Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from dot
Speaker 1: com Aimar and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: Then today joining me in the studio is Mr Chuck
Speaker 1: Bryant from Stuff you Should Know. Hi, Chuck insert computer
Speaker 1: simulated applause. I'm sure no one can do that if
Speaker 1: we wanted to. Yeah. So I was looking through all
Speaker 1: the different requests that I've ever seen, and I realized
Speaker 1: there are tons. I mean, they've just been piling up, uh,
Speaker 1: And I was going over those with you, and you
Speaker 1: saw one that leapt out at you and you immediately
Speaker 1: wanted to do it. It comes to us from Jeff
Speaker 1: who wrote, Hi, Jonathan, since you asked, I do have
Speaker 1: a suggestion for a topic to cover that I don't
Speaker 1: think you have yet. Could you do an episode or
Speaker 1: two if needed to cover the rise and fall of Atari.
Speaker 1: Actually worked in the store that sold only Atari home
Speaker 1: computers and game systems and the early nineties. Atari's products
Speaker 1: are at the time we're as good or better than
Speaker 1: what was being put out by their competitors, and yet
Speaker 1: they failed big time. Thank you for the entertaining and
Speaker 1: educational show. I enjoyed Part one of the two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen review this morning. So clearly this request came in
Speaker 1: some time ago, I guess so. But yeah, this was
Speaker 1: one that when I brought it up to you, you said,
Speaker 1: absolutely we should do an episode about Attari. Well, you
Speaker 1: and I are the same age roughly, and we are
Speaker 1: children of Atari every way, you know, we grew up
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties during the Atari's heyday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was huge, huge in my life. And uh
Speaker 1: my brother actually uh has set his up recently and
Speaker 1: I was just playing uh Combat last week. That Combat
Speaker 1: and we'll get to this obviously was the game that
Speaker 1: shipped with and it kind of holds up. You know
Speaker 1: what it really does. I it's it's an incredibly simple
Speaker 1: game and has incredibly simple graphics, but it's the play
Speaker 1: ability comes in the fact that it's a two player
Speaker 1: game and uh, trash talking galore can happen. We had
Speaker 1: a blast. It really was a lot of fun, and
Speaker 1: not just for nostalgia. The gameplay, like you said, still
Speaker 1: holds up to a certain degree. I think, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's obviously for someone who's like, no, I
Speaker 1: need to have you know, the fourteen different controls mapped
Speaker 1: out on my keyboard and my my gaming mouse and everything.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna appeal to you, but but it's still
Speaker 1: a compelling experience. So we wanted to go through the
Speaker 1: rise and fall of Atari. And it is an epic story.
Speaker 1: I mean, it has so many different elements to it,
Speaker 1: and it's at least gonna be two episodes. We're gonna
Speaker 1: see how how far we can go before we have
Speaker 1: to take a break and replenish our our, our vital
Speaker 1: bodily fluids before we break out. Exactly. Good good reference there,
Speaker 1: Mr Chuck. So starting off a little little information before
Speaker 1: we get into the actual Attari days. Computer games have
Speaker 1: been around pretty much since the days that computers were
Speaker 1: first built. You know, you you have computer programmers who
Speaker 1: often had these analytical minds that were also fond of
Speaker 1: things like puzzles and games, and so naturally, when those
Speaker 1: early computer programs were being designed, programmers were thinking, huh,
Speaker 1: I wonder if I could actually make this machine do
Speaker 1: something fun, not just something functional. Yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the things you probably heard a lot in
Speaker 1: the early days. Would well, maybe they'd be fun if
Speaker 1: dot dot dot and uh, before you know what, they
Speaker 1: were playing some you know to us an archaic form
Speaker 1: of a video Yeah, maybe like a game version of
Speaker 1: like Tic Tac toe, you know, but instead of it
Speaker 1: having a video screen because video screens were late in
Speaker 1: the game in the computer days, they would print this
Speaker 1: 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 for
Speaker 1: you to look at, or a new strip of tape. Really,
Speaker 1: because a friend of mine, his name's Richard Garriot, and
Speaker 1: he's a big game developer. He created one of the
Speaker 1: big computer game successes and then in the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties called Ultima, and he talks about in his days
Speaker 1: when he was in computer programming classes in high school,
Speaker 1: it was all printed to tape and it was like
Speaker 1: a little adventure game and we'll talk about adventure in
Speaker 1: a bit too, where it would print out the room
Speaker 1: and your little position, like you'd be a little X
Speaker 1: in the room and you'd say go left. It would
Speaker 1: have to print a new version of it where the
Speaker 1: X was just slightly to the left. In the pre
Speaker 1: eco friendly days as well, these days, such a game
Speaker 1: would probably be frowned upon. So uh, but you know
Speaker 1: it sets the stage to show that that people realize
Speaker 1: there was potential or electronics in the game world. And
Speaker 1: that gets us up to nine eight, when a man
Speaker 1: named William Higginbotham of Brooke Caven National Laboratory veloped an
Speaker 1: electronic game called Tennis for two on a Donner Model
Speaker 1: thirty analog computer, and uh, it would simulate table tennis,
Speaker 1: and it simulated velocity and changes in direction, all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I looked it up just
Speaker 1: to see what it looked like. It looked like sort
Speaker 1: of like a like a ship's sonar or something. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It was taking an oscil lator, the same sort of
Speaker 1: thing that you might see as like a heart monitor
Speaker 1: in hospital, kind of kind of like that, and by
Speaker 1: you change by fiddling with the voltage, essentially he could
Speaker 1: change the different images so that you would have essentially
Speaker 1: to paddle like things and the ball like thing and
Speaker 1: play a very basic game. And he said that he
Speaker 1: had made it because people would come to visit the
Speaker 1: lab and there wasn't a whole lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: was actually interesting to look at, and so this was
Speaker 1: the way to entertain them. That's pretty funny to like
Speaker 1: to impress people he had stuff that was far more advanced.
