Replay: The History of Video Games (3 page)

Hand-made: Bill Pitts (left) and Hugh Tuck constructing the first coin-op video game,
Galaxy Game
. Courtesy of Bill Pitts

2. Avoid Missing Ball For High Score

As a student Bill Pitts lived for life underground. Instead of attending lectures, Pitts spent his time at Stanford University, California, combing the sprawling network of steam tunnels beneath the 8,000-acre campus for access points into off-limits buildings. “I went to Stanford in the fall of ’64 and for the first two years my hobby was breaking into buildings,” he recalled.

While Pitts was not the only student exploring the ill-lit and noisy tunnels, his expeditions were mainly a solitary affair. “There were others, but we didn’t really know each other,” he said. “Sometimes there would be a brick wall and the tunnel would go through and others before me had knocked the bricks out so you could crawl through.” Exploring the tunnels was a risky business: “It was pretty dangerous. I had a very heavy leather jacket; it was all raggedy, the lining on the inside was falling out. I would wear it in the steam tunnels even though it was hotter than 120° Fahrenheit down there. If any of the steam pipes broke I thought it would protect me, but actually I would have just cooked a little bit more slowly.”

Pitts’ interest in exploring Stanford’s campus would prove fateful. One evening in 1966, while driving to meet some friends at a bar, he spotted a driveway going up into the hills about five miles from the centre of Stanford. “I could tell by the sign right at the front that this was a Stanford facility,” he said. “It was also a building I hadn’t broken into yet, so I figured I needed to come back later that night and break into this building.” Armed with the toolkit he used for picking locks and unscrewing grates on his adventures, Pitts returned to the mystery site at 11pm that night to break into the laboratory. His initial reaction was disappointment. “It’s all lit up and there’s lots of doors and they are all unlocked, but I go inside and what’s inside is the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project. They had a big huge time-sharing computer system called the PDP-6 – one big computer and probably 20 Teletypes connected to it so lots of people could each be developing code simultaneously and each one thought they had the computer to themselves. Back then it was magical. It was amazing that this single computer could be servicing 20 people at the same time. I was enthralled by it.”
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Pitts had done some introductory computing courses and wanted to get to grips with the space-age computer he had discovered. He persuaded Lester Earnest, the head of the artificial intelligence project, to let him use the machine when no one else was waiting. “Les said: ‘You can use it as long as no-one else is using it’,” said Pitts. “So I ended up going up there every night probably at eight or nine o’clock and working through ’til six or seven in the morning when other people showed up. I didn’t go to classes anymore. I couldn’t care less about classes; I wanted to play with computers. My dad was going crazy, my parents were well aware of the fact that I wasn’t going to classes. My dad would tell me you’re just going to be a computer bum.”

At the facility Pitts saw first-hand the cutting edge of computer science. He worked with Arthur Samuel, who had quit IBM for academia at the start of the 1960s, on the latest incarnation of his Checkers game. He heard the first music created by the software that would form the basis of Yamaha’s keyboards. He watched postgraduate students connect robotic arms and cameras to the PDP-6 and teach it to recognise, pick up and stack blocks. And he got to play
Spacewar!
.

“
Spacewar!
was one of the cool things at the A.I. lab,” he recalled. “I had a friend from high school, Hugh Tuck, and when he was in town I’d take him to the A.I. lab and we’d play
Spacewar!
.” And it was during one of these
Spacewar!
sessions in 1966 that Tuck remarked that if only they could make a coin-operated version of the game they would get rich. With computers still hugely expensive and large, the idea was little more than a daydream. But then, in 1969, the Digital Equipment Corporation unveiled the $20,000 PDP-11. At that price, Pitts thought, a coin-op version of
Spacewar!
might be possible: “I called Hugh up and said we could now build one of these things.”

While $20,000 was still prohibitive for arcades that were used to buying slot machines for around $1,000, th pair figured they could make one and work out how cheap they would need to make the machine for it to be commercially viable. With money from Tuck’s wealthy parents, the pair started adapting a PDP-11 to create their coin-operated version of
Spacewar!
, which they named
Galaxy Game
. They decided to charge players 10 cents a game or a quarter for three games. The winner of each game would get a free game. The idea was to ensure the machine was in constant use and therefore always taking money.

By August 1971 everything was almost in place: The Tresidder student union on the Stanford University campus had agreed to be the test site for
Galaxy Game
and the final touches were being made. Then the pair got a call from a man named Nolan Bushnell, who worked for a company called Nutting Associates. “He had heard of us through mutual contacts,” said Pitts. “He called me up and said ‘Hey, come on over and see what I’m doing. I know you’re building a version of
Spacewar!
using a whole PDP-11 and that’s gotta cost a lot of money and I just want to show you the one I’m doing because I think you’re going to lose a lot of money.”

* * *

Bushnell, like Pitts, discovered
Spacewar!
during his student days at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s and had fallen in love with the game. But, unlike Pitts, Bushnell had long-standing interest in the amusements business. At school he wanted to design rides for Disney’s amusement parks and, after gambling away his tuition fees at university, had started working for the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, a town just north of Salt Lake City where the University of Utah was based. Bushnell’s love of
Spacewar!
, interest in electrical engineering and involvement with the amusement business, coupled with his entrepreneurial spirit, caused him to immediately think about turning the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game into a coin-operated machine. “When I first saw
Spacewar!
on the PDP-1, I was working summers at Lagoon so I was intimately aware of arcade economics,” he said. “It occurred to me that if I could put that game on a computer screen and into the arcades, it would make a lot of money. But with the million-dollar computers of the time it wouldn’t work.”

