Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and we are about
Speaker 1: to launch into a series of three classic episodes. So
Speaker 1: for the next couple of weeks, we're gonna have these
Speaker 1: classics play out. These were episodes that I recorded and
Speaker 1: published the week of March second, two thousand fifteen, so
Speaker 1: quite some time ago. Ties into some stuff that I've
Speaker 1: touched on in some other episodes recently, Like I talked
Speaker 1: about the video game crash in Ree, We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the Rise and Fall of Atari. Now, this was
Speaker 1: a three part series that I did have a special
Speaker 1: guest on these shows, so I hope you enjoy that.
Speaker 1: But let's listen to the Rise and Fall of Atari,
Speaker 1: Part one, which published March second, two thousand fifteen. Enjoy. Hi, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: since you asked, I do have a suggestion for a
Speaker 1: topic to cover that I don't think you have yet.
Speaker 1: Could you do an episode or two if needed to
Speaker 1: cover the rise and fall of Atari. Actually worked in
Speaker 1: the store that sold only Atari home computers and game
Speaker 1: systems in the early nineties. Uh Atari's products are at
Speaker 1: the time were as good or better than what was
Speaker 1: being put out by their competitors, and yet they failed
Speaker 1: big time. Thank you for the entertaining and educational show.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed part one of the two thousand fourteen review
Speaker 1: this morning. So clearly this request came in some time ago,
Speaker 1: I guess so. But yeah, this was one that when
Speaker 1: I brought it up to you, you said, absolutely we
Speaker 1: should do an episode about Atari. Well, you and I
Speaker 1: are the same age roughly, and we are children of
Speaker 1: Atari every way, you know, we grew up in the
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties during the Atari's heyday. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: was huge, huge in my life. And uh my brother
Speaker 1: actually uh has set his up recently and I was
Speaker 1: just playing uh Combat last week. That Combat and we'll
Speaker 1: get to this obviously was the game that shipped with
Speaker 1: and it kind of holds up. You know what it
Speaker 1: really does. I it's it's an incredibly simple game and
Speaker 1: has incredibly simple graphics, but it's the playability comes in
Speaker 1: the fact that it's a two player game and uh,
Speaker 1: trash talking galore can happen. We had a blast. It
Speaker 1: really was a lot of fun, and not just for nostalgia.
Speaker 1: The gameplay, like you said, still holds up to a
Speaker 1: certain degree. I think, yeah, yeah. I mean it's obviously
Speaker 1: for someone who's like, no, I need to have you know,
Speaker 1: the fourteen different controls mapped out on my keyboard and
Speaker 1: my my gaming mouse and everything, it's not gonna appeal
Speaker 1: to you. But but it's still a compelling experience. So
Speaker 1: we wanted to go through the rise and fall of Atari,
Speaker 1: and it is an epic story. I mean, it has
Speaker 1: so many different elements to it, and it's at least
Speaker 1: gonna be two episodes. We're gonna see how how far
Speaker 1: we can go before we have to take a break
Speaker 1: and replenish our our, our vital bodily fluids before we
Speaker 1: break out. Exactly. Good good reference there, Mr Chuck. So,
Speaker 1: starting off a little little information before we get into
Speaker 1: the actual Attari days. Computer games have been around pretty
Speaker 1: much since the days that computers were first built. You know,
Speaker 1: you you have computer programmers who often had these analytical
Speaker 1: minds that were also fond of things like puzzles and games,
Speaker 1: and so naturally, when those early computer programs were being designed,
Speaker 1: programmers were thinking, huh, I wonder if I could actually
Speaker 1: make this machine do something fun, not just something functional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the things you probably heard
Speaker 1: a lot in the early days. But well, maybe they'd
Speaker 1: be fun if dot dot dot and before you know what,
Speaker 1: they were playing some you know, to us an archaic
Speaker 1: form of a video Yeah, maybe like a game version
Speaker 1: of like Tic Tac toe, you know, but instead of
Speaker 1: it having a video screen, because video screens were late
Speaker 1: in the game in the computer days, they would print
Speaker 1: this stuff out like you would have maybe a tape printer,
Speaker 1: and it would print each move, so every time something changed,
Speaker 1: it had to print a new piece of paper to
Speaker 1: look at or a new strip of tape. Really, because
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, his name's Richard Garriot, and he's
Speaker 1: a big game developer. He created one of the big
Speaker 1: computer game successes and then in the eighties and nineties
Speaker 1: called Ultima, and he talks about in his days when
Speaker 1: he was in computer programming classes in high school, it
Speaker 1: was all printed to tape and it was like a
Speaker 1: little adventure game and we'll talk about adventure in a
Speaker 1: bit too, where it would print out the room and
Speaker 1: your little position, like you'd be a little X in
Speaker 1: the room and you'd say, go left. It would to
Speaker 1: print a new version of it where the X was
Speaker 1: just slightly to the left. In the pre eco friendly
Speaker 1: days as well, these days such a game would probably
Speaker 1: be frowned upon. So uh, but you know, it sets
Speaker 1: the stage to show that that people realize there was
Speaker 1: potential or electronics in the game world. And that gets
Speaker 1: us up to ninety eight when a man named William
Speaker 1: Higginbotham of Brookhaven National Laboratory developed an electronic game called
Speaker 1: Tennis for two on a Donner Model thirty analog computer.
Speaker 1: And uh, it would simulate table tennis, and it simulated
Speaker 1: velocity and changes in direction, all this kind of stuff. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I looked it up just to see what it looked like.
Speaker 1: It looked like sort of like a like a ship's
Speaker 1: sonar or something. Yeah, exactly. It was taking an oscill lator,
Speaker 1: I mean, the same sort of thing that you might
Speaker 1: see as like a heart monitor in hospital, kind of
Speaker 1: kind of like that. And by you change by fiddling
Speaker 1: with the voltage, essentially he could change the different images
Speaker 1: so that you would have essentially to paddle like things
Speaker 1: and the ball like thing and play a very basic game.
Speaker 1: And he said that he had made it because people
Speaker 1: would come to visit the lab and there wasn't a
Speaker 1: whole lot of stuff that was actually interesting to look
Speaker 1: at the bar, and so this was the way to
Speaker 1: entertain them. That's pretty funny to like to impress people.
Speaker 1: He had stuff that was far more advanced, but he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: but look at this tennis for two and people probably, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly like hisn't cutting edge. So have you ever seen
Speaker 1: the mel Brooks films Silent Movie? All right? In Silent Movie,
Speaker 1: there's actually a scene where Sid caesar Is is in
Speaker 1: the hospital and his character is in the hospital and
Speaker 1: to uh, Dom Deloise and Marty Feldman who walk up
Speaker 1: to his heart monitor and turn it into this game
Speaker 1: and they play a game of Pong on his heart monitor,
Speaker 1: which totally forgot about causes him to totally freak out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's this game which is interesting because the original
Speaker 1: well we'll get into pong, but the original pongs were silent. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's actually true. And in nineteen sixty two, that's when
Speaker 1: we get up to the time when m i T.
