WEBVTT - The Rise and Fall of Atari: Part One 0:00:04.240 --> 0:00:07.920 Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from dot 0:00:07.960 --> 0:00:14.800 com Aimar and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland. 0:00:14.800 --> 0:00:17.800 Then today joining me in the studio is Mr Chuck 0:00:17.840 --> 0:00:21.880 Bryant from Stuff you Should Know. Hi, Chuck insert computer 0:00:21.960 --> 0:00:26.600 simulated applause. I'm sure no one can do that if 0:00:26.600 --> 0:00:30.920 we wanted to. Yeah. So I was looking through all 0:00:30.920 --> 0:00:33.360 the different requests that I've ever seen, and I realized 0:00:33.400 --> 0:00:36.479 there are tons. I mean, they've just been piling up, uh, 0:00:36.520 --> 0:00:39.320 And I was going over those with you, and you 0:00:39.360 --> 0:00:42.040 saw one that leapt out at you and you immediately 0:00:42.040 --> 0:00:44.600 wanted to do it. It comes to us from Jeff 0:00:44.600 --> 0:00:46.960 who wrote, Hi, Jonathan, since you asked, I do have 0:00:47.000 --> 0:00:49.040 a suggestion for a topic to cover that I don't 0:00:49.040 --> 0:00:51.479 think you have yet. Could you do an episode or 0:00:51.560 --> 0:00:54.760 two if needed to cover the rise and fall of Atari. 0:00:55.240 --> 0:00:58.200 Actually worked in the store that sold only Atari home 0:00:58.280 --> 0:01:02.560 computers and game systems and the early nineties. Atari's products 0:01:02.600 --> 0:01:04.759 are at the time we're as good or better than 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:07.240 what was being put out by their competitors, and yet 0:01:07.280 --> 0:01:09.400 they failed big time. Thank you for the entertaining and 0:01:09.560 --> 0:01:12.000 educational show. I enjoyed Part one of the two thousand 0:01:12.040 --> 0:01:15.960 fourteen review this morning. So clearly this request came in 0:01:16.040 --> 0:01:18.880 some time ago, I guess so. But yeah, this was 0:01:18.920 --> 0:01:21.039 one that when I brought it up to you, you said, 0:01:21.040 --> 0:01:24.240 absolutely we should do an episode about Attari. Well, you 0:01:24.280 --> 0:01:26.880 and I are the same age roughly, and we are 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:30.880 children of Atari every way, you know, we grew up 0:01:30.880 --> 0:01:34.640 in the seventies and eighties during the Atari's heyday. Yeah, 0:01:34.680 --> 0:01:37.720 and it was huge, huge in my life. And uh 0:01:37.840 --> 0:01:41.800 my brother actually uh has set his up recently and 0:01:41.840 --> 0:01:46.520 I was just playing uh Combat last week. That Combat 0:01:46.640 --> 0:01:49.360 and we'll get to this obviously was the game that 0:01:49.440 --> 0:01:52.640 shipped with and it kind of holds up. You know 0:01:52.720 --> 0:01:55.919 what it really does. I it's it's an incredibly simple 0:01:56.000 --> 0:01:59.880 game and has incredibly simple graphics, but it's the play 0:01:59.880 --> 0:02:02.559 ability comes in the fact that it's a two player 0:02:02.600 --> 0:02:08.400 game and uh, trash talking galore can happen. We had 0:02:08.440 --> 0:02:11.640 a blast. It really was a lot of fun, and 0:02:11.680 --> 0:02:14.960 not just for nostalgia. The gameplay, like you said, still 0:02:14.960 --> 0:02:16.840 holds up to a certain degree. I think, yeah, yeah, 0:02:16.840 --> 0:02:19.040 I mean it's obviously for someone who's like, no, I 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:21.640 need to have you know, the fourteen different controls mapped 0:02:21.639 --> 0:02:24.240 out on my keyboard and my my gaming mouse and everything. 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:28.520 It's not gonna appeal to you, but but it's still 0:02:28.520 --> 0:02:31.880 a compelling experience. So we wanted to go through the 0:02:32.000 --> 0:02:36.200 rise and fall of Atari. And it is an epic story. 