you look at it you think like, well, you know, 0:20:52.280 --> 0:20:55.960 there could even be production errors and that that could 0:20:55.960 --> 0:20:59.479 create weird glitches that are only for that unit of 0:20:59.480 --> 0:21:02.400 the game. It's not like a game shipped with glitches 0:21:02.440 --> 0:21:06.080 would be that many. Maybe some solder wasn't complete and 0:21:06.119 --> 0:21:09.119 so something in the game's not working properly. So it 0:21:09.200 --> 0:21:12.800 made it more like those early Arcaden machines were really 0:21:12.880 --> 0:21:16.760 more like pinball games than they were like the modern games. 0:21:17.320 --> 0:21:19.440 We'll be back with more of the rise and fall 0:21:19.440 --> 0:21:30.240 of Atari. After these messages, we get to August of 0:21:30.320 --> 0:21:32.879 nineteen seventy one. That's when the team had produced the 0:21:32.920 --> 0:21:35.480 test unit of their game, which was, as you were saying, 0:21:35.520 --> 0:21:38.680 called computer Space, and they set it up in a 0:21:38.400 --> 0:21:44.400 in a restaurant and bar called Dutch Goose in Palo Alto, California. 0:21:45.280 --> 0:21:48.560 What they officially debut the game at the nineteen seventy 0:21:48.560 --> 0:21:52.639 one Music and Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago, and by 0:21:52.640 --> 0:21:55.040 the end of nineteen seventy one they begin to ship 0:21:55.080 --> 0:21:56.800 the game. So that first game was just sort of 0:21:56.840 --> 0:21:59.119 a test run to see if they could get it 0:21:59.200 --> 0:22:01.560 to to look it doesn't do great business because it 0:22:01.720 --> 0:22:06.639