Speaker 1: Professor Steve Russell developed a game called Space War, which
Speaker 1: is one of the earliest video games. He did this
Speaker 1: with two of his students, and they built it for
Speaker 1: a big mainframe computer. Yeah. It was the only way
Speaker 1: they could really at the time exactly. So if you
Speaker 1: wanted to play a computer game, you had to go
Speaker 1: someplace where essentially a room is dedicated to that computer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They were largely still using vacuum tubes for a lot
Speaker 1: of this technology. I mean, transistors had had started to
Speaker 1: come out, but they hadn't been integrated into computers deeply
Speaker 1: at this point. Uh. And that's when around this times
Speaker 1: when an electrical engineering student named Nolan Bushnell, the probably
Speaker 1: the most important person in this story, that's when he
Speaker 1: discovered space war because the computer lab at the university
Speaker 1: was going to the University of Utah College of Engineering,
Speaker 1: had Space War on one of its computers. Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: I saw an interview with him earlier today on YouTube
Speaker 1: where he was talking about at the time. He said
Speaker 1: there were only like four universities in the entire country
Speaker 1: that had graphical displays period, and University of Utah just
Speaker 1: happened to be one of them. And it seemed like
Speaker 1: when you start hearing about the story and how it
Speaker 1: all just fell into place, it's I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'm a believer in fate, but all these little puzzle
Speaker 1: pieces came together in just the right way to get
Speaker 1: his motor running. Basically, if if they hadn't, if any
Speaker 1: of the elements that took place, then the whole arcade
Speaker 1: industry could have been delayed by several years if he
Speaker 1: had just gone to a different university that didn't have
Speaker 1: computer screens. Right, Yeah, because the University of Utah was
Speaker 1: a pioneer in that space, and so he really got
Speaker 1: his introduction to it. Uh. Another interesting thing about him
Speaker 1: is that he would work in his off time, like
Speaker 1: when whenever school was out at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a huge deal because that inspired the thought of,
Speaker 1: you know what, people are shoving quarters in the ski
Speaker 1: ball games and pinball and you know all manner of
Speaker 1: sort of boardwalk arcade games. And he obviously had some
Speaker 1: sort of business sense to him because he thought, why
Speaker 1: not try and do this really fun thing that I've
Speaker 1: been sneaking into the lab and doing every night and
Speaker 1: charge people money for it? Right? What if we were
Speaker 1: to create an experience using an electronic game where on
Speaker 1: a per coin basis you would get either an allotted
Speaker 1: amount of time to play or some other metric like
Speaker 1: in pong. It might be the number of lives. In
Speaker 1: most video games as number of lives, but in a
Speaker 1: few it's time. Um. And that that would determine how
Speaker 1: much of that experience you could have before you had
Speaker 1: to plunk in another quarter. And if I find it
Speaker 1: so compelling that I'll sneak into the to the lab,
Speaker 1: people be willing to pay a quarter for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a stroke of genius. It was absolutely, I
Speaker 1: mean you. There are a lot of criticisms that are
Speaker 1: leveled against Bushnell and Cord, including people who used to
Speaker 1: work with him. Um. And a lot of people claim, well,
Speaker 1: he never invented anything. I have to object to that
Speaker 1: because he took two separate ideas and turned them into
Speaker 1: something that spawned an entire industry. And if that's not invention,
Speaker 1: I don't know what is. Yeah. And whether or not
Speaker 1: he was um, I guess it wasn't coding, but whether
Speaker 1: or not he was soldering the games and inventing the
Speaker 1: games themselves. Those games are worthless unless someone comes along
Speaker 1: and says, you know what, I know how to package
Speaker 1: this right and take it to the public for them
Speaker 1: to enjoy, right, And so I mean so without this
Speaker 1: this vision again, I'm sure we would have eventually come
Speaker 1: around to the arcade industry. Anyway, someone would have come
Speaker 1: up with that idea, but it would have been later
Speaker 1: and the story might have been much different. So Bushnell
Speaker 1: graduates from college and goes to work for a company
Speaker 1: called Ampex. This is around nineteen sixty nine. Ampex is
Speaker 1: an electronics company, and I got a little bit of
Speaker 1: trivia something I thought you would appreciate, Chuck, you're a musician.
Speaker 1: So Ampex developed a tape recorder that less Paul used
Speaker 1: to pioneer the sound on sound technique. Yeah. Less Paul
Speaker 1: used an Ampex tape recorder which was designed to have
Speaker 1: a secondary writing head that would allow him to record
Speaker 1: a track and then play along with that recorded track
Speaker 1: to create a new mixed track of both of them together.
Speaker 1: So this would allow one musician to essentially back him
Speaker 1: or herself up. However, what it did do also is
Speaker 1: destroy the original track, the original recording, because it records
Speaker 1: over it, so you no longer have that, so you
Speaker 1: have plus yes, and that's the new base. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is kind of cool. I thought that you would appreciate that.
Speaker 1: So I am tex. Ampex has had a real important
Speaker 1: part in the electronics industry in general. But it also
Speaker 1: plays host to the meeting of the two people who
Speaker 1: would really push Atari in the early days. That's uh
Speaker 1: Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Yeah, and Dabney they met
Speaker 1: in nineteen nine and like you said, both employees of
Speaker 1: Ampex and both um very much interested in uh pioneering
Speaker 1: Space War as the very first video game. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were looking at Space War and they thought, how can
Speaker 1: we make this as a coin operated game. Now, clearly
Speaker 1: we can't do the same thing that Space War is
Speaker 1: doing because having a mainframe computer not something you can
Speaker 1: install in your local bar. Yea. So we have to
Speaker 1: figure out how to take this same concept but do
Speaker 1: it in a much smaller form factor that could be
Speaker 1: a coin operated game. Yeah, And that turned out to
Speaker 1: be sort of a recurring UM thing in Bushnell's career
Speaker 1: was this guy did something really neat. Let me sort
Speaker 1: of make a very similar version, but in a much
Speaker 1: like sleeker package that's consumer oriented. Yeah. I read a
Speaker 1: transcript of an interview that UM that Ted Dabney did.
Speaker 1: I read a lot of that actually Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: I mean there's clearly some bad blood between the two
Speaker 1: of them. But Dabney talked about how what would happen
Speaker 1: is Bushnell would come up to him and say, I
Speaker 1: want to do this. How is that possible? Dabney would
Speaker 1: figure it out, tell him, and then Bushnell would go
Speaker 1: off and do it. So Bushnell had skills, but Dabney
Speaker 1: always dismissed it as saying he wasn't an engineer. He
Speaker 1: could do something if you told him how to do it,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't engineer it himself. Yeah, he he was.