0:02:36.280 --> 0:02:38.920 I mean, it has so many different elements to it, 0:02:38.960 --> 0:02:41.120 and it's at least gonna be two episodes. We're gonna 0:02:41.120 --> 0:02:43.560 see how how far we can go before we have 0:02:43.639 --> 0:02:46.840 to take a break and replenish our our, our vital 0:02:46.880 --> 0:02:52.079 bodily fluids before we break out. Exactly. Good good reference there, 0:02:52.200 --> 0:02:57.440 Mr Chuck. So starting off a little little information before 0:02:57.480 --> 0:03:00.840 we get into the actual Attari days. Computer games have 0:03:00.919 --> 0:03:04.840 been around pretty much since the days that computers were 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:07.799 first built. You know, you you have computer programmers who 0:03:07.840 --> 0:03:12.440 often had these analytical minds that were also fond of 0:03:12.480 --> 0:03:16.520 things like puzzles and games, and so naturally, when those 0:03:16.600 --> 0:03:20.679 early computer programs were being designed, programmers were thinking, huh, 0:03:20.680 --> 0:03:22.640 I wonder if I could actually make this machine do 0:03:22.800 --> 0:03:26.079 something fun, not just something functional. Yeah, I think that's 0:03:26.120 --> 0:03:27.680 one of the things you probably heard a lot in 0:03:27.720 --> 0:03:29.960 the early days. Would well, maybe they'd be fun if 0:03:30.040 --> 0:03:32.640 dot dot dot and uh, before you know what, they 0:03:32.639 --> 0:03:35.440 were playing some you know to us an archaic form 0:03:35.480 --> 0:03:38.320 of a video Yeah, maybe like a game version of 0:03:38.320 --> 0:03:40.800 like Tic Tac toe, you know, but instead of it 0:03:41.080 --> 0:03:44.120 having a video screen because video screens were late in 0:03:44.160 --> 0:03:46.920 the game in the computer days, they would print this 0:03:47.040 --> 0:03:50.120 stuff out like you would have maybe a tape printer, 0:03:50.960 --> 0:03:53.760 and it would print each move, so every time something changed, 0:03:53.800 --> 0:03:56.120 it had to print a new piece of paper for 0:03:56.200 --> 0:03:58.400 you to look at, or a new strip of tape. Really, 0:03:58.440 --> 0:04:03.040 because a friend of mine, his name's Richard Garriot, and 0:04:03.080 --> 0:04:05.800 he's a big game developer. He created one of the 0:04:07.600 --> 0:04:10.560 big computer game successes and then in the eighties and 0:04:10.600 --> 0:04:13.440 nineties called Ultima, and he talks about in his days 0:04:13.440 --> 0:04:15.960 when he was in computer programming classes in high school, 0:04:16.640 --> 0:04:18.400 it was all printed to tape and it was like 0:04:18.440 --> 0:04:20.919 a little adventure game and we'll talk about adventure in 0:04:20.960 --> 0:04:24.240 a bit too, where it would print out the room 0:04:24.360 --> 0:04:26.520 and your little position, like you'd be a little X 0:04:26.839 --> 0:04:29.120 in the room and you'd say go left. It would 0:04:29.120 --> 0:04:31.000 have to print a new version of it where the 0:04:31.160 --> 0:04:34.800 X was just slightly to the left. In the pre 0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:38.680 eco friendly days as well, these days, such a game 0:04:38.680 --> 0:04:43.440 would probably be frowned upon. So uh, but you know 0:04:43.480 --> 0:04:46.520 it sets the stage to show that that people realize 0:04:46.560 --> 0:04:51.120 there was potential or electronics in the game world. And 0:04:51.160 --> 0:04:54.160 that gets us up to nine eight, when a man 0:04:54.240 --> 0:05:00.400 named William Higginbotham of Brooke Caven National Laboratory veloped an 0:05:00.440 --> 0:05:04.560 electronic game called Tennis for two on a Donner Model 0:05:04.640 --> 0:05:10.960 thirty analog computer, and uh, it would simulate table tennis, 0:05:11.240 --> 0:05:14.240 and it simulated velocity and changes in direction, all this 0:05:14.320 --> 0:05:16.720 kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I looked it up just 0:05:16.760 --> 0:05:18.839 to see what it looked like. It looked like sort 0:05:18.839 --> 0:05:23.880 of like a like a ship's sonar or something. Yeah, exactly. 