Authors: Steven Kent
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (13 page)
Tank
had very primitive graphics. Players controlled either a black or a white tank that consisted of a square with a line sticking out of the front representing a gun turret. By December, the game had become a runaway hit.
While Kee Games scored well with
Tank
, Atari found itself falling behind.
Grantrak 10
, one of Atari’s first driving games, had been very expensive to develop and even more expensive to distribute. The Grass Valley team designed the game, but after delivering it, Atari found that it was nearly unplayable. Alcorn fixed the game’s control problems, but other complications followed.
It cost $1,095 for Atari to manufacture
Grantrak 10
, but because of an accounting error, the finished game was sold for $995. The company lost $100 on each unit sold, and
Grantrak 10
became Atari’s bestselling game of 1974.
2
The only animosity was that Atari was dying and Joe Keenan was a great president who had skills that Nolan didn’t have. They wanted to cut the cord and watch Atari die and they’d survive. And Nolan and I said, “No way.”
Ron Gordon, Bushnell’s vice president of international sales and marketing, came back and said, “Okay, look here’s what you do. Merge Kee Games back in with Atari and put Alcorn back in engineering. Let Joe be the president [of both companies].”
That’s exactly what happened, but there was a time when Nolan was just in tears. He saw his company dying.
—Al Alcorn
Bushnell’s scheme had worked, yet it began having negative effects. Through Kee Games, Bushnell had nearly doubled his distribution, but now he had to merge both companies to keep Atari alive. Atari’s lackluster year, combined with the overhead costs of starting up and running a second company, had gouged deeply into Atari’s profits.
Historically, several companies have created controlled competition in the past. Bushnell’s coup was that he actually fooled the entire amusement industry into believing that Kee Games and Atari were bitter rivals. Even after the merger, when it became public knowledge that Bushnell had been a Kee board member all along, people had trouble believing it. Only one shrewd distributor had seen through the guise.
The thing about it is that nobody in the coin-op business figured out what we’d done except for one guy, Joe Robbins. He was with Empire Distributing
and later went to Bally. I remember him coming up to me at a trade show and saying, “Bushnell, you think you’re pretty clever. I know your number, but I respect you. I knew what you were doing and you did it really well.”—Nolan Bushnell
The personnel lady came in with a young candidate who had shown up on our doorstep. He was this real scuzzy kid. She said, “What shall we do?”
I think I said, “We should either call the cops or we should talk to him.” So I talked to him.
The kid was a dropout and really grungy. He was 18 years old and he knew something…. He had a spark of brilliance. Don Lang, one of my engineers, was asking for a tech, so I said, “Great. I’ll give you a job working for a real engineer.”
The next day Don came to me and said, “What did I do to deserve this?”
I said, “What? You wanted a tech, you got a tech.”
He said, “This guy’s filthy. He’s just obnoxious. And he doesn’t know electronics.”
The kid worked out in the end. His name was Steve Jobs.
—Al Alcorn
Shortly after Atari re-absorbed Kee Games, Al Alcorn hired the man who would become the company’s most distinguished alumnus—Steve Jobs. Though he went on to found such companies as Apple Computers and Pixar Animation Studios, at the time Jobs was little more than a skinny kid with long hair and a wispy beard. Several people described him as looking like a “20-year-old Ho Chi Minh.” (Ho Chi Minh was the leader of North Vietnam during the Vietnam war.)
Like many luminaries in the computer industry, Jobs knew more about technology than social graces. He was dismissed as a hippie by most of his fellow engineers. According to Alcorn, Jobs once came to work with a jar of cranberry juice and told his supervisor he was fasting. “He said, ‘If I pass out,
just lay me on the workbench. Don’t call the police, please. I’ll be fine. I’m just a little weak right now.’”
Some co-workers complained that Jobs smelled bad. He offended others by openly treating them like idiots. In the end, Jobs’s genius helped him emerge as a valuable employee, but by that time, he had managed to make enemies throughout the company.
If he thought you were a dumb shit, he’d treat you like shit. That pissed certain people off. I liked him a lot…. Still do.
—Nolan Bushnell
In 1975, Jobs decided to make a pilgrimage to India. At the time, several
Tank
machines had broken down in Germany. Alcorn offered Jobs a one-way ticket to Germany if he would fix the machines.
He wanted to go to India to meet his guru. I said, “Fine, I’ve got a problem in Germany.”
The German distributors would take our boards and hook them up to 60-cycle monitors to make games, but they only had access to 50-cycle power and they had bad ground loops. I gave Steve a quick course in ground-loop power-supply repair and a one-way ticket to Germany. I figured it would be cheaper to get to India from Germany than it would be from here [California].
I found out later that it would have been cheaper to leave from here.
He fixed their problem, but they were freaked because Steve Jobs is the antithesis of the Germans. They’re meat and potatoes and beer, and he’s air and water and vegetables … maybe.
—Al Alcorn
Jobs handled the problem without a hitch. When he returned from his pilgrimage several months later, Alcorn hired him back.
Steve came back around the time that we were starting up the consumer stuff. Steve was wearing saffron robes and a shaved head…. gave me a
Baba Ram Das book. Apparently, he had hepatitis or something and had to get out of India before he died.I put him to work again. That’s when the famous story about
Breakout
took place. That’s a big story that’s often told wrong.—Al Alcorn
Shortly after Jobs returned, work began on a game called
Breakout.
From the start, the game took on special significance. Nolan Bushnell created the concept himself.
*
(As things turned out, it was the last game Bushnell created at Atari. In fact, nearly twenty years passed before Bushnell designed another game.)