Speaker 1: He's sort of like a producer almost, Yeah, and really
Speaker 1: get at getting super talented people together to create a vision. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of like you could think of other pairings that
Speaker 1: this this applies to, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,
Speaker 1: who will come up later, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are a lot of Ben and Jerry,
Speaker 1: uh Itchy and Scratchy. We can just keep throwing out
Speaker 1: pair of names out there. Uh So, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It was the beginning of a partnership that
Speaker 1: would end up launching this arc caid industry idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they got together and they they said, well, let's
Speaker 1: sort of copy that game in a in a cabinet version.
Speaker 1: But we don't really have the money to fund this,
Speaker 1: so they took it to a few different people. Finally
Speaker 1: landed at a place called Nutting Associates, who agreed to
Speaker 1: finance a game, which was really the very first arcade
Speaker 1: game called Computer Space. Yep, yep. They got a programmer
Speaker 1: by the name of Larry Brian to come on board.
Speaker 1: Larry Brian had also worked at Ampex. Uh. They formed
Speaker 1: a company that they originally called Scissor G. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: just said the name kind of sounded and look cool. Yeah, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you if you don't know how
Speaker 1: to spell it, it's it's of course one of those
Speaker 1: uh spelling B words. It's s y z y g
Speaker 1: y and it refers to the planetary alignment and things
Speaker 1: come into alignment there in sissy G. I didn't even
Speaker 1: know that. Oh yeah, that real meaning. It was one
Speaker 1: of my my father's one of my father's favorite words,
Speaker 1: no joke. Uh, so I was instilled in my brain
Speaker 1: at an early age. Uh. They come up with this name,
Speaker 1: which they wouldn't stick with for reasons. We'll get to Uh.
Speaker 1: They thought about using a computer called the Data General
Speaker 1: Nova eight hundred, but it's pretty expensive and it still
Speaker 1: wasn't really going to fit their needs, so they weren't
Speaker 1: really sure how they were going to do this. Originally,
Speaker 1: the idea was that all three of the initial founding
Speaker 1: members Dabney, Bushnell, and Brian were going to contribute a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars into a group fund to be like the
Speaker 1: owner operating capital. Only Dabney and Bushnell did. Brian never did.
Speaker 1: So do you know why did he? Was it because
Speaker 1: he didn't want to throw I don't know, I I
Speaker 1: never came across. It was just a lot of matter
Speaker 1: of fact of Brian never put his under. It's just
Speaker 1: never an explanation. Yeah, And so eventually both Bushnell and
Speaker 1: and uh Damney would put in an extra two hundred
Speaker 1: and fiftyes, so that brought the owner's equity up to
Speaker 1: a incredible seven hundred dollars princely some for this company. Uh,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, Chuck. They went to Nutting to say, like, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe you can help us by manufacturing this thing. We'll
Speaker 1: retain the rights to the game, you'll be able to
Speaker 1: manufacture it and sell it, but we get royalties for
Speaker 1: it as well, and it's the next big thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they convinced Nutting that it's the next big thing. So
Speaker 1: Nutting Associates has no clue about this stuff. They essentially
Speaker 1: give them the space to do whatever they want to do,
Speaker 1: thinking like, all right, well we we can't do this ourselves.
Speaker 1: We're gonna let this group do this. And if it
Speaker 1: pays off, it's huge. We'll be making lots of money.
Speaker 1: And if it doesn't, well it will just call it
Speaker 1: a loss. So the agreement included a five percent royalty
Speaker 1: on unit sales, so that's what the group would get
Speaker 1: um and the units were relatively inexpensive. They were like
Speaker 1: a thousand dollars, which in today's money is about six
Speaker 1: grand a piece. But it was it was not for
Speaker 1: the home consumer. It was this, yeah exactly. This would
Speaker 1: be like a restaurant, you know that's or maybe a
Speaker 1: bowling alley something like that. Uh. But remember there's no
Speaker 1: market for these yet. Yeah, no one knows because they
Speaker 1: didn't exist. It's just crazy to think about. No one
Speaker 1: knew if it was going to work at all, and
Speaker 1: it sort of didn't sort of didn't It wasn't a
Speaker 1: big success for them at all, right, Right, And the
Speaker 1: one of the problems was that this game that was
Speaker 1: based off Space War, just like Space War, was kind
Speaker 1: of complicated. It was a game built by engineers for engineers.
Speaker 1: So you see like all these buttons and dials and stuff,
Speaker 1: and you think, all right, uh, this does not appear
Speaker 1: to be intuitive in any way. No one really understood
Speaker 1: how to play it. It looked a little like Asteroids. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: as far as just the look of the game, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's one of those that when you look at
Speaker 1: you think, uh, you know, I I don't even know
Speaker 1: what it is, like how I control the things, nor
Speaker 1: do I know what I'm supposed to do. So it
Speaker 1: had some limited success, but it wasn't a runaway hit.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't that simplistic experience that the average person
Speaker 1: could immediately identify. Well yeah, plus it was I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean people are used to seeing a pinball machine, maybe,
Speaker 1: but if you look up this thing online, there's all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it seems there. You know, arcade games
Speaker 1: to us, now there were so ubiquitous, the game cabinet itself,
Speaker 1: but when you look at this thing at the time,
Speaker 1: no one knew what the heck it was. Right, there
Speaker 1: was this weird looking yellow pod with a TV screen
Speaker 1: in it in the corner, and I have no idea
Speaker 1: with all the this little game pad on the front
Speaker 1: of it, and what am I even supposed to do
Speaker 1: with that on my way to the bathroom. I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole thing wouldn't have even been possible except for
Speaker 1: the fact that Dabney made a breakthrough while he was
Speaker 1: he was tooling around in his home. According to the
Speaker 1: interviews I've seen, in his daughter's bedroom, he used that
Speaker 1: as his work space. He moved one of his daughters
Speaker 1: in with the other. He had two daughters. He's like,
Speaker 1: I need your room. This is going to be my lab.
Speaker 1: And uh. He started playing with cathode ray to video
Speaker 1: screens without the use of a computer as as an input,
Speaker 1: and he used counters and gates basic electronic components to
Speaker 1: manipulate that CRT display to create the images on a
Speaker 1: screen that you can control by changing the values directly. So, uh,
Speaker 1: think of you know, you remember the tracking on a
Speaker 1: TV when the screen would be rolling and you have
Speaker 1: to adjust the tracking snature. Because we're old, we remember
Speaker 1: this stuff. That was the basis of him being able
Speaker 1: to control vertical movement on the screen. He just essentially
Speaker 1: he manufactured a way of doing that where by using
Speaker 1: a control you could change the the input into the
Speaker 1: television and make that vertical movement possible. For horizontal, we
Speaker 1: had to change voltages in a really interesting way so
Speaker 1: that you could get horizontal movement. Otherwise you would only
Speaker 1: be able to move up and down. Now, was that
Speaker 1: the spot in motion circuit? Yes, okay, and that changed
Speaker 1: everything because this meant for the first time that well,
Speaker 1: not I, he could create a game that didn't need
Speaker 1: a computer attached to it, right, you could do a
Speaker 1: home version of this game, yes, exactly, and then everything
Speaker 1: that you would need for the game you could build
Speaker 1: onto the circuit. And that meant that every circuit for
Speaker 1: every game was unique, right, Like like one, if you
Speaker 1: look at two different arcade games from this era, the
Speaker 1: game is all hardwired on the circuit try and those
Speaker 1: circuit boards are going to look different because it's those
Speaker 1: physical components that create the assets of each game. Which
Speaker 1: is kind of cool to think about because these days
Speaker 1: we're used to the general purpose machine, right, the computer,
Speaker 1: and then everything else is controlled on the software. Side.