0:05:24.000 --> 0:05:26.320 It was taking an oscil lator, the same sort of 0:05:26.320 --> 0:05:29.000 thing that you might see as like a heart monitor 0:05:29.160 --> 0:05:32.480 in hospital, kind of kind of like that, and by 0:05:32.520 --> 0:05:35.880 you change by fiddling with the voltage, essentially he could 0:05:36.000 --> 0:05:39.600 change the different images so that you would have essentially 0:05:39.680 --> 0:05:44.160 to paddle like things and the ball like thing and 0:05:44.200 --> 0:05:46.159 play a very basic game. And he said that he 0:05:46.160 --> 0:05:48.680 had made it because people would come to visit the 0:05:48.760 --> 0:05:51.920 lab and there wasn't a whole lot of stuff that 0:05:52.000 --> 0:05:54.440 was actually interesting to look at, and so this was 0:05:54.480 --> 0:05:56.960 the way to entertain them. That's pretty funny to like 0:05:57.000 --> 0:05:59.960 to impress people he had stuff that was far more advanced. 0:06:00.080 --> 0:06:01.839 But he's like, oh, but look at this tennis for 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:05.520 two and people aroba like, oh, yeah, exactly like cutting edge. 0:06:06.400 --> 0:06:10.880 So have you ever seen the mel Brooks films Silent Movie? 0:06:11.040 --> 0:06:13.800 All right? In Silent Movie, there's actually a scene where 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:17.560 Sid Caesar Is is in the hospital. His character is 0:06:17.600 --> 0:06:21.080 in the hospital and to uh, Tom Deloise and Marty 0:06:21.120 --> 0:06:23.800 Felman who walk up to his heart monitor and turn 0:06:23.880 --> 0:06:26.400 it into this game and they play a game of 0:06:26.480 --> 0:06:28.799 Pong on his heart monitor, which totally forgot about causes 0:06:28.839 --> 0:06:31.200 him to totally freak out. But it's this game which 0:06:31.240 --> 0:06:34.039 is interesting because the original well we'll get into Pong, 0:06:34.080 --> 0:06:38.120 but the original Pongs were silent. Yes, yeah, that's actually true. 0:06:38.440 --> 0:06:41.160 And in nineteen sixty two, that's when we get up 0:06:41.160 --> 0:06:43.560 to the time when m i T. Professor Steve Russell 0:06:43.680 --> 0:06:47.120 developed a game called Space War, which is one of 0:06:47.160 --> 0:06:49.719 the earliest video games. He did this with two of 0:06:49.760 --> 0:06:54.560 his students and they built it for a big mainframe computer. Yeah. 0:06:54.600 --> 0:06:56.960 It was the only way they could really at the time. Exactly. 0:06:57.040 --> 0:06:59.880 So if you wanted to play a computer game, you 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:04.120 had to go someplace where essentially a room is dedicated 0:07:04.160 --> 0:07:07.400 to that computer, the Big Mac. Yeah, they were largely 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:09.760 still using vacuum tubes for a lot of this technology. 0:07:09.880 --> 0:07:12.600 I mean, transistors had had started to come out, but 0:07:12.640 --> 0:07:17.760 they hadn't been integrated into computers deeply at this point. Uh. 0:07:17.840 --> 0:07:21.800 And that's when around this times when an electrical engineering 0:07:21.840 --> 0:07:26.720 student named Nolan Bushnell, the probably the most important person 0:07:26.760 --> 0:07:31.239 in this story. Yeah, that's when he discovered space war 0:07:31.400 --> 0:07:35.120 because the computer lab at the university was going to 0:07:35.160 --> 0:07:39.280 the University of Utah College of Engineering, had space War 0:07:39.320 --> 0:07:41.440 on one of its computers. Yeah, he was. I saw 0:07:41.480 --> 0:07:43.880 an interview with him earlier today on YouTube where he 0:07:43.920 --> 0:07:46.720 was talking about at the time. He said there were 0:07:46.760 --> 0:07:49.920 only like four universities in the entire country that had 0:07:50.000 --> 0:07:54.160 graphical displays period, and University of Utah just happened to 0:07:54.200 --> 0:07:57.120 be one of them. And it seemed like when you 0:07:57.160 --> 0:07:59.520 start hearing about the story and how it all just 0:07:59.560 --> 0:08:01.520 fell into place, it's I don't know if I'm a 0:08:01.520 --> 0:08:04.440 believer in fate, but all these little puzzle pieces came 0:08:04.480 --> 0:08:08.720 together in just the right way to get his motor running. Basically, 0:08:08.840 --> 0:08:12.200 if if they hadn't, if any of the elements that 0:08:12.760 --> 0:08:15.840 took place, then the whole arcade industry could have been 0:08:15.840 --> 0:08:18.640 delayed by several years if he