Breakout
was a reiteration of
Pong
, in which players used the ball to knock bricks out of a wall at the top of the screen. Though Bushnell knew consumers would love
Breakout
, he worried about the cost of manufacturing the game.
In order to cut costs, Atari engineers tried to minimize the number of dedicated chips used in their games; tightly designed games had around 75.
In those days, Atari shipped approximately 10,000 copies of its most popular games. Because of repair costs and reduced circuit-board space, Atari saved approximately $100,000 for each chip removed before production. Bushnell wanted his engineers to reduce the number of chips in
Breakout
but got a less-than-enthusiastic response when he asked for volunteers.
We had this bidding process. Nobody wanted to do
Breakout.
I remember that I figured that
Breakout
was going to be about a 75-chip game, so I’d give a bonus for every chip they took out.—Nolan Bushnell
Steve Jobs accepted the challenge. By this time, Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, had begun developing the Apple II, generally regarded as the computer that launched the personal-computer industry. Wozniak worked for
Hewlett Packard. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early enthusiasts who built their own computers. Other Homebrew members considered Wozniak, or “Woz,” to be the most brilliant member of the club. Jobs turned to Wozniak for help in minimizing
Breakout’
s circuitry.
So meanwhile, Steve’s friend, Wozniak, comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these
Tank
games were on the production line, and he’d play
Tank
forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.I found what really had happened is Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign
Breakout
].Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable…. a tour de force.
It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab.
—Al Alcorn
Wozniak was able to remove more than 50 chips from
Breakout
, but his design was too tight. No one could figure out how he did it, and the manufacturing plant could not reproduce it. In the end, Alcorn had to assign another engineer to build a version of
Breakout
that was more easily replicated. The final game had about 100 chips.
Bushnell and Alcorn disagree on some of the details concerning Steve Jobs’s bonus. Bushnell remembers offering Jobs $100 for each chip he removed. He claims Wozniak removed 50 chips and Jobs received a $5,000 bonus. Alcorn says that Jobs was told to reduce the design to a maximum of 50 chips and that he would receive $1,000 for every chip he removed beyond that mark. According to Alcorn, Jobs pocketed a $30,000 bonus.
Alcorn and Bushnell both agree, however, that Jobs misled Wozniak about the amount that he received. Jobs told Wozniak that the bonus was only one-tenth of what Bushnell actually paid.
I think we’ve got an order of magnitude problem here.
Jobs misled Wozniak, but Jobs got five grand and Woz got half of $500. I mean the macro-numbers are right, as it was told. I’m just saying that the denominator, the dollars per chip, is off.
—Nolan Bushnell
And Nolan says, “For every chip less than 50 I’ll give you $1,000 cash bonus.”
Now Jobs didn’t use the money for his own personal gain. He put it into Apple. But still, the fact that Wozniak’s best friend lied to him broke him up. That was the beginning of the end of the friendship between Woz and Jobs.
—Al Alcorn
According to Silicon Valley legend, Steve Wozniak discovered that he’d been misled many years later, while flying on a business trip and reading a biography about Jobs. Nolan Bushnell says that the legend is not true.
You want to know the real story? Woz was up here to a Sunday afternoon picnic at our house. We were talking and I asked, “What did you do with that $5,000?”
He says, “What?”
He was visibly upset. Wozniak’s tender. I mean, he’s really a good guy.
—Nolan Bushnell
Wozniak says that both stories are true. He first discovered Jobs’s deception on the plane and he did later ask Bushnell for details at his house.
I got $375, and I’ve never really known how much Steve got. He told me he was giving me 50 percent, and I know he got more than $750. I knew he believed that it was fine to buy something for $60 and sell it for $6,000 if you could do it. I just didn’t think he would do it to his best friend.
—Steve Wozniak
Atari first began shipping
Pong
machines outside the United States as early as 1973. As its business expanded, Atari sought foreign partners to help with distribution and shipping laws. Namco became Atari’s partner in Japan.
At the time, Namco was Japan’s sixth- or seventh-largest arcade company, behind such sturdy giants as Taito and Sega. Unlike Taito and Sega, which were founded by a Russian and an American, respectively, Namco was founded by a Japanese entrepreneur named Masaya Nakamura.
A former naval engineer, Nakamura started his company with $3,000. He purchased two mechanical horse rides that he had to place on the roof of a department store because his competitors had exclusive arrangements with the best sites.
I initially purchased two secondhand horse rides, and I talked a department store into allowing me to set them up in its roof garden. I operated the rides myself. I refurbished the machines myself. I would polish them and clean them every day, and I was there to welcome the mothers of the children as they arrived.
—Masaya Nakamura, founder and president, Namco
Because of the size of the Japanese market and the country’s enthusiasm for coin-operated entertainment, Atari created a Japanese branch to oversee importing and distributing games. Nakamura visited Atari’s Japanese branch shortly after it was formed. He began purchasing games and met Bushnell.
In 1974, Bushnell decided to close the Japanese operation. He sold it to Nakamura, and Namco became Atari’s chief Japanese distributor.
Bushnell established Atari Japan and tried to expand his business. For various reasons, including poor maintenance and a selection of inappropriate locations, Atari Japan’s business was not really doing well.
—Masaya Nakamura
We had real problems in Japan. Japan is a pretty closed market, difficult to get your product in … closed distribution. That’s why we did the deal with
Nakamura and Namco. He was willing to sort of break with tradition and start working with an American company. And he really made money on
Breakout.—Nolan Bushnell