Speaker 1: But this was all hardware, which you know for such
Speaker 1: in every game was a little different from the next two. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you look at it you think like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: there could even be production errors and that that could
Speaker 1: create weird glitches that are only for that unit of
Speaker 1: the game. It's not like a game shipped with glitches
Speaker 1: would be that many. Maybe some solder wasn't complete and
Speaker 1: so something in the game's not working properly. So it
Speaker 1: made it more like those early Arcaden machines were really
Speaker 1: more like pinball games than they were like the modern games.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more of the rise and fall
Speaker 1: of Atari. After these messages, we get to August of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one. That's when the team had produced the
Speaker 1: test unit of their game, which was, as you were saying,
Speaker 1: called computer Space, and they set it up in a
Speaker 1: in a restaurant and bar called Dutch Goose in Palo Alto, California.
Speaker 1: What they officially debut the game at the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one Music and Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago, and by
Speaker 1: the end of nineteen seventy one they begin to ship
Speaker 1: the game. So that first game was just sort of
Speaker 1: a test run to see if they could get it
Speaker 1: to to look it doesn't do great business because it
Speaker 1: was units total sold um, but it was enough money
Speaker 1: um for for Dabney and Bushnell to sort of continue
Speaker 1: to fund their company. Right. They decided at that point
Speaker 1: that they wanted to incorporate Sissy g And then they
Speaker 1: had a speed bump because they realized I found out
Speaker 1: there was already another company using the name sissy Gy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Apparently it was a little candle company in Mendocino, California,
Speaker 1: like some hippies, So that that put their plans on
Speaker 1: pause as they had to rethink the name. And also
Speaker 1: at that time, in nineteen seventy two, Bushnell would attend
Speaker 1: a meeting that would later come back to haunt him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he attended a meeting that had a presentation of the
Speaker 1: Magna Vox Odyssey, which is a home video game console
Speaker 1: that featured very several silent games, the most notable one
Speaker 1: being a table tennis game. Yeah, and who was it was?
Speaker 1: It was a man same bear was the head of
Speaker 1: Magna Box at the time. He advented I think called
Speaker 1: the Brown Box, which was later changed to the Magnavox Odyssey.
Speaker 1: And like you said, I think a lesson to be
Speaker 1: learned here has never signed the guest book, right, because
Speaker 1: Bushnell um signed the guest book as an attendee. And
Speaker 1: these before they took the Odyssey to market, they had
Speaker 1: these very special small batch screenings for invitees only, and
Speaker 1: which wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do either. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they did have a patent on it, it would
Speaker 1: allow people that chance to maybe we could beat them
Speaker 1: to market by creating exactly similar and that's exactly what
Speaker 1: happened in the case of Bushnell. Yeah, so this was
Speaker 1: like this would come back to haunt him later. And yeah,
Speaker 1: if you are going to go to one of these meetings,
Speaker 1: don't leave a paper trail. That's the lesson there. So
Speaker 1: by June, Bushnell and Damney incorporate as a Tory Incorporated. Yes,
Speaker 1: which the name got came from a Japanese game board
Speaker 1: game called go Ye, which Pushnell was just crazy for.
Speaker 1: And apparently the meaning of it is basically the equivalent
Speaker 1: to I've got you in check. I'm about to take
Speaker 1: all your stones, is what he said, right right, And
Speaker 1: and I think the root word was a taru, which
Speaker 1: means to hit a target and uh, just a cool
Speaker 1: sounding name, like it jumped out at him at the time.
Speaker 1: It's like, I like it, right, And they they create
Speaker 1: some common stock, which collectively would value the company at
Speaker 1: about seventy five thousand dollars, big jump from the seven
Speaker 1: D dollars that they had to the bank at the time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the famous Attari logo. I didn't put this in
Speaker 1: the notes, but it was designed by a gay named
Speaker 1: George Opperman. Now, according to Auberman, the two side pieces,
Speaker 1: like if you look at the Atari logo, it's it's
Speaker 1: got three kind of columns, the two on either side
Speaker 1: sort of slope away. I've always wonder what that was.
Speaker 1: It's a stylized A. So that's one thing. Some people
Speaker 1: call it the Mount Fuji logo because I think looks
Speaker 1: like Mount Fuji. Opperman says. The two side pieces represented
Speaker 1: opposing players in the middle straight section represented the center
Speaker 1: line in pong, which is kind of cool. The whole
Speaker 1: logo was that stylized day and Apperman was the in
Speaker 1: house artist for Atari and created a lot of the
Speaker 1: art that the arcade cabinets were you were sporting. Well,
Speaker 1: it's certainly iconic now, you know, Yeah, you see that
Speaker 1: logo and it just for guy's our age, that just
Speaker 1: really conjures up a lot. Well. Yeah, and he and
Speaker 1: he had a big influence on that early artwork of Atari,
Speaker 1: especially in the arcade world. He would sadly pass away
Speaker 1: in nineteen Yeah, only fifty years old, I think. Um.
Speaker 1: But also in June of that year, Al Alcorn, who
Speaker 1: had worked at Ampex, he joins Atari and he begins
Speaker 1: working on one of Atari's biggest hits, Pong, which is
Speaker 1: odd in a way. It's odd for a couple of reasons,
Speaker 1: the biggest one being no one ever intended Pong to
Speaker 1: be a hit. Yeah. Bushnell at the time was working
Speaker 1: on a driving game. He said that was really hard. Uh,
Speaker 1: driving games still are, I think one of the tougher
Speaker 1: ones to get right to really nail. Yeah, And he
Speaker 1: said he hired Alcorn and was like, well, I just
Speaker 1: wanted to give him a little test to see how
Speaker 1: good he was, because I wasn't gonna throw him on
Speaker 1: this driving game right away up for failure. Can you
Speaker 1: program using this circuit that damn produced, right, And because
Speaker 1: this is this is a whole new thing, like the
Speaker 1: designing games using this circuit that had been pioneered for
Speaker 1: the computer space games. So uh, you know, Alcorn takes
Speaker 1: this concept and he works on on pawing and unlike
Speaker 1: the earlier table tennis electronic games, this one had sound.