had just gone to 0:08:18.680 --> 0:08:21.600 a different university that didn't have computer screens. Right, Yeah, 0:08:21.840 --> 0:08:24.800 because the University of Utah was a pioneer in that space, 0:08:25.200 --> 0:08:28.760 and so he really got his introduction to it. Uh. 0:08:28.800 --> 0:08:31.360 Another interesting thing about him is that he would work 0:08:32.000 --> 0:08:34.480 in his off time, like when whenever school was out 0:08:35.040 --> 0:08:38.600 at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Yeah, that was a huge 0:08:38.679 --> 0:08:42.240 deal because that inspired the thought of, you know what, 0:08:42.320 --> 0:08:45.400 people are shoving quarters in these ski ball games and 0:08:45.559 --> 0:08:49.479 pinball and you know, all manner of sort of boardwalk 0:08:49.600 --> 0:08:52.520 arcade games. And he obviously had some sort of business 0:08:52.520 --> 0:08:54.880 sense to him because he thought, why not try and 0:08:55.000 --> 0:08:56.880 do this really fun thing that I've been sneaking into 0:08:56.880 --> 0:08:59.439 the lab and doing every night and charge people money 0:08:59.480 --> 0:09:01.600 for it? Right? What if we were to create an 0:09:01.640 --> 0:09:06.040 experience using an electronic game where on a per coin basis, 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:08.800 you would get either an allotted amount of time to 0:09:08.880 --> 0:09:12.200 play or some other metric like in pong, it might 0:09:12.240 --> 0:09:14.240 be the number of lives. In most video games is 0:09:14.320 --> 0:09:17.280 number of lives, but a few it's time, um, and 0:09:17.360 --> 0:09:20.720 that that would determine how much of that experience you 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:22.839 could have before you had to plunk in another quarter. 0:09:23.320 --> 0:09:27.080 And if I find it so compelling that I'll sneak 0:09:27.120 --> 0:09:29.760 into the to the lab, people be willing to pay 0:09:29.760 --> 0:09:32.280 a quarter for it. Yeah, it was a genius. It 0:09:32.320 --> 0:09:35.360 was absolutely, I mean you. There are a lot of 0:09:35.360 --> 0:09:39.440 criticisms that are leveled against Bushnell and Coordinate, including people 0:09:39.480 --> 0:09:42.400 who used to work with him. Um and a lot 0:09:42.400 --> 0:09:46.440 of people claim, well, he never invented anything. I have 0:09:46.520 --> 0:09:51.120 to object to that because he took two separate ideas 0:09:51.400 --> 0:09:55.440 and turned them into something that spawned an entire industry. 0:09:55.480 --> 0:09:58.000 And if that's not invention, I don't know what is. Yeah, 0:09:58.000 --> 0:10:00.559 And whether or not he was I guess it wasn't coding, 0:10:00.600 --> 0:10:03.680 but whether or not he was soldering the games and 0:10:03.760 --> 0:10:07.440 inventing the games themselves. Those games are worthless unless someone 0:10:07.520 --> 0:10:09.360 comes along and says, you know what, I know how 0:10:09.400 --> 0:10:11.920 to package this and take it to the public for 0:10:12.000 --> 0:10:14.600 them to enjoy, Right, And so, I mean so without 0:10:14.640 --> 0:10:18.120 this this vision, again, I'm sure we would have eventually 0:10:18.160 --> 0:10:20.599 come around to the arcade industry. Anyway, someone would have 0:10:20.640 --> 0:10:22.480 come up with that idea, but it would have been 0:10:22.559 --> 0:10:26.240 later and the story might have been much different. So 0:10:27.040 --> 0:10:30.040 Bushnell graduates from college and goes to work for a 0:10:30.080 --> 0:10:33.760 company called Ampex. This is around nineteen sixty nine. Ampex 0:10:33.800 --> 0:10:36.200 is an electronics company, and I got a little bit 0:10:36.240 --> 0:10:39.160 of trivia something I thought you would appreciate, Chuck, you're 0:10:39.200 --> 0:10:44.040 a musician. So Ampex developed a tape recorder that less 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:49.079 Paul used to pioneer the sound on sound technique. Yeah. 0:10:49.200 --> 0:10:52.439 Less Paul used an Ampex tape recorder which was designed 0:10:52.440 --> 0:10:55.600 to have a secondary writing head that would allow him 0:10:55.679 --> 0:10:58.440 to