DEPOSIT QUARTER

BALL WILL SERVE AUTOMATICALLY

AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE

—Instructions seen on the first Pong arcade game, September 1972

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture. © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Reprinted by Permission of Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it.

The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made *Pong’*s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed-off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.

It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well-crafted myth. “The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work—then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.

Bushnell began work on video games when he toiled at Ampex, which made tape recorders, recording tape, and an early VCR, as a research designer for $12,000 a year. He didn’t like the gig much, feeling that the only way to make real money was to become an entrepreneur who made his own games for an audience that had yet to be targeted or mined.

At Ampex, Bushnell and straight-shooting former navy man Ted Dabney got to know each other during lunches. They ate their brown-bag ham sandwiches, turned over a wastebasket, put a Go game table on top, and played the strategy game almost daily. When he created the oddly named Syzygy, his first company, in late 1971, Bushnell’s vision for games was all he could talk about. Syzygy would be primarily based around pinball arcade routes in the Bay Area and a deal to make double-wide pinball machines for Bally in Chicago. Video games weren’t exactly an afterthought, but they certainly wouldn’t be the primary cash cow in those early months of existence.

Superiors like Charlie Steinberg, a future Ampex president, thought Bushnell had gone mad and tried everything to rid him of the idea of starting his own company. He wanted to keep Bushnell at Ampex as a career man. All this made Bushnell even more obsessed with forging his own path. When he had trouble with his wife and the two divorced, a prime reason was that Bushnell was spending too much time on his plan for world domination through games.

Bushnell and Dabney each put $250 into their Syzygy company, but a California roofing contractor already bore the odd moniker. Undaunted, Bushnell changed the name immediately. He loved Go, the strategy-oriented game from ancient China—everything from the way the smooth stone game pieces felt to the way the board looked. So for his company’s name, Bushnell settled upon a word from Go, the game he loved so much: Atari. The definition is the equivalent of the word “check” in chess but also means “you are about to become engulfed.”

The 27-year-old’s first employee was a former Ampex engineer, 22-year-old Allan Alcorn. Bushnell impressed Alcorn with a free lunch and his turquoise Buick station wagon. He offered Alcorn a $1,000-a-month salary, which Bushnell hoped to pay from the contracts he was aggressively seeking. Alcorn’s pay was $200 less than he made at Ampex, but the package included a generous 10 percent of the company. At their meeting, Bushnell started telling Alcorn of all the contracts he had suddenly amassed. In actuality, he had only planned on getting those deals. Alcorn took it in stride, understanding that there was something entrepreneurial about Bushnell that made him utter the most outrageous things. While some were offended by that, Alcorn saw it as a talent. In their small office lab in one of the shabbier districts of Santa Clara, Bushnell walked back and forth and gestured with his hands as he told Alcorn, “I want to make a game that any drunk in any bar can play. Simple. Simple enough for a drunk to play.”

Early in the gestation of Atari, Bushnell, who many thought wasn’t a good manager, sent a lucid eight-point document to the engineering staff. There was no joking and no spin; it was serious business in which he laid down the law. Bushnell’s one-page charter, as he called it, asked the slim staff to build four or more Pong machines by December 31, along with a Chicago-style coin box for those machines; to add more staff for emergency projects; to design packaging for Doctor Pong for dentists’ offices; and to create packaging for a possible home version of Pong. At the end, he wrote, “Statements concerning our manufacturing capacity are inapplicable to the above design schedule.”

The pragmatic Alcorn wrote back, “Is the fact that we have no money a reason not to do this?” Manufacturing costs were indeed huge bugaboos.

Bushnell quickly replied with a handwritten “NO!!!” and sent the memo back.

The word “no” rarely daunted Bushnell. It was like a fly to be batted away. Though he had no infrastructure for it, Bushnell decided to have Atari itself begin to make the machines, from 1972 onward, with a local Wells Fargo bank on board. First, he began to search for larger digs. Then the few folks who made up Atari went to an unemployment office in Santa Clara and randomly hired a slew of slackers who were down on their luck, to build machines and try to meet an ever increasing demand. The workers were Hells Angels, parolees, addled high-school dropouts, alternative-minded hippies, and drug addicts, who earned $1.75 an hour and who were put on an assembly line of sorts for up to 18 hours a day in an old roller-skating rink on Martin Avenue.

There were constant parties, rampant hooking up, and nasty next-day hangovers. Despite the pot-churned hazes, Bushnell made some wise decisions. He paid his suppliers immediately, and there was rarely a shortage of parts in the office. And distributors understood Pong; there was beauty in its simplicity. Some bought the machines by the hundreds.

There was something intensely instinctive about playing Pong in a bar that went beyond enjoying the Odyssey at home. Like the pinball and other penny-arcade games that came before Pong, the game coaxed adults, not kids, to play it. It vied for your money along with booze, the jukebox, and pinball. Like the sexy new thing in town, its video screen constantly beckoned. Its distinctive sound was familiar and persuasive, extraordinarily mimicking the thwack of a paddle smacked against a plastic ball. And, like a voyeur looking into a window, you had to peer into the game’s hooded cabinet to engage the mystery within. Everything about Pong was alluring, even