Speaker 1: It sounds so silly, but it was a huge difference
Speaker 1: to actually hear that little boom and uh, it had
Speaker 1: a few other noteworthy characteristics to differentiate it that also
Speaker 1: sound a little bit like of course, but it really
Speaker 1: made a big difference. The ball sped up as you
Speaker 1: played the game, which was a huge, huge difference. Um.
Speaker 1: And then you talked about some of these sort of
Speaker 1: happy accidents. One of them occurred with Pong. There was
Speaker 1: that little space at the very top and the bottom
Speaker 1: of the screen where you couldn't block and in other words,
Speaker 1: a game couldn't go on forever. At some point you
Speaker 1: were going to lose it to that corner, right, so
Speaker 1: some at some bounce, it's going to hit that trajectory
Speaker 1: where no matter what, you can't block it. And it
Speaker 1: just it made it more fun. And it was a
Speaker 1: two player games, so again it'll it pitched people against
Speaker 1: each other, just like we were talking about with combat.
Speaker 1: That creates an experience that just invites that kind of
Speaker 1: fun sort of you know, one upsmanship, trash talking sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. Nothing. I don't think anyone was making, you know,
Speaker 1: horrible uh statements like you hear on something like Xbox
Speaker 1: Live because you're in person, next to the next to whomever.
Speaker 1: But it also was a much simpler game. It was
Speaker 1: easy to grasp, the controls were simple. Everyone who saw
Speaker 1: it knew exactly what the gameplay went, so it had
Speaker 1: far greater appeal than something that was much more dense
Speaker 1: like computer space. Yeah. And the name obviously comes from
Speaker 1: Ping pong, but they couldn't call it ping pong, and
Speaker 1: they couldn't call it ping because of the golf clubs,
Speaker 1: and so Pong was just sort of the no brainer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first Pong game was installed in a tavern,
Speaker 1: Andy Taps tavern. Yeah. I look that up to see
Speaker 1: if it's still existed, and I don't think it does. Sad.
Speaker 1: Uh So the original Pong was black and white, had
Speaker 1: a black and white television for a screen, and people
Speaker 1: would come in and play even if they weren't planning
Speaker 1: on buying anything to eat or drink. It became a
Speaker 1: destination game. Yeah, to the point where I read that
Speaker 1: early in the game's life, they got a call saying, hey,
Speaker 1: the game's not working. You need to come out here
Speaker 1: in service its like amount to find out what was wrong.
Speaker 1: And what was wrong was that they were using an
Speaker 1: old milk jug to catch the coins inside the cabinet,
Speaker 1: and the milk jug had filled to overflowing and no
Speaker 1: more coins could come in, so the game was malfunctioned.
Speaker 1: Great story. We had to empty the coins from the
Speaker 1: things that they could play it. Uh and uh. It
Speaker 1: was kind of interesting like this we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: in the second. But the the plan was that in
Speaker 1: order to give an incentive to businesses to buy into
Speaker 1: the arcade games, they said, all right, well we will
Speaker 1: split revenue down the middle, goes to you, comes to us,
Speaker 1: which literally we will count out the quarters and we
Speaker 1: will get half of them. And they literally went from
Speaker 1: place to place employees of Atari picking up sack fulls
Speaker 1: of quarters at the end of every year, possibly suffering
Speaker 1: enormous back pain, one of whom apparently carried a roofing
Speaker 1: hatchet for protection. Um but they were bringing in They
Speaker 1: said a single unit typically would earn about forty dollars
Speaker 1: a day, which is over two hundred and twenty dollars today, um,
Speaker 1: which is that's fantastic for the first thing of its kind.
Speaker 1: And um it said that they believe machines were ordered
Speaker 1: by the end of nineteen seventy three. By nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: over eight thousand of these were all over the country
Speaker 1: now and abroad, I think at this point, yeah, and
Speaker 1: keep in mind these are like, you know, a grand apiece,
Speaker 1: and they're getting there, getting this this all of the
Speaker 1: money at this point because originally they went to uh
Speaker 1: Nutting and said do you want to do this? And
Speaker 1: they thought, well, no, we don't really want to work
Speaker 1: with Nutting anymore. We want to be able to do
Speaker 1: this with someone else. They they started shopping around to
Speaker 1: see if they could work with a different distributor of
Speaker 1: of games, like like the kind of games you would
Speaker 1: find at an amusement park. So they look at Bally
Speaker 1: because Bally of course was famous for their pinball as
Speaker 1: well as there are other there are other games that
Speaker 1: they were pioneering in, but Bally wasn't wasn't sold on
Speaker 1: the idea pong. They wanted Atari to make a game
Speaker 1: for them. In fact, a couple of games one would
Speaker 1: be a pinball game and one would be a video game,
Speaker 1: but they weren't interested in Pong, and ultimately the guys
Speaker 1: that Attari decided, you know what, we're gonna do this ourselves.
Speaker 1: But it was a huge, huge jump for them, you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't have the background of manufacturing. No, it turned
Speaker 1: out to be a great move though. Yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: absolutely it. It really set them for success for at
Speaker 1: least the next couple of years. So some interesting things
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen seventy three. At the tail end of
Speaker 1: seventy two, Atari would file a patent for Pong. Now
Speaker 1: keep in mind that when you file a patent it
Speaker 1: can take years before you get you know that approved
Speaker 1: or declined. And it was already released at this point
Speaker 1: when they filed. Yes, they didn't pre file, right, so
Speaker 1: they file after the games already released. Uh. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, they do something that at first I was
Speaker 1: confused about until I read more details, which is that
Speaker 1: they established a second company called Key Games k E. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't quite understand this all right, So they set
Speaker 1: up a second company that's essentially appears to be a
Speaker 1: competitor to Atari, not just a competitor, but they are
Speaker 1: producing knockoffs of Atari games. And here's the reason why.
Speaker 1: There are rules for certain types of companies where they
Speaker 1: can only work with a single distributor. So if they
Speaker 1: create a title and and enter an agreement with that distributor,
Speaker 1: all of their titles have to go through that distributor.
Speaker 1: So it limits the options of the company producing the games.
Speaker 1: By creating this second company, they could produce the exact
Speaker 1: same games with a different name under the name of
Speaker 1: this other dummy corporation. Practically it's a little more than
Speaker 1: a dummy corporation, but not much more, and then offer
Speaker 1: that to different distributors. Makes sense, So it opens up
Speaker 1: a lot of options. So a little bit of yeah,
Speaker 1: a little little little uh spoken mirrors a little bit
Speaker 1: of guests, which cut the ball is under some stuff,
Speaker 1: and so you know, it was the way of getting
Speaker 1: around that. Bushnell, by the way, clearly very savvy when
Speaker 1: it comes to working. Meanwhile, Long is going crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going crazy for for many reasons that we already
Speaker 1: talked about. But um, another big reason I saw the
Speaker 1: interview with Bushnell said is that women were very good
Speaker 1: at it for some reason, and it appealed to women,
Speaker 1: and it was the first UM I guess sort of
Speaker 1: the first time he said that women felt comfortable going
Speaker 1: up to a man in a bar and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, do you want to play this game with me?