record a track and then play along with that 0:10:58.520 --> 0:11:01.640 recorded track to create an new mixed track of both 0:11:01.640 --> 0:11:04.760 of them together. So this would allow one musician to 0:11:04.880 --> 0:11:08.840 essentially back him or herself up. Yeah. Yeah. However, what 0:11:08.920 --> 0:11:13.280 it did do also is destroy the original track, the 0:11:13.280 --> 0:11:16.559 original recording, because it records over it, so you no 0:11:16.600 --> 0:11:19.360 longer have that, so you have you plus yes, and 0:11:19.400 --> 0:11:22.640 that's the new base. Yeah, which is kind of cool. 0:11:22.720 --> 0:11:24.600 I thought that you would appreciate that, So I am Tex. 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:27.800 Ampex has had a real important part in the electronics 0:11:27.880 --> 0:11:31.920 industry in general, but it also plays host to the 0:11:31.960 --> 0:11:35.640 meeting of the two people who would really push Atari 0:11:35.720 --> 0:11:42.040 in the early days. That's uh, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Yeah, 0:11:42.040 --> 0:11:45.600 and Dabney they met nine, like you said, both employees 0:11:45.600 --> 0:11:51.160 of Ampex, and both um very much interested in, uh 0:11:51.320 --> 0:11:55.320 pioneering Space War as the very first video game. Yeah, 0:11:55.320 --> 0:11:57.520 they were looking at Space War and they thought, how 0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:00.960 can we make this as a coin operated a game. Now, 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:03.640 clearly we can't do the same thing that Space War 0:12:03.720 --> 0:12:08.160 is doing because having a mainframe computer not something you 0:12:08.160 --> 0:12:11.280 can install in your local bar. So we have to 0:12:11.280 --> 0:12:14.280 figure out how to take this same concept but do 0:12:14.320 --> 0:12:16.360 it in a much smaller form factor that could be 0:12:16.400 --> 0:12:18.960 a coin operated game. And that turned out to be 0:12:19.040 --> 0:12:23.120 sort of a recurring UM thing in Bushnell's career was 0:12:24.000 --> 0:12:26.640 this guy did something really neat. Let me sort of 0:12:26.679 --> 0:12:30.240 make a very similar version, but in a much like 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:35.400 sleeker package that's consumer oriented. Yeah. I read a transcript 0:12:35.520 --> 0:12:38.839 of an interview that UM that Ted Dabney did. Read 0:12:38.880 --> 0:12:41.000 a lot of that. Actually, Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean 0:12:41.120 --> 0:12:44.079 there's clearly some bad blood between the two of them. 0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:47.760 But Dabney talked about how what would happen is Bushnell 0:12:47.800 --> 0:12:50.040 would come up to him and say I want to 0:12:50.080 --> 0:12:53.440 do this, How is that possible? Dabney would figure it out, 0:12:53.559 --> 0:12:55.560 tell him and then Bushnell would go off and do it. 0:12:55.880 --> 0:13:00.480 So Bushnell had skills, but Dabney always dismissed as saying 0:13:00.520 --> 0:13:02.880 he wasn't an engineer. He could do something if you 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:05.840 told him how to do it, but he couldn't engineer 0:13:05.880 --> 0:13:09.360 it himself. Yeah, he need he was. He's sort of 0:13:09.360 --> 0:13:12.000 like a producer almost, Yeah, and really good at getting 0:13:12.360 --> 0:13:15.800 super talented people together to create a vision. Yeah, sort 0:13:15.800 --> 0:13:18.920 of like you could think of other pairings that this 0:13:18.920 --> 0:13:21.959 this applies to, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who 0:13:21.960 --> 0:13:24.960 will come up later, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates. 0:13:24.960 --> 0:13:27.600 I mean there are a lot of diff Ben and Jerry, 0:13:28.160 --> 0:13:31.160 uh Itchy and Scratchy. We can just keep throwing out 0:13:31.240 --> 0:13:33.679 pair of names out there. Uh So, yeah, it was, 0:13:34.440 --> 0:13:38.320 it wasn't. It was the beginning of a partnership that 0:13:38.360 --> 0:13:44.120 would end up launching this arcade industry idea. Yeah. So 0:13:44.280 --> 0:13:47.120 they got together and they they said, well, let's sort 0:13:47.160 --> 0:13:50.079 of copy that game in a in a cabinet version. 