Speaker 1: But he's like, oh, but look at this tennis for
Speaker 1: two and people aroba like, oh, yeah, exactly like cutting edge.
Speaker 1: So have you ever seen the mel Brooks films Silent Movie?
Speaker 1: All right? In Silent Movie, there's actually a scene where
Speaker 1: Sid Caesar Is is in the hospital. His character is
Speaker 1: in the hospital and to uh, Tom Deloise and Marty
Speaker 1: Felman who walk up to his heart monitor and turn
Speaker 1: it into this game and they play a game of
Speaker 1: Pong on his heart monitor, which totally forgot about causes
Speaker 1: him to totally freak out. But it's this game which
Speaker 1: is interesting because the original well we'll get into Pong,
Speaker 1: but the original Pongs were silent. Yes, yeah, that's actually true.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty two, that's when we get up
Speaker 1: to the time when m i T. Professor Steve Russell
Speaker 1: developed a game called Space War, which is one of
Speaker 1: the earliest video games. He did this with two of
Speaker 1: his students and they built it for a big mainframe computer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was the only way they could really at the time. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to play a computer game, you
Speaker 1: had to go someplace where essentially a room is dedicated
Speaker 1: to that computer, the Big Mac. Yeah, they were largely
Speaker 1: still using vacuum tubes for a lot of this technology.
Speaker 1: I mean, transistors had had started to come out, but
Speaker 1: they hadn't been integrated into computers deeply at this point. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's when around this times when an electrical engineering
Speaker 1: student named Nolan Bushnell, the probably the most important person
Speaker 1: in this story. Yeah, that's when he discovered space war
Speaker 1: because the computer lab at the university was going to
Speaker 1: the University of Utah College of Engineering, had space War
Speaker 1: on one of its computers. Yeah, he was. I saw
Speaker 1: an interview with him earlier today on YouTube where he
Speaker 1: was talking about at the time. He said there were
Speaker 1: only like four universities in the entire country that had
Speaker 1: graphical displays period, and University of Utah just happened to
Speaker 1: be one of them. And it seemed like when you
Speaker 1: start hearing about the story and how it all just
Speaker 1: fell into place, it's I don't know if I'm a
Speaker 1: believer in fate, but all these little puzzle pieces came
Speaker 1: together in just the right way to get his motor running. Basically,
Speaker 1: if if they hadn't, if any of the elements that
Speaker 1: took place, then the whole arcade industry could have been
Speaker 1: delayed by several years if he had just gone to
Speaker 1: a different university that didn't have computer screens. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the University of Utah was a pioneer in that space,
Speaker 1: and so he really got his introduction to it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Another interesting thing about him is that he would work
Speaker 1: in his off time, like when whenever school was out
Speaker 1: at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Yeah, that was a huge
Speaker 1: deal because that inspired the thought of, you know what,
Speaker 1: people are shoving quarters in these ski ball games and
Speaker 1: pinball and you know, all manner of sort of boardwalk
Speaker 1: arcade games. And he obviously had some sort of business
Speaker 1: sense to him because he thought, why not try and
Speaker 1: do this really fun thing that I've been sneaking into
Speaker 1: the lab and doing every night and charge people money
Speaker 1: for it? Right? What if we were to create an
Speaker 1: experience using an electronic game where on a per coin basis,
Speaker 1: you would get either an allotted amount of time to
Speaker 1: play or some other metric like in pong, it might
Speaker 1: be the number of lives. In most video games is
Speaker 1: number of lives, but a few it's time, um, and
Speaker 1: that that would determine how much of that experience you
Speaker 1: could have before you had to plunk in another quarter.
Speaker 1: And if I find it so compelling that I'll sneak
Speaker 1: into the to the lab, people be willing to pay
Speaker 1: a quarter for it. Yeah, it was a genius. It
Speaker 1: was absolutely, I mean you. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: criticisms that are leveled against Bushnell and Coordinate, including people
Speaker 1: who used to work with him. Um and a lot
Speaker 1: of people claim, well, he never invented anything. I have
Speaker 1: to object to that because he took two separate ideas
Speaker 1: and turned them into something that spawned an entire industry.
Speaker 1: And if that's not invention, I don't know what is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And whether or not he was I guess it wasn't coding,
Speaker 1: but whether or not he was soldering the games and
Speaker 1: inventing the games themselves. Those games are worthless unless someone
Speaker 1: comes along and says, you know what, I know how
Speaker 1: to package this and take it to the public for
Speaker 1: them to enjoy, Right, And so, I mean so without
Speaker 1: this this vision, again, I'm sure we would have eventually
Speaker 1: come around to the arcade industry. Anyway, someone would have
Speaker 1: come up with that idea, but it would have been
Speaker 1: later and the story might have been much different. So
Speaker 1: Bushnell graduates from college and goes to work for a
Speaker 1: company called Ampex. This is around nineteen sixty nine. Ampex
Speaker 1: is an electronics company, and I got a little bit
Speaker 1: of trivia something I thought you would appreciate, Chuck, you're
Speaker 1: a musician. So Ampex developed a tape recorder that less
Speaker 1: Paul used to pioneer the sound on sound technique. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Less Paul used an Ampex tape recorder which was designed
Speaker 1: to have a secondary writing head that would allow him
Speaker 1: to record a track and then play along with that
Speaker 1: recorded track to create an new mixed track of both
Speaker 1: of them together. So this would allow one musician to
Speaker 1: essentially back him or herself up. Yeah. Yeah. However, what
Speaker 1: it did do also is destroy the original track, the
Speaker 1: original recording, because it records over it, so you no
Speaker 1: longer have that, so you have you plus yes, and
Speaker 1: that's the new base. Yeah, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 1: I thought that you would appreciate that, So I am Tex.