Speaker 1: And he said that made a big difference. It appealed
Speaker 1: to both sexes and um and it also brought it
Speaker 1: down as the this great I g N article says
Speaker 1: to you know, where real people congregated. It brought it
Speaker 1: into the bars, into the bowling alleys. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: like you know, engineering students exactly. It wasn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: some computer lab where you had to have uh, you know,
Speaker 1: student access to get there. We've got more to say
Speaker 1: about Atari in just a moment, but we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break. Another interesting thing that happened in
Speaker 1: nine was that they got a new space for putting
Speaker 1: together their pong machines. Did you hear about this? The
Speaker 1: ten thousand square foot space they got. So there was
Speaker 1: one story that Dabney told about how originally the little
Speaker 1: space they were in they found out that their neighbor
Speaker 1: had stopped paying rent and essentially scaddled. So they cut
Speaker 1: a hole in the wall and used the next door space,
Speaker 1: but even that wasn't big enough because then they were like, well,
Speaker 1: what happens when we get caught as well, we'll just
Speaker 1: ask how much we owe them, like when they when
Speaker 1: we get caught, we'll we'll pay for it, but until
Speaker 1: then we won't. Um. But then they decided that they
Speaker 1: would lease a space and they found an a business
Speaker 1: that was no longer doing this. It was ten thousand
Speaker 1: square foot roller rink and they turned it into their
Speaker 1: manufacturing center for pong. Yeah, and then there's the story
Speaker 1: about how that that that signed guest thing comes back
Speaker 1: to Hank and see Magnavox a patent, yes, for electronic
Speaker 1: table tennis, so Atari did not have a patent for pong.
Speaker 1: Magnavox had a patent for electronic table tennis. And this
Speaker 1: starts to raise some important conversations between the two where
Speaker 1: Magnavox is looking at pong and saying, that's our game,
Speaker 1: so we're going to go after these guys. Meanwhile, Bushnell
Speaker 1: buys out Ted Dabney from the company. Depending upon whom
Speaker 1: you asked, Abney sometimes just says no, I was just
Speaker 1: kind of canned. Yeah. He says that he was forced
Speaker 1: out basically that his old friend came up to him
Speaker 1: basically said, um, if you don't accept this buy out,
Speaker 1: then I'm going to take all the assets over to
Speaker 1: a different company and you're you'll be left with nothing. Right,
Speaker 1: So he took the opportunity to get bought out. I
Speaker 1: didn't see numbers. Yeah, I didn't either. I don't think
Speaker 1: anyone has ever about it. It It sounds like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: the interview, definitely he portrays Bushnell as misrepresenting the truth.
Speaker 1: Let's say, that's a very kind way of putting it.
Speaker 1: And I haven't heard Bushnell talk much about it. He
Speaker 1: seems to, I don't know, gloss over that or least
Speaker 1: not even address it's from what I've seen. Well. Uh.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy three was also when Atari got a new
Speaker 1: hire in the electrical engineering department. You may have heard
Speaker 1: of him. His name is Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: joins Atari in nineteen seventy three, and by the end
Speaker 1: of the year, Key Games in Atari, which remember are
Speaker 1: really being operated simultaneously by the same heads of people,
Speaker 1: into a licensing agreement for ATRII to produce a version
Speaker 1: of the game Emanation, which was key games first first title. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and by the way, can you guess do you want
Speaker 1: to guess what the game elimination was? The title makes
Speaker 1: it sound like it's something terrible. It was not. It
Speaker 1: was not. It was a four player version of Pong,
Speaker 1: and so uh, the Atari version would become known as Quadrupong.
Speaker 1: So it's funny that Atari is licensing a game that
Speaker 1: essentially the same folks had developed, right Like, it's all again,
Speaker 1: it's all this sort of shell game going on. So
Speaker 1: moving up to nineteen seventy four, this is where we
Speaker 1: start seeing the Magnavox thing come to a head. The
Speaker 1: inventor Ralph Bayer convinces Magnavox to sue Atari, claiming that
Speaker 1: the company copied the electronic table tennis game from the Odyssey,
Speaker 1: which they did, Yeah, pretty much, and Bushnell basically comes up.
Speaker 1: The guy makes all the right moves, it seems like
Speaker 1: for a while. Yeah. Um. He basically says, you know what,
Speaker 1: we'll settle for some money and will become a licensee
Speaker 1: so you don't have to worry about us. You go
Speaker 1: and sue everybody else because Paul was getting knocked off
Speaker 1: all over the place and you spend all your time
Speaker 1: doing that. We'll settle for some money. We'll be a
Speaker 1: licensee and we'll make that and some other Magnavox some
Speaker 1: titles and just don't worry about us anymore. And Magnavox
Speaker 1: is like, all right, yeah, it was good to me, brilliant.
Speaker 1: I mean, they no longer a Torii, no longer has
Speaker 1: to go after these copycats because Magnavox is going to
Speaker 1: do it on their behalf and they're not being uh
Speaker 1: come after for Magna. Yeah. So the settlement shield basically
Speaker 1: exactly a settlement amount. We don't it's not publicized, but
Speaker 1: according to different accounts, it could be anywhere between four
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and a million bucks. So not change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but still when you when you know now you've got
Speaker 1: like your big brother looking out for you, you don't know,
Speaker 1: they can just make money now exactly. It freed them
Speaker 1: up to be super creative. Uh, And that's what they
Speaker 1: started doing right away pretty much. And this is also
Speaker 1: the year Dabney, who had who had left buys the
Speaker 1: name the rights to the name scissor Gy Game Company
Speaker 1: from Atari. Uh. And then he also would leave the
Speaker 1: board of directors in nineteen seventy four, which was his
Speaker 1: last connection to the company that by that time, Dabney's
Speaker 1: connections are now severed. Uh. And then meanwhile, Key Games
Speaker 1: releases its first original game called Tank, which ends up
Speaker 1: being a massive hit. Uh. And then so such a
Speaker 1: big hit, keep in my nineteen Tank comes out. The
Speaker 1: demand is so high they go ahead and develop and
Speaker 1: produced Tank two in that same year. Like you think
Speaker 1: about how video games are produced, and now, granted it's
Speaker 1: a totally different ball game these days, but the way
Speaker 1: video games are produced these days, they go in for
Speaker 1: years of development. If you get a game, and you
Speaker 1: won't expect a sequel for several years to come, unless
Speaker 1: with a few exceptions like the Assassin's Creed series appears
Speaker 1: to have a sequel come out every few months. U
Speaker 1: certain sports franchise games obviously those are gonna come out
Speaker 1: each year to reflect the change. Yeah, but most most games,
Speaker 1: you know, you end up waiting years between sequels. But
Speaker 1: this is where things are just moving at a furious pace.