0:13:51.360 --> 0:13:52.880 But we don't really have the money to fund this, 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:55.160 so they took it to a few different people, finally 0:13:55.200 --> 0:13:58.680 landed at a place called Nutting Associates, who agreed to 0:13:58.720 --> 0:14:03.680 finance a game which was really the very first arcade 0:14:03.679 --> 0:14:07.160 game called computer Space Yep, yep. They got a programmer 0:14:07.200 --> 0:14:09.320 by the name of Larry Brian to come on board. 0:14:09.440 --> 0:14:12.760 Larry Brian had also worked at Ampex. Uh. They formed 0:14:12.880 --> 0:14:17.000 a company that they originally called sissy G. Yeah. They 0:14:17.000 --> 0:14:19.400 just said the name kind of sounded and look cool. Yeah, which, 0:14:19.440 --> 0:14:21.280 by the way, if you if you don't know how 0:14:21.320 --> 0:14:24.080 to spell it, it's it's of course one of those 0:14:24.240 --> 0:14:26.560 uh spelling B words. It's s y z y g 0:14:26.880 --> 0:14:31.160 y and it refers to the planetary alignment when things 0:14:31.200 --> 0:14:33.480 come into alignment there in sissy G. I didn't know 0:14:33.560 --> 0:14:36.200 that it was one of my my father's one of 0:14:36.240 --> 0:14:39.560 my father's favorite words, no joke. Uh, so I was 0:14:39.640 --> 0:14:42.480 instilled in my brain at an early age. They come 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:44.800 up with this name, which they wouldn't stick with for 0:14:45.000 --> 0:14:47.440 reasons we'll get to. Uh. They thought about using a 0:14:47.440 --> 0:14:50.400 computer called the Data General Nova eight hundred, but it's 0:14:50.800 --> 0:14:53.640 pretty expensive and it still wasn't really going to fit 0:14:53.680 --> 0:14:57.120 their needs, so they weren't really sure how they were 0:14:57.160 --> 0:15:00.600 going to do this. Originally, the idea was all three 0:15:00.640 --> 0:15:04.800 of the initial founding members, Dabney Bushnell and Brian were 0:15:04.800 --> 0:15:08.280 going to contribute a hundred dollars into a group fund 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:12.960 to be like the owner operating capital. Only Dabney and 0:15:13.040 --> 0:15:15.880 Bushnell did. Brian never did. So do you know why 0:15:16.160 --> 0:15:19.200 he was it because he didn't want to. I don't know. 0:15:19.440 --> 0:15:21.480 I I never came across. It was just a lot 0:15:21.520 --> 0:15:25.720 of matter of fact of Brian never put him. It's 0:15:25.760 --> 0:15:31.480 just never an explanation. Yeah. And so eventually both Bushnell 0:15:31.560 --> 0:15:33.520 and and uh Dabney would put in an extra two 0:15:33.600 --> 0:15:35.600 hundred and fiftyes. So that brought the owner's equity up 0:15:35.600 --> 0:15:40.960 to a incredible seven dollars princely some for this company. Uh. 0:15:41.000 --> 0:15:43.240 And like you were saying, Chuck, they went to Nothing 0:15:43.320 --> 0:15:47.240 to say, like, uh, maybe you can help us by 0:15:47.440 --> 0:15:50.240 manufacturing this thing. Will retain the rights to the game. 0:15:51.000 --> 0:15:53.480 You'll be able to manufacture it and sell it, but 0:15:53.560 --> 0:15:56.040 we get royalties for it as well. And it's the 0:15:56.080 --> 0:16:00.000 next big thing. Yeah. They convinced Nutting that's next big. 0:16:00.320 --> 0:16:03.720 So Nothing Associates has no clue about this stuff. They 0:16:03.800 --> 0:16:06.880 essentially give them the space to do whatever they want 0:16:06.880 --> 0:16:10.040 to do, thinking like all right, well we we can't 0:16:10.080 --> 0:16:12.160 do this ourselves. We're gonna let this group do this 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:14.880 and if it pays off, it's huge. We'll be making 0:16:14.920 --> 0:16:17.680 lots of money. And if it doesn't, well it we'll 0:16:17.760 --> 0:16:20.960 just call it a loss. So the agreement included a 0:16:21.000 --> 0:16:23.840 five percent royalty on unit sales, so that's what the 0:16:24.320 --> 0:16:28.760 group would get um. And the units were relatively inexpensive. 