But the idea refused to go away. After graduating in 1968, Bushnell became an engineer for Ampex Corporation, a company best known for its breakthroughs in audio and video recording technology. While working there he read about the Data General Nova, a computer that cost $3,995, and immediately thought again of
Spacewar!
. “I thought if I could get that computer to run four monitors and have four coin slots, it would make enough money to pay for itself,” said Bushnell. Bushnell teamed up with Ted Dabney, another Ampex engineer, to try and design his
Spacewar!
coin-op machine on paper. “We were good friends and Ted had a lot of analogue computer skills that I didn’t have,” said Bushnell. “I was a digital guy. I knew how to deal with bits and bytes and logic and things like that and Ted really understood a lot more about how tonterface with a consumer television set and power supplies and things like that.”

Using the Nova proved to be a dead end. For a start the computer was so slow it couldn’t update the television screen quickly enough to keep the game moving at the necessary speed. Bushnell and Dabney sought to ease the demands on the computer by creating separate pieces of hardware to handle jobs such as displaying the stars that formed the backdrop of the game. It still didn’t work. Even reducing the number of screens supported by the computer failed to get the game working. By Thanksgiving 1970, Bushnell concluded the project was doomed to failure. “I got frustrated and decided to abandon it,” said Bushnell. “But I kept worrying about the problem and thinking about it and then I had that ‘a-ha’ moment where I thought I’m going to get rid of the computer and do it all in hardware. From that point, it just flew together.”

Bit by bit Dabney and Bushnell created dedicated circuits to perform each of the functions they originally hoped Data General’s computer would handle. The approach not only overcame the technological difficulties but also made the machine a lot cheaper to build. So much cheaper that it no longer needed to support multiple screens to justify its price tag to arcade owners. But the new approach did force a rethink of the game itself. Out went the two-player duelling and the gravitational field of
Spacewar!
. Instead players controlled one spaceship that had to shoot down two flying saucers controlled by the hardware. In short it was no longer
Spacewar!
.

By the summer of 1971 the game was nearing completion and Bushnell was starting to wonder who they could sell the game to. A trip to the dentist solved that problem. “I was at my dentist and, with a mouthful of cotton, I told him what I was doing and he said ‘you should talk to this guy’,” said Bushnell. “One of his other patients was the sales guy at Nutting Associates, so he gave me the telephone number and I called him up, told him what I was doing and we went in and negotiated a deal.”

* * *

Nutting Associates started after Bill Nutting, a resident of the Californian city of Palo Alto, invested some money in a local company that made teaching equipment for the US Navy. Among the company’s products was a multiple-choice quiz machine that projected film with the questions on a screen and then prompted naval trainees to press a button to give their answer. He figured that if a coin slot was added to the machine it could be popular bar game and turned to his brother Dave Nutting, a former first lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, to adapt the technology. “It appeared to me as a fun challenge. I re-engineered and repackaged the concept and we then called it
Computer Quiz
,” said Dave. “In the meantime Bill contacted various coin-op distributors who liked the idea.”

With interest high, Dave moved to Milwaukee to start a manufacturing operation closer to Chicago, the hub of the amusements business. “I rented space and began to build up inventory when Bill announced his wife Claire did not go along with the plan,” said Dave. “Claire was a complete control freak and I was a threat to her.” The clash led the brothers to part ways and Dave formed his own company Nutting Industries to make the same machine under the name
I.Q. Computer
while Bill went ahead with
Computer Quiz
. Both games became a success with around 4,400
Computer Quiz
and 3,600
I.Q. Computer
machines being built at a time when a popular pinball table would have a production run of 2,000 to 3,000.

Computer Quiz
got Nutting Associates off to a good start, but by 1971 it needed a new hit and Bushnell and Dabney’s radical video game machine looked just the ticket. So in August 1971 Bushnell left Ampex for Nutting Associates to complete work on the game he believed would transform the amusements business. And in a nod to
Computer Quiz
, the game was named
Computer Space
. It was then that Bushnell got word of the video game being made by Pitts and Tuck.
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He decided to call them up. “I was curious. I didn’t know what was inside their game and I expected it to be a PDP-8 or PDP-10 at the time. I was curious about what their economics were.”

Pitts and Tuck accepted Bushnell’s invite and headed to Nutting’s building in Mountain View, California. “We went in there and Nolan was literally an engineer with an oscilloscope in his hand working on
Computer Space
,” said Pitts. “It was at a point where he could demonstrate it to us, although it was still in development.” Bushnell’s hopes of learning from the pair came to nothing. “I thought they were clever guys but I was hoping they had cut costs down somehow and they hadn’t. I left a little disappointed that they hadn’t and yet at the same time relived because I felt they weren’t going to be competition for me.” Pitts thought Bushnell’s technology was great but believed he and Tuck had a better game: “I was very impressed by his engineering skills but our game was absolutely true to
Spacewar!
. It was a real version of
Spacewar!
. Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardised version.”