Speaker 1: Now that we have the home version of Pong yet
Speaker 1: not well, there were some early home versions. There was
Speaker 1: one that was being developed at this time and actually
Speaker 1: did come out. Yeah, so there were actually two different
Speaker 1: versions of that, right, Sears licensed it. I had that one,
Speaker 1: So you had the Sears version of Pons Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there was a second one that was marketed under
Speaker 1: the Atari name. So again it was weird because it
Speaker 1: almost felt like Atari was competing against itself and had
Speaker 1: two different versions of the same thing on the market. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: because they didn't have that patent yet, I think, so
Speaker 1: Sears was the distributor and they had their own version. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that I think the other versions outsold
Speaker 1: the official Pong version. Oh yeah, the Atari. I think
Speaker 1: Atari had like fifty thousand of them on the market
Speaker 1: and Sears had a hundred and fifty thousand of them.
Speaker 1: Those you know, easily eclipsing it. But yeah, that ended
Speaker 1: up being a big hit that would come out in nineteen.
Speaker 1: It was limited to only playing the Pong games there was.
Speaker 1: This was not a cartridge. Yeah, so it's all again
Speaker 1: it's hard coded into the console, right. Yeah. I I
Speaker 1: had UM. I don't I had I had one that
Speaker 1: was I don't think it was Pong UM and I
Speaker 1: don't think it was. It wasn't the Magnavox Odyssey because
Speaker 1: I seemed to remember there were sound effects. But I
Speaker 1: did have one that was the collection of essentially variations
Speaker 1: on pong. Pong was one, but you also had racquetball,
Speaker 1: which was pong but way faster. Um. Then there was
Speaker 1: one that was basketball that was essentially pong, but it
Speaker 1: was turned so that both paddles were maybe two inches
Speaker 1: above the bottom line, and then you had like little
Speaker 1: lines that represented goals. Yeah, like there was there's a
Speaker 1: whole selection of these style games. They're all variations on
Speaker 1: around exactly. So I had one of those. I don't
Speaker 1: know if hey, listeners, if you know what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about and you think, oh, that sounds like the blah
Speaker 1: blah blah, yeah, you just let me know. Um. But
Speaker 1: this is also around the time when Atari would announce
Speaker 1: the acquisition of Key Games. How did that work out?
Speaker 1: Tory buys its own company for Joe Keenan became Joe Keenan,
Speaker 1: who remember was the head of Key Games. He's also
Speaker 1: Bushnell's neighbor. Yeah. According to the story, Dabney Tody says, yeah.
Speaker 1: Bushnell says he walked up to Joe one day when
Speaker 1: Joe was mowing his lawn, said, Hey, would you like
Speaker 1: to run a company that looks like it's competing against me,
Speaker 1: I basically need a shell company owner because I have
Speaker 1: a company. But Joe Keenan would actually become the new
Speaker 1: president of Attari and Nolan Bushnell was becomes the chairman
Speaker 1: of of Atari Crazy. And this is also when a
Speaker 1: Tory starts working on a project code named Stella. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is change everything again a home market approach. So
Speaker 1: two developments make this possible. One is the production of
Speaker 1: a microchip called the Moss technology six oh five to
Speaker 1: micro processor uh. And then the other one was creating
Speaker 1: the methodology of storing games on ROM cartridges. ROM stands
Speaker 1: for read only memory. So this is why if you
Speaker 1: had one of those old cartridge based systems, UH, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't let you do things like keep track of your
Speaker 1: high score. For example, like you plug your cartridge gen
Speaker 1: and you could get a high score. But as soon
Speaker 1: as you turned the machine off, that's a race because
Speaker 1: it was read only memory couldn't write anything. So the
Speaker 1: console would have all the stuff that would allow it
Speaker 1: to accept these cartridges. But the beauty of it was
Speaker 1: you were not limited to a select number of titles.
Speaker 1: As long as more cartridges would come out, you could
Speaker 1: play different games. Yeah, and UH, you know we should
Speaker 1: set this in here. In the early to mid nineteen seventies, Um,
Speaker 1: there was not a lot of options as a child. Um,
Speaker 1: you had crappy handheld games, yer electronics type stuff. Yep.
Speaker 1: You had, um a few TV channels that you could
Speaker 1: watch three maybe four if you could get a UHF
Speaker 1: station its pre Fox even Yeah, just the big three, ABC, NBC,
Speaker 1: and CBS. UM, and there were you know, all the
Speaker 1: all the games were like uh, you know, there were
Speaker 1: card games and and you know, or actually playing outside
Speaker 1: with your friends, which was great, but but there was
Speaker 1: not a lot. There weren't many options. So home computing
Speaker 1: in the home video console was to call it revolutionary.
Speaker 1: There isn't a word big enough to call it what
Speaker 1: it was, right, And so keep in mind this is
Speaker 1: this is the dawn of two eras that are coming
Speaker 1: about at the same time. They're both about to change
Speaker 1: children's worlds forever. One is that the r acade is
Speaker 1: on the horizon, like not not not just the you know,
Speaker 1: occasional game in a bar or restaurant or bowling out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they had arcades previously, but like we said, it
Speaker 1: was pinball and yeah, skee ball and stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 1: So the video the video arcade is just about to
Speaker 1: come to pass, and the home video game market is
Speaker 1: about to come to pass. Suddenly we have way more
Speaker 1: options than uh, you know, finding out who's really good
Speaker 1: at getting hit with a stick? That was That was
Speaker 1: my favorite game as a kid. I was really good
Speaker 1: at that game. I could get hit by a stick
Speaker 1: like crazy. Uh So, nineteen seventies six, we get a
Speaker 1: game coming out from Atari called Breakout. Yeah designed, um, well,
Speaker 1: we thought it was designed and perfected by Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: because he was the employee assigned to that job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bushnell and Bristow. Steve Bristow, who was another employee of Atari,
Speaker 1: came up with the concept and gave it to Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs and said, make this thing that we thought on
Speaker 1: of essentially kind of a racquetball style game. And so
Speaker 1: Jobs goes back, does some work, comes back with a
Speaker 1: circuit board and says I did it, and they hook
Speaker 1: it up. They're like, wow, this is great. Yeah, in fact,
Speaker 1: it's so great. You have done such a good job
Speaker 1: designing this where you've created a really efficient system like
Speaker 1: we would have thought that you would have to use,
Speaker 1: you know, a dozen or more other processors. To get
Speaker 1: this done, but you've managed to make a really elegant
Speaker 1: solution to it. We're going to give you a bonus.
Speaker 1: Here's an extra five grand. Yeah. And he was like
Speaker 1: a uh yeah. And that friend was it was maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit more responsible than I let on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this guy I know. I went to college with him.