0:16:28.840 --> 0:16:32.760 They were like a thousand dollars, which in today's money 0:16:32.840 --> 0:16:36.320 is about six grand a piece. But it was it 0:16:36.360 --> 0:16:39.120 was not for the home consumer. It was this like 0:16:39.240 --> 0:16:42.200 the yeah, exactly, this would be like a restaurant, you 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:45.440 know that's or maybe a bowling alley something like that. 0:16:46.360 --> 0:16:49.040 But remember there's no market for these yet. Yeah, no 0:16:49.040 --> 0:16:51.880 one knows because they didn't exist. It's just crazy to 0:16:51.920 --> 0:16:53.800 think about. No one knew if it was going to 0:16:53.880 --> 0:16:56.400 work at all, and it sort of didn't, sort of didn't. 0:16:56.400 --> 0:16:58.800 It wasn't a big success for them at all, right, Right, 0:16:58.880 --> 0:17:00.720 And the one of the part probably was was that 0:17:00.960 --> 0:17:03.880 this game that was based off Space War, just like 0:17:03.920 --> 0:17:07.399 Space War, was kind of complicated. It was a game 0:17:07.840 --> 0:17:12.479 built by engineers for engineers. So you see like all 0:17:12.520 --> 0:17:15.320 these buttons and dials and stuff, and you think, all right, uh, 0:17:15.320 --> 0:17:18.240 this does not appear to be intuitive in any No 0:17:18.280 --> 0:17:20.119 one really understood how to play it. It looked a 0:17:20.160 --> 0:17:23.280 little like Asteroids. Yeah. Um, as far as just the 0:17:23.560 --> 0:17:26.040 look of the game, yeah, And it's one of those 0:17:26.040 --> 0:17:28.320 that when you look at you think, uh, you know, 0:17:28.359 --> 0:17:31.200 I I don't even know what it is, like how 0:17:31.240 --> 0:17:33.360 I control the things, nor do I know what I'm 0:17:33.359 --> 0:17:37.160 supposed to do. So it had some limited success, but 0:17:37.640 --> 0:17:40.920 it wasn't a runaway hit. It just wasn't that simplistic 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:46.680 experience that the average person could immediately identify. Well yeah, 0:17:46.680 --> 0:17:48.879 plus it was I mean, uh, I mean people are 0:17:48.960 --> 0:17:51.560 used to seeing a pinball machine maybe, but if you 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:54.280 look up this thing online, there's all of a sudden, 0:17:54.280 --> 0:17:57.120 it seems there. You know, Urcade games to us now, 0:17:57.240 --> 0:18:01.280 there were so ubiquitous, the game cabinet itself, But when 0:18:01.320 --> 0:18:02.840 you look at this thing at the time, no one 0:18:02.920 --> 0:18:04.760 knew what the heck it was. Right there was this 0:18:04.840 --> 0:18:09.960 weird looking yellow pod right with a TV screen in 0:18:09.960 --> 0:18:12.480 it in the corner, and I have no idea with 0:18:12.520 --> 0:18:14.719 all the this little game pad on the front of it, 0:18:15.000 --> 0:18:16.520 and what am I even supposed to do with that 0:18:16.600 --> 0:18:18.400 on my way to the bathroom. I mean, the whole 0:18:18.440 --> 0:18:21.760 thing wouldn't have even been possible except for the fact 0:18:21.800 --> 0:18:24.440 that Dabney made a breakthrough while he was he was 0:18:24.560 --> 0:18:28.320 tooling around in his home. According to the interviews I've seen, 0:18:28.359 --> 0:18:31.920 in his daughter's bedroom. He used that as his workspace. 0:18:32.400 --> 0:18:34.520 He moved one of his daughters in with the other 0:18:35.200 --> 0:18:38.119 two daughters. He's like, I need you room. This is 0:18:38.119 --> 0:18:41.520 going to be my lab. And uh. He started playing 0:18:41.560 --> 0:18:44.840 with cathode ray to video screens without the use of 0:18:44.880 --> 0:18:49.000 a computer as as an input, and he used counters 0:18:49.000 --> 0:18:54.400 and gates basic electronic components to manipulate that CRT display 0:18:54.440 --> 0:18:56.560 to create the images on a screen that you can 0:18:56.600 --> 0:19:01.320 control by changing the values directly. So uh, think of 0:19:01.800 --> 0:19:05.520 you know, you remember the tracking on a TV when 0:19:05.520 --> 0:19:07.399 the screen would be rolling and you have to adjust 0:19:07.400 --> 0:19:10.560 the tracking snature. Because we're old, we remember this stuff. 