Speaker 1: Ampex has had a real important part in the electronics
Speaker 1: industry in general, but it also plays host to the
Speaker 1: meeting of the two people who would really push Atari
Speaker 1: in the early days. That's uh, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Dabney they met nine, like you said, both employees
Speaker 1: of Ampex, and both um very much interested in, uh
Speaker 1: pioneering Space War as the very first video game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were looking at Space War and they thought, how
Speaker 1: can we make this as a coin operated a game. Now,
Speaker 1: clearly we can't do the same thing that Space War
Speaker 1: is doing because having a mainframe computer not something you
Speaker 1: can install in your local bar. 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. And that turned out to be
Speaker 1: sort of a recurring UM thing in Bushnell's career was
Speaker 1: this guy did something really neat. Let me sort of
Speaker 1: make a very similar version, but in a much like
Speaker 1: sleeker package that's consumer oriented. Yeah. I read a transcript
Speaker 1: of an interview that UM that Ted Dabney did. Read
Speaker 1: a lot of that. Actually, Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean
Speaker 1: there's clearly some bad blood between the two of them.
Speaker 1: But Dabney talked about how what would happen is Bushnell
Speaker 1: would come up to him and say I want to
Speaker 1: do this, How is that possible? Dabney would figure it out,
Speaker 1: tell him and then Bushnell would go off and do it.
Speaker 1: So Bushnell had skills, but Dabney always dismissed as saying
Speaker 1: he wasn't an engineer. He could do something if you
Speaker 1: told him how to do it, but he couldn't engineer
Speaker 1: it himself. Yeah, he need he was. He's sort of
Speaker 1: like a producer almost, Yeah, and really good at getting
Speaker 1: super talented people together to create a vision. Yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of like you could think of other pairings that this
Speaker 1: this applies to, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who
Speaker 1: will come up later, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates.
Speaker 1: I mean there are a lot of diff 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 arcade industry idea. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: they got together and they they said, well, let's sort
Speaker 1: 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 sissy 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 when things
Speaker 1: come into alignment there in sissy G. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that it was one of my my father's one of
Speaker 1: my father's favorite words, no joke. Uh, so I was
Speaker 1: instilled in my brain at an early age. They come
Speaker 1: up with this name, which they wouldn't stick with for
Speaker 1: reasons we'll get to. Uh. They thought about using a
Speaker 1: computer called the Data General Nova eight hundred, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty expensive and it still wasn't really going to fit
Speaker 1: their needs, so they weren't really sure how they were
Speaker 1: going to do this. Originally, the idea was all three
Speaker 1: of the initial founding members, Dabney Bushnell and Brian were
Speaker 1: going to contribute a hundred dollars into a group fund
Speaker 1: to be like the owner operating capital. Only Dabney and
Speaker 1: Bushnell did. Brian never did. So do you know why
Speaker 1: he was it because he didn't want to. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I I never came across. It was just a lot
Speaker 1: of matter of fact of Brian never put him. It's
Speaker 1: just never an explanation. Yeah. And so eventually both Bushnell
Speaker 1: and and uh Dabney would put in an extra two
Speaker 1: hundred and fiftyes. So that brought the owner's equity up
Speaker 1: to a incredible seven dollars princely some for this company. Uh.
Speaker 1: And like you were saying, Chuck, they went to Nothing
Speaker 1: to say, like, uh, maybe you can help us by
Speaker 1: manufacturing this thing. Will retain the rights to the game.
Speaker 1: You'll be able to manufacture it and sell it, but
Speaker 1: we get royalties for it as well. And it's the
Speaker 1: next big thing. Yeah. They convinced Nutting that's next big.
Speaker 1: So Nothing Associates has no clue about this stuff. They
Speaker 1: essentially give them the space to do whatever they want
Speaker 1: to do, thinking like all right, well we we can't
Speaker 1: do this ourselves. We're gonna let this group do this
Speaker 1: and if it pays off, it's huge. We'll be making
Speaker 1: lots of money. And if it doesn't, well it we'll
Speaker 1: just call it a loss. So the agreement included a
Speaker 1: five percent royalty on unit sales, so that's what the
Speaker 1: group would get um. And the units were relatively inexpensive.
Speaker 1: They were like a thousand dollars, which in today's money
Speaker 1: is about six grand a piece. But it was it
Speaker 1: was not for the home consumer. It was this like
Speaker 1: the yeah, exactly, this would be like a restaurant, you
Speaker 1: know that's or maybe a bowling alley something like that.
Speaker 1: But remember there's no market for these yet. Yeah, no
Speaker 1: one knows because they didn't exist. It's just crazy to
Speaker 1: think about. No one knew if it was going to
Speaker 1: work at all, and it sort of didn't, sort of didn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a big success for them at all, right, Right,
Speaker 1: And the one of the part probably was was that
Speaker 1: this game that was based off Space War, just like
Speaker 1: Space War, was kind of complicated. It was a game
Speaker 1: built by engineers for engineers. So you see like all
Speaker 1: these buttons and dials and stuff, and you think, all right, uh,
Speaker 1: this does not appear to be intuitive in any No
Speaker 1: one really understood how to play it. It looked a
Speaker 1: little like Asteroids. Yeah. Um, as far as just the
Speaker 1: look of the game, yeah, And it's one of those
Speaker 1: that when you look at you think, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I I don't even know what it is, like how
Speaker 1: I control the things, nor do I know what I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to do. So it had some limited success, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't a runaway hit. It just wasn't that simplistic
Speaker 1: experience that the average person could immediately identify. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: plus it was I mean, uh, I mean people are
Speaker 1: used to seeing a pinball machine maybe, but if you
Speaker 1: look up this thing online, there's all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it seems there. You know, Urcade games to us now,
Speaker 1: there were so ubiquitous, the game cabinet itself, But when
Speaker 1: you look at this thing at the time, no one
Speaker 1: knew what the heck it was. Right there was this
Speaker 1: weird looking yellow pod right with a TV screen in
Speaker 1: it in the corner, and I have no idea with
Speaker 1: all the this little game pad on the front of it,
Speaker 1: and what am I even supposed to do with that
Speaker 1: on my way to the bathroom. I mean, the whole
Speaker 1: thing wouldn't have even been possible except for the fact
Speaker 1: that Dabney made a breakthrough while he was he was
Speaker 1: tooling around in his home. According to the interviews I've seen,
Speaker 1: in his daughter's bedroom. He used that as his workspace.
Speaker 1: He moved one of his daughters in with the other
Speaker 1: two daughters. He's like, I need you room. This is
Speaker 1: going to be my lab. And uh. He started playing
Speaker 1: with cathode ray to video screens without the use of
Speaker 1: a computer as as an input, and he used counters
Speaker 1: and gates basic electronic components to manipulate that CRT display
Speaker 1: to create the images on a screen that you can
Speaker 1: control by changing the values directly. So uh, think of
Speaker 1: you know, you remember the tracking on a TV when
Speaker 1: the screen would be rolling and you have to adjust
Speaker 1: the tracking snature. Because we're old, we remember this stuff.
Speaker 1: That was the basis of him being able to control
Speaker 1: vertical movement on the screen. He just essentially he manufactured
Speaker 1: a way of doing that where by using a control
Speaker 1: you could change the the input into the television and
Speaker 1: make that vertical movement possible. For horizontal we had to
Speaker 1: change voltage is in a really interesting way so that
Speaker 1: you could get horizontal movement. Otherwise you would only be
Speaker 1: able to move up and down. Now, was that the
Speaker 1: spot in motion circuit? Yes, okay, and that changed everything
Speaker 1: because this meant for the first time that I, 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 circuitry, and those circuit
Speaker 1: boards are going to look different because it's those physical
Speaker 1: components that create the assets of each game, which is
Speaker 1: kind of cool to think about because these days we're
Speaker 1: used to the general purpose machine, right, the computer, and
Speaker 1: then everything else is controlled on the software side. But
Speaker 1: this was all hardware, which you know for every game
Speaker 1: 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 in 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 arcading machines. We're really
Speaker 1: more like pinball games than they were like the modern games.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, really are staying 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 a great name. They officially debuted the game at
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy one Music and Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago,
Speaker 1: and by the end of nineteen seventy one they begin
Speaker 1: to ship the game. So that first game was just
Speaker 1: sort of a test run to see if they could
Speaker 1: get it to to Look now, it doesn't do great
Speaker 1: business because it was a units total sold yeah um,
Speaker 1: but it was enough money um for for Dabney and
Speaker 1: Bushnell to sort of continue to fund their company. Right.
Speaker 1: They decided at that point that they wanted to incorporate
Speaker 1: Sissy G and then they had a speed bump because
Speaker 1: they realized I found out there was already another company
Speaker 1: using the name sissy Gy. Yeah, apparently it was a
Speaker 1: little candle company and Mendocino, California like some hippies, So
Speaker 1: that that put their plans on pause as they had
Speaker 1: to rethink the name. And also at that time, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, Bushnell would attend a meeting that would
Speaker 1: later come back to haunt him. Yeah, he attended a
Speaker 1: meeting that had a presentation of the Magnavox Odyssey, which
Speaker 1: is a home video game console that featured very several
Speaker 1: silent games, the most notable one being a table tennis game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and who was it was? It was the man's name
Speaker 1: Bear was the head of Magnavox. At the time, he
Speaker 1: had been a thing called the brown Box, which was
Speaker 1: later changed to the Magnavox Odyssey. And like you said,
Speaker 1: I think a lesson to be learned here. Has never
Speaker 1: signed the guest book because Bushnell um signed the guest
Speaker 1: Book as an attendee. And these before they took the
Speaker 1: Odyssey to market, they had these very special small batch
Speaker 1: screenings for invitees only, and which wasn't the smartest thing
Speaker 1: in the world to do either, Yeah, because they did
Speaker 1: have a patent on it. It would allow people that
Speaker 1: chance to maybe we could beat them to market by
Speaker 1: creating exact similar and that's exactly what happened in the
Speaker 1: case of Bushnell. Yeah, so this was like this would
Speaker 1: come back to haunt him later. And yeah, if you
Speaker 1: are going to go to one of these meetings, don't
Speaker 1: leave a paper trail. That's 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, which Bushnell was just crazy for. And
Speaker 1: apparently the meaning of it is basically the equivalent to
Speaker 1: I've got you in check. I'm about to take all
Speaker 1: your stones, is what he said, right right, And and
Speaker 1: I think the 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: hundred 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 game 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: sore slope away. I always wonder what that was. It's
Speaker 1: a stylized A. So that's one thing. Some people call
Speaker 1: it the Mount Fuji logo because I think it looks
Speaker 1: like Mount Fuji. Apperman 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 Auberman 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 he had a big influence on that early artwork
Speaker 1: of Atari, especially in the arcade world. He would sadly
Speaker 1: pass away 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. Yes, he joins Atari and he
Speaker 1: begins working on one of Atari's biggest hits, Pong, which
Speaker 1: is odd in a way. It's odd for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons, the biggest one being no one ever intended
Speaker 1: Pong to be a hit. Yeah. Bushonell at the time
Speaker 1: was working on a driving game. He said that was
Speaker 1: really hard. Uh, driving games still are I think one
Speaker 1: of the tougher ones to get right to really nail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he said he hired Alcorn and was like, well,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to give him a little test to
Speaker 1: see how good he was because I wasn't gonna throw
Speaker 1: him on this driving game right away up for failure.
Speaker 1: Can you program using this circuit that damn produced, right
Speaker 1: And because this is this is a whole new thing,
Speaker 1: like the designing game using this circuit that had been
Speaker 1: pioneered for the computer space games. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Alcorn takes this concept and he works on on Pong.
Speaker 1: And unlike the earlier table tennis electronic games, this one
Speaker 1: had sound. It sounds so silly, but it was a
Speaker 1: huge difference to actually hear that little boom boom boom,
Speaker 1: and uh, it had a few other noteworthy characteristics to
Speaker 1: differentiate it that also sound a little bit like of course,
Speaker 1: but it really made a big difference. The ball sped
Speaker 1: up as you played the game, which was a huge,
Speaker 1: huge difference. Um. And then you talked about some of
Speaker 1: these sort of happy accidents. One of them occurred with Pong.
Speaker 1: There was that little space at the very top and
Speaker 1: the bottom of the screen where you couldn't block and
Speaker 1: in other words, a game couldn't go on forever. At
Speaker 1: some point you were going to lose it to that
Speaker 1: corner some at some bounce, it's going to hit that
Speaker 1: trajectory where no matter what, you can't block it, and
Speaker 1: it just it made it more fun. And it was
Speaker 1: a two player game, so again it'll it pitched people
Speaker 1: against 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 reppeal 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: and the taps tavern. Yeah. I look that up to
Speaker 1: see if it still existed, and I don't think it does, sad. Uh.
Speaker 1: So the original Pong was black and white, had a
Speaker 1: black and white television for a screen, and people would
Speaker 1: come in and play, even if they weren't planning on
Speaker 1: buying anything to eat or drink. It became a destination
Speaker 1: h game. Yeah, to the point where I read that
Speaker 1: early in the game's life, they got a call saying,
Speaker 1: the game's not working. You need to come out here
Speaker 1: in services. So it came out to find out what
Speaker 1: was wrong, and what was wrong was that they were
Speaker 1: using an old milk jug to catch the coins inside
Speaker 1: the cabinet, and the milk jug had filled to overflowing
Speaker 1: and no more coins could come in, so the game
Speaker 1: was malfunctioned, so they had to empty the coins from
Speaker 1: the things that they could play it. Uh and uh.
Speaker 1: It was kind of interesting like this. We'll talk more
Speaker 1: about in the second but the the plan was that
Speaker 1: in order to give an incentive to businesses to buy
Speaker 1: into the arcade games, they said, all right, well, we
Speaker 1: will split revenue down the middle, goes to you, comes
Speaker 1: to us, which literally, we will count out the quarters
Speaker 1: and will get half of them. And they literally went
Speaker 1: from place to place employees of Atari picking up sack
Speaker 1: fulls of quarters at the end of every year, possibly
Speaker 1: suffering enormous back pain, one of whom apparently carried a
Speaker 1: roofing hatchet for protection. Um. But they were bringing in.
Speaker 1: They said a single unit typically would earn about forty
Speaker 1: dollars a day, which is over two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: dollars today, um, which is that's fantastic for the first
Speaker 1: thing of its kind. And um. It said that they
Speaker 1: believe machines were ordered by the end of nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy four, over eight thousand of these were
Speaker 1: all over the country and abroad. I think at this point, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and keep in mind these are like, you know,
Speaker 1: a grand apiece, and they're getting uh, they're getting this,
Speaker 1: this all of the money at this point because originally
Speaker 1: they went to uh Nutting and said do you want
Speaker 1: to do this? And they thought, well, no, we don't
Speaker 1: really want to work with Nutting anymore. We want to
Speaker 1: be able to do this with someone else. They they
Speaker 1: started shopping around to see if they could work with
Speaker 1: a different distributor of of games, like like the kind
Speaker 1: of games you would find at an amusement park. So
Speaker 1: they look at Bally because Bally of course was famous
Speaker 1: for their pinball as well as there are other there
Speaker 1: are other games that they were pioneering in, but Bally
Speaker 1: wasn't wasn't sold on the idea pong. They wanted Atrii
Speaker 1: to make a game for them, in fact, a couple
Speaker 1: of games. One would be a pinball game and one
Speaker 1: would be a video game, but they weren't interested in Pong.
Speaker 1: And ultimately the guys that Attari decided, you know what,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this ourselves. But it was a huge,
Speaker 1: huge jump for them, you know, they didn't have the
Speaker 1: background and manufacturing. No, it turned out to be a
Speaker 1: great move. Though, Yeah, no, it's absolutely it. It really
Speaker 1: set them for success for at least the next couple
Speaker 1: of years. So some interesting things happened in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: at the tail end of seventy two, Atari would file
Speaker 1: a patent for Pong. Now keep in mind that when
Speaker 1: you file a patent it can take years before you
Speaker 1: get you know, that approved or declined. And it was
Speaker 1: already released at this point when they filed. Yes, they
Speaker 1: didn't pre file, so they file after the games already released. Uh.
Speaker 1: In ninety three, they do something that at first I
Speaker 1: was confused about until I read more details, which is
Speaker 1: that 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 in
Speaker 1: a competitor to Atari. Not just a competitor, but they
Speaker 1: are 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, UH,
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. That makes sense, So it opens
Speaker 1: up a lot of options. So it's a little bit, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little little little uh spoken mirrors a little bit
Speaker 1: of guests which cup the ball is under sort of 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 systems like this. Meanwhile, Long is
Speaker 1: going crazy. Yeah, it's going crazy for for many reasons
Speaker 1: that we already talked about. But um, another big reason
Speaker 1: I saw the interview with Bushnell said is that women
Speaker 1: were very good at it for some reason, and it
Speaker 1: appealed to women. And it was the first, um, I
Speaker 1: guess sort of the first time he said that women
Speaker 1: felt comfortable going up to a man in a bar
Speaker 1: and say, hey, you know, do you want to play
Speaker 1: this game with me? And he said that made a
Speaker 1: big difference. It appealed to both sexes and UM, and
Speaker 1: it also brought it down, as the this great I
Speaker 1: g N article says, to you know, where real people
Speaker 1: congregated it, brought it into the bars, into the bowling alleys.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't like you know, engineering students exactly. It wasn't.
Speaker 1: It wasn't some computer lab where you had to have uh,
Speaker 1: you know, student access to eat. Another interesting thing that
Speaker 1: happened in nine was that they got a new space
Speaker 1: for putting together their pong machines. Did you hear about this?
Speaker 1: The ten thousand square foot space they got. So there
Speaker 1: was one story that Dabney told about how originally the
Speaker 1: little space they were in they found out that their
Speaker 1: neighbor had stopped paying rent and essentially scaddled, So they
Speaker 1: cut a hole in the wall and used the next
Speaker 1: door space. But even that wasn't big enough because then
Speaker 1: they were like, well, what happens when we get caughts
Speaker 1: as well? We'll just ask how much we owe them,
Speaker 1: Like when we get caught, we'll we'll pay for it,
Speaker 1: but until then we won't um. But then they decided
Speaker 1: that they would lease a space, and they found an
Speaker 1: a business that was no longer doing this is it
Speaker 1: was ten thou square foot roller rink and they turned
Speaker 1: it into their manufacturing center for pong. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there's the story about how that that that signed guest
Speaker 1: thing comes back to haunt and see Magnifox yes for
Speaker 1: electronic table tennis. So Atari did not have a patent
Speaker 1: for pong. Magnavox had a patent for electronic table tennis.
Speaker 1: And this starts to raise some important conversations between the
Speaker 1: two where Magnavox is looking at pong and saying, that's
Speaker 1: our game, So we're going to go after these guys. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Bushnell buys out Ted Dabney from the company. Depending upon
Speaker 1: whom you aske, Dabney sometimes just says no, I was
Speaker 1: just kind of canned. Yeah. He says that he was
Speaker 1: forced out basically that his old friend came up to
Speaker 1: him and basically said, um, if you don't accept this
Speaker 1: buy out, then I'm going to take all the assets
Speaker 1: over to a different company and you'll you'll be left
Speaker 1: with nothing, right, So he took the opportunity to get
Speaker 1: bought out. I didn't see numbers. Yeah I didn't either.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone has ever about it. It It sounds like,
Speaker 1: yeah the the interview, definitely he portrays Bushnell as misrepresenting
Speaker 1: the truth. Let's say that's a very kind way of
Speaker 1: putting it. And I haven't heard Bushnell talk much about it.
Speaker 1: He seems to, I don't know, gloss over that, or
Speaker 1: at least not even address it. Yeah, that's from what
Speaker 1: I've seen. Well. Uh, nineteen seven three was also when
Speaker 1: Atari got a new hire in the electrical engineering department.
Speaker 1: You may have heard of him. His name is Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: So Steve Jobs joined Atari in nineteen seventy three, and
Speaker 1: by the end of the year, Key Games in Atari,
Speaker 1: which remember are really being operated simultaneously by the same
Speaker 1: heads of people, into a licensing agreement for Atari to
Speaker 1: produce a version of the game Elimination, which was key
Speaker 1: games first first title. Yeah, and by the way, can
Speaker 1: you guess do you want to guess what the game
Speaker 1: Elimination was? The title makes it sound like it's something terrible.
Speaker 1: It was not. It was not. It was a four
Speaker 1: player version of Pong, and so uh, the Atari version
Speaker 1: would become known as Quadrapong. So it's funny that Atari
Speaker 1: is licensing a game that essentially the same folks had developed, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's all again, it's all this sort of shell game
Speaker 1: going on. So moving up to nineteen seventy four, this
Speaker 1: is where we start seeing the Magnavox thing come to
Speaker 1: a head. The inventor Ralph Bayer convinces Magnavox to sue Atari,
Speaker 1: claiming that the company copied the electronic table tennis game
Speaker 1: from the Odyssey, which they did, Yeah, pretty much, And
Speaker 1: Bushnell basically comes up. The guy makes all the right moves,
Speaker 1: it seems like for a while. Um he basically says,
Speaker 1: you know what, We'll settle for some money and will
Speaker 1: become a licensee, so you don't have to worry about us.
Speaker 1: You go and sue everybody else because Paul was getting
Speaker 1: knocked off all over the place, and you spend all
Speaker 1: your time doing that. We'll settle for some money, will
Speaker 1: be a licensee, and we'll make that and some other
Speaker 1: Magnavox titles, and just don't worry about us anymore. And
Speaker 1: Magnavox is like, all right, yeah, it was good to me, brilliant.
Speaker 1: I mean, they no longer Atari no longer has to
Speaker 1: go after these copycats because Magnavox is going to do
Speaker 1: it on their behalf and they're not being h come
Speaker 1: after for Magna Yeah, so the settlement shield basically exactly
Speaker 1: set the amount. We don't it's not publicized, but according
Speaker 1: to different accounts, it could be anywhere between four thousand
Speaker 1: dollars and a million bucks, so not chump change. But
Speaker 1: still when you when you know now you've got like
Speaker 1: your big brother looking out for you, you don't know,
Speaker 1: it's they can just make money, 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. Yeah. And this is
Speaker 1: also the year Dabney, who had who had left, buys
Speaker 1: the name the rights to the name Scissor G Game
Speaker 1: Company from Atari. Uh. And then he also would leave
Speaker 1: the board of directors in nineteen seventy four, which was
Speaker 1: his last connection to the company that by that time
Speaker 1: Dabney's connections are now severed. Uh. And then meanwhile Key
Speaker 1: Games releases its first original game called Tank, which ends
Speaker 1: up being a massive hit. Uh. And then so such
Speaker 1: a big hit, keep in my nineteen Tank comes out,
Speaker 1: the demand is so high they go ahead and develop
Speaker 1: and produce Tank two in that same year. Like you
Speaker 1: think about how video games are produced and how granted
Speaker 1: it's a totally different ball game, these days. But the
Speaker 1: way video games are produced these days, they go in
Speaker 1: for years of development. If you get a game, and
Speaker 1: you won't expect a sequel for several years to come,
Speaker 1: unless with a few exceptions like the Assassin's Creed series
Speaker 1: appears to have a sequel come out every few months.
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 Pon 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 that was.
Speaker 1: This was not a cartridge. Yeah, so it's all again,
Speaker 1: it's hard coded into the console, right y. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: I had UM, I don't I had I had one
Speaker 1: that was I don't think it was Pong um, and
Speaker 1: I don't think it was. It wasn't the Magnavox Odyssey,
Speaker 1: because I seemed to remember there were sound effects. But
Speaker 1: I did have one that was the collection of essentially variations,
Speaker 1: and Pong Pong was one, but you also had Racketball,
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. Interest like there's there's a
Speaker 1: whole selection of these style games, but they're all just
Speaker 1: variations on an exactly. So I had one of those
Speaker 1: I don't know if hey, listeners, if you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about and you think, oh, that sounds like
Speaker 1: the blah blah blah, Yeah, you just let me know. Um.
Speaker 1: But this is also around the time when Atari would
Speaker 1: announce the acquisition of Key Games, that Tory buys its
Speaker 1: own company. Joe Keenan became Joe Keenan, who remember was
Speaker 1: the head of Key Games. He's also Bushnell's neighbor. Yeah.
Speaker 1: According to the story Dabney Toldy says, yeah. Bush Nell
Speaker 1: says he walked up to Joe one day when Joe
Speaker 1: was mowing his law and said, Hey, would you like
Speaker 1: to run a company that looks like it's competing against me?
Speaker 1: Need a shell company owner because company, but Joe Keenan
Speaker 1: would actually become the new president of Atari and Nolan
Speaker 1: Bushnell was becomes the chairman of of Atari. UH. And
Speaker 1: this is also when at starts working on a project
Speaker 1: code named Stella yea, 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, right, So this is why if
Speaker 1: you had one of those old cartridge based systems, uh,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't let you do things like keep track of
Speaker 1: your high score. For example, you plug your cartridgeen and
Speaker 1: you could get a high score, but as soon as
Speaker 1: you turned the sheen off, that's erased. Because it was
Speaker 1: read only memory couldn't write anything. So the console would
Speaker 1: have all the stuff that would allow it to accept
Speaker 1: these cartridges. But the beauty of it was you were
Speaker 1: not limited to a select number of titles. As long
Speaker 1: as more cartridge as would come out, you could play
Speaker 1: different games. Yeah. And uh, you know we should set
Speaker 1: the scene here in the early to mid nineties seventies. Um,
Speaker 1: there was not a lot of options as a child. Um,
Speaker 1: you had crappy handheld games, Tiger 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: stations pre Fox even Yeah, just the big three, ABC,
Speaker 1: B NBC, and CBS. UM, and there were you know,
Speaker 1: all the all the games were like uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there were card games and and you know or actually
Speaker 1: playing outside with your friends, which was great, but but
Speaker 1: there was not a lot. There weren't many options. So
Speaker 1: home computing in the home video console was to call
Speaker 1: it revolutionary. There isn't a word big enough to call
Speaker 1: it what it was, right, And so keep in mind
Speaker 1: this is this is the dawn of two eras that
Speaker 1: are coming about at the same time. They're both about
Speaker 1: to change children's worlds forever. One is that the arcade
Speaker 1: is on the horizon, like not not not just the
Speaker 1: you know, occasional game in a bar or restaurant or
Speaker 1: bowling out. Yeah, and they had arcades previously, but like
Speaker 1: we said, it was pinball and yeah, Skei ball and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Right, So the video the video arcade
Speaker 1: is just about to come to pass, and the home
Speaker 1: video game market is about to come to pass. Suddenly
Speaker 1: we have way more options than uh, you know, finding
Speaker 1: out who's really good at getting hit with a stick?
Speaker 1: That was That was my favorite game as a kid.
Speaker 1: I was really good at that game. I could get
Speaker 1: hit by a stick like. Uh. So, nineteen seventies six
Speaker 1: we get a game coming out from Atari called Breakout.
Speaker 1: Yeah designed, um, well, we thought it was designed and
Speaker 1: perfected by Steve Jobs because he was the employee assigned
Speaker 1: to that job. Yeah, Bushnell and Bristow. Steve Bristow, who
Speaker 1: was another employee of Atari, came up with the concept
Speaker 1: and gave it to Steve Jobs and said, make this
Speaker 1: thing that we thought of essentially kind of a racquetball
Speaker 1: style game. And so Jobs goes back, does some work,
Speaker 1: comes back with a circuit board and says I did it,
Speaker 1: and they hook it up. They're like, wow, this is great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in fact, it's so great. You have done such a
Speaker 1: good job designing this where you've created a really efficient system,
Speaker 1: Like 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: really suff he made this thing? So? Yeah, wasn't he?
Speaker 1: AC actually built the integrated circuit that was used in Breakout,
Speaker 1: and Breakout was and it is still a great game.
Speaker 1: It's another one of those that holds up. It really
Speaker 1: does very challenging, great gameplay. It's still a challenge. And
Speaker 1: then uh, and then as soon as this success hit Jobs,
Speaker 1: he said, all right, guys, see you that he and
Speaker 1: Wasniak and a person who was one of the um
Speaker 1: developers over at Atari all go to form a little
Speaker 1: company called Apple. That's right. It took them a couple
Speaker 1: of years to get things going, but they of course
Speaker 1: would end up kind of repeating the success that Attari
Speaker 1: was seeing in the video game market with the personal
Speaker 1: computer market. So in a way, you could think of
Speaker 1: Atari as being at least partially responsible not just for
Speaker 1: the video game industry, but also the personal computer industry,
Speaker 1: because otherwise Jobs might not have had the the inspiration
Speaker 1: in the capital to really go out and say, let's
Speaker 1: 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 had this great idea for the
Speaker 1: vcs or what would become the AT and they couldn't
Speaker 1: really fund it to the extent that they needed to
Speaker 1: 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 Atari was
Speaker 1: really was. They said, Um, there were a lot of
Speaker 1: marijuana smoking. They called an MRB session Marijuana Review 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 the interviews I've I've seen, the
Speaker 1: names were picked from attractive ladies who were receptionists or
Speaker 1: secretaries at Atari. Yeah. Really, you know, forward thinking, classy
Speaker 1: 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 minds. 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 in
Speaker 1: Dabney and was like, the pizzas crappy, and in here
Speaker 1: it's like, well, I needed to be loud and the
Speaker 1: pizza just has to be mediocre at best. And you
Speaker 1: know what, he was right because the pizza was never
Speaker 1: good and every one of us loved that place. I
Speaker 1: want I want to do an episode at some point.
Speaker 1: Looking I don't know if I can do it because
Speaker 1: I don't know if it really falls into tech stuff,
Speaker 1: but I would love to do the story of Chuck
Speaker 1: E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. I grew up knowing Showbiz Pizza,
Speaker 1: not Chuck E Cheese. I remember, I remember Showbiz Pizza specifically. 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, but if you thought the
Speaker 1: two were kind of similar, it's because the creators of
Speaker 1: Showbiz Pizza originally worked on the Chuck E Cheese and
Speaker 1: then there was a falling out in a split, so
Speaker 1: there was another one in Atlanta called Sergeant Singers. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I totally for yeah. And I had
Speaker 1: a little quick side story here. When I was like twelve,
Speaker 1: the new it might have been Showbiz actually opened up
Speaker 1: and for their grand opening they had an invitation only
Speaker 1: thing that somehow my dad was an elementary school principle
Speaker 1: that got an invitation to this and UH to come
Speaker 1: with his kids. And you basically walk in and everything
Speaker 1: was free that night. Wow, so free food. They gave
Speaker 1: you the sackfuls of tokens anytime you wanted them, and
Speaker 1: it was literally stands out as one of the best
Speaker 1: nights of my childhood. I still remember it to this
Speaker 1: day as being like one of the most fun things
Speaker 1: I've ever done. I could see that, I mean that
Speaker 1: would that would be a dream come true. A free man.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. It blew my mind. Well, we have talked
Speaker 1: for 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 wow, tease it right before
Speaker 1: the release of the I know, we gotta have a
Speaker 1: reason for people to come back next week. You get
Speaker 1: really good. Yeah, we've got tons more to talk about.
Speaker 1: I mean, we haven't even left the seventies yet, and
Speaker 1: trust me, like we've got some drama coming up with
Speaker 1: the rise and fall of the video game industry as
Speaker 1: a whole, not to mention the crazy corporate shuffling of
Speaker 1: the Atari brand, which is kind of heartbreaking, but we
Speaker 1: will we'll address that too. And we've got more to
Speaker 1: talk about as far as just the greatest Attari games ever,
Speaker 1: the worst Atari games ever, the ones that you and
Speaker 1: I both played with your kids, and our our reflection
Speaker 1: on that. So make sure you tune in for that. Remember,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for future episodes, just send
Speaker 1: me a message tech Stuff at how stuffworks dot com
Speaker 1: is my email. Drop me a line on Twitter or
Speaker 1: Facebook or tumbler. It's tech stuff h s W at
Speaker 1: all three of those. Remember to check out Chuck's work
Speaker 1: on stuff you should know. Yeah, the Pinball episode that
Speaker 1: my interest. Folks listening to this one, sweet, I'll definitely
Speaker 1: tune in for that. Pinball is one of my great passions.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to go to the Pinball Museum in
Speaker 1: Vegas and just lose myself well, that wraps this up. Guys.
Speaker 1: We will talk to you again. Releases for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, because it has stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com