Speaker 1: He works for HP. His name is Steve. Wasn't he
Speaker 1: was really good at this stuff. He made this thing, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: wasn't he act actually built the integrated circuit that was
Speaker 1: used in Breakout, and Breakout was and it is still
Speaker 1: a great game. It's another one of those that holds up.
Speaker 1: It really does very challenging eight gameplay. It's still a challenge.
Speaker 1: And then uh, and then as soon as the success
Speaker 1: hit Jobs, he said, all right, guys, see you that
Speaker 1: he and Wozniak and a person who was one of
Speaker 1: the um developers over at Atari all go to form
Speaker 1: a little company called Apple. That's right. It took them
Speaker 1: a couple of years to get things going, but they,
Speaker 1: of course would end up kind of repeating the success
Speaker 1: that Attari was seeing in the video game market with
Speaker 1: the personal computer market. So in a way, you could
Speaker 1: think of Atari as being at least partially responsible not
Speaker 1: just for the video game industry, but also the personal
Speaker 1: computer industry, because otherwise jobs might not have had the
Speaker 1: the inspiration in the capital to really go out and say,
Speaker 1: let's do this thing. So it's kind of cool. Um Bushnell,
Speaker 1: by the way, decides he is time, it's ready, he's
Speaker 1: ready to cash out. Well, yeah, I mean one of
Speaker 1: the problems was they they had this great idea for
Speaker 1: the vcs or what would become the AT and they
Speaker 1: couldn't really fund it to the extent that they needed
Speaker 1: to scale this thing, and so he wanted to cash out,
Speaker 1: cash in and just have a little more uh backing basically,
Speaker 1: and so he made the well it's pretty interesting decision
Speaker 1: in the long run to sell to warners. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: sells to Warrant Communications for twenty eight million dollars. He
Speaker 1: walks away with fifteen million of that. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: all of a sudden. Um. I saw an interview with
Speaker 1: al Alcorn that was he was like, we had real
Speaker 1: money in the bank for the first time. He said,
Speaker 1: we had backing, and we had we felt safe. But um,
Speaker 1: here's the problem. Atari was a a very fun company
Speaker 1: to work for, likely like, have you seen Wolf of
Speaker 1: Wall Street? Because I have a feeling that was really
Speaker 1: was They said, Um, there were a lot of marijuana smoking.
Speaker 1: They called an MRB session Marijuana Review you Board. Um,
Speaker 1: he said. One of the developers in the interview that
Speaker 1: I saw today said, we basically sit around and get
Speaker 1: high and brainstorm games. Um. They said it was the
Speaker 1: day's for sexual harassment. There were a lot of people
Speaker 1: going home with each other in the end of the night,
Speaker 1: and then cocaine came onto the scene. Another thing to
Speaker 1: think about is a lot of these game consoles, if
Speaker 1: you or the different projects they have, if you look,
Speaker 1: a lot of the the code names are women's names,
Speaker 1: and according to most of the interviews i've I've seen,
Speaker 1: the names were picked from attractive ladies who were receptionists
Speaker 1: or secretaries at Atari. Yeah. Really, you know, forward thinking,
Speaker 1: classy type stuff. At any rate, you know, Warner Is well,
Speaker 1: they changed everything. They're a big corporation. Yeah, that you
Speaker 1: couldn't come and go as you pleased anymore. They would
Speaker 1: talk about the way they dressed. Um, you were you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, you were responsible for being there at
Speaker 1: a certain time every day and leaving at a certain time,
Speaker 1: and that did not fly with these creative startup right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it caused a lot of tension. Meanwhile, Bushnell would
Speaker 1: go off to finally really work on a project he
Speaker 1: had been thinking about since the early seventies, something that
Speaker 1: he really wanted to do. He had this idea of
Speaker 1: creating a destination for families to be like just a
Speaker 1: money making machine, a pizza parlor where you would have
Speaker 1: entertainment and electronic games and other like Midway style games,
Speaker 1: and it would just be a license to print money.
Speaker 1: And that, my friends, is how Chucky Cheese was born. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he um. I saw the interview with Dabney where
Speaker 1: he was talking to him about it at first, and
Speaker 1: Dabney was like, the pizzas crappy and in here it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I needed to be loud and the pizza just has
Speaker 1: to be mediocre at best. And you know what, he
Speaker 1: was right, because the pizza was never good and every
Speaker 1: one of us loved that place. I want I want
Speaker 1: to do an episode at some point. Looking I don't
Speaker 1: know if I can do it because I don't know
Speaker 1: if it really falls into tech stuff, but I would
Speaker 1: love to do the story of Chuck e Cheese and
Speaker 1: Showbiz Pizza. I grew up knowing Showbiz Pizza, not Chuck
Speaker 1: E Cheese. I remember, I remember Showbiz Pizza specifically. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And if you think the two are kind of similar,
Speaker 1: and you were wondering, I mean, granted they both belonged
Speaker 1: to the same entity now, yeah, but if you thought
Speaker 1: the two were kind of similar, it's because the creators
Speaker 1: of Showbiz Pizza originally worked on the Chuck E Cheese
Speaker 1: and then there was a falling out in a split,
Speaker 1: so there was another one in Atlanta called Sergeant Singers.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Oh my gosh, I totally forgot. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I had a little quick side story here. When I
Speaker 1: was like twelve, the new it might have been Showbiz
Speaker 1: actually opened up and for their grand opening they had
Speaker 1: an invitation only thing that somehow my dad was an
Speaker 1: elementary school principle that got an invitation to this and
Speaker 1: uh to come with his kids, and you basically walk
Speaker 1: in and everything was free that night. Wow, so free food.
Speaker 1: They gave you to sackfuls of tokens anytime you wanted them,
Speaker 1: and it was literally stands out as one of the
Speaker 1: best nights of my childhood. I still remember it to
Speaker 1: this day as being like one of the most fun
Speaker 1: things I've ever done. I could see that. I mean,
Speaker 1: that would that would be a dream come true. Man,
Speaker 1: it's it blew my mind. Well, we have talked for
Speaker 1: a long time. We've got a lot more to cover,
Speaker 1: but in order to do that, we're going to end here.
Speaker 1: I'm calling it now. I'm looking at the time. It's
Speaker 1: over fifty minutes already, So tease it right before the
Speaker 1: release of the I know, we gotta have a reason
Speaker 1: for people to come back next week. Yeah, we've got
Speaker 1: tons more to talk about. I mean, we haven't even
Speaker 1: left the seventies yet, and trust me, like we've got
Speaker 1: some drama coming up with the rise and fall of
Speaker 1: the video game industry as a whole, not to mention
Speaker 1: the crazy corporate shuffling of the Atari brand, which is
Speaker 1: kind of heartbreaking. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode
Speaker 1: about the rise and fall of Atari. Like I said,
Speaker 1: we've got two more parts coming up covering that your ease,
Speaker 1: So we will continue this story next week. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
Speaker 1: of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me the Twitter
Speaker 1: handle for the show is Text Stuff H s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.