0:19:11.440 --> 0:19:13.680 That was the basis of him being able to control 0:19:13.880 --> 0:19:17.960 vertical movement on the screen. He just essentially he manufactured 0:19:18.000 --> 0:19:20.440 a way of doing that where by using a control 0:19:21.040 --> 0:19:24.439 you could change the the input into the television and 0:19:24.480 --> 0:19:27.600 make that vertical movement possible. For horizontal we had to 0:19:27.680 --> 0:19:30.919 change voltage is in a really interesting way so that 0:19:30.960 --> 0:19:33.000 you could get horizontal movement. Otherwise you would only be 0:19:33.000 --> 0:19:34.679 able to move up and down. Now, was that the 0:19:34.720 --> 0:19:38.240 spot in motion circuit? Yes, okay, and that changed everything 0:19:38.359 --> 0:19:41.760 because this meant for the first time that I, well 0:19:41.880 --> 0:19:45.240 not I, he could create a game that didn't need 0:19:45.359 --> 0:19:48.520 a computer attached to it. Right, you could do a 0:19:48.560 --> 0:19:51.560 home version of this game, yes, exactly, and then everything 0:19:51.600 --> 0:19:53.440 that you would need for the game you could build 0:19:53.440 --> 0:19:56.600 onto the circuit And that meant that every circuit for 0:19:56.640 --> 0:20:00.280 every game was unique, right, Like like one, if you 0:20:00.280 --> 0:20:04.679 look at two different arcade games from this era, the 0:20:04.720 --> 0:20:08.359 game is all hardwired on the circuitry, and those circuit 0:20:08.400 --> 0:20:11.760 boards are going to look different because it's those physical 0:20:11.800 --> 0:20:16.080 components that create the assets of each game, which is 0:20:16.160 --> 0:20:18.320 kind of cool to think about because these days we're 0:20:18.440 --> 0:20:21.480 used to the general purpose machine, right, the computer, and 0:20:21.520 --> 0:20:25.040 then everything else is controlled on the software side. But 0:20:25.280 --> 0:20:28.840 this was all hardware, which you know for every game 0:20:28.920 --> 0:20:31.320 was a little different from the next two. Yeah. Yeah, 0:20:31.359 --> 0:20:33.439 And you look at it you think like, well, you know, 0:20:33.440 --> 0:20:37.120 there could even be production errors in that that could 0:20:37.160 --> 0:20:40.639 create weird glitches that are only for that unit of 0:20:40.680 --> 0:20:43.560 the game. It's not like a game shipped with glitches 0:20:43.600 --> 0:20:47.280 would be that many. Maybe some solder wasn't complete and 0:20:47.320 --> 0:20:50.320 so something in the game's not working properly. So it 0:20:50.359 --> 0:20:54.000 made it more like those early arcading machines. We're really 0:20:54.040 --> 0:20:57.959 more like pinball games than they were like the modern games. 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:02.159 Um yeah, really are staying We get to August of 0:21:02.240 --> 0:21:04.840 nineteen seventy one. That's when the team had produced the 0:21:04.880 --> 0:21:07.440 test unit of their game, which was, as you were saying, 0:21:07.440 --> 0:21:10.640 called Computer Space, and they set it up in a 0:21:10.359 --> 0:21:16.480 in a restaurant and bar called Dutch Goose in Palo Alto, California. 0:21:17.240 --> 0:21:19.639 What a great name. They officially debuted the game at 0:21:19.640 --> 0:21:23.840 the nineteen seventy one Music and Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago, 0:21:24.320 --> 0:21:26.320 and by the end of nineteen seventy one they begin 0:21:26.400 --> 0:21:28.480 to ship the game. So that first game was just 0:21:28.520 --> 0:21:30.760 sort of a test run to see if they could 0:21:30.760 --> 0:21:32.760 get it to to Look now, it doesn't do great 0:21:32.800 --> 0:21:37.359 business because it was a units total sold yeah um, 0:21:37.400 --> 0:21:40.440 but it was enough money um for for Dabney and 0:21:40.480 --> 0:21:44.880 Bushnell to sort of continue to fund their company. Right. 0:21:44.960 --> 0:21:48.760 They decided at that point that they wanted to incorporate 0:21:48.880 --> 0:21:52.480 Sissy G and then they had a speed bump because 0:21:52.480 --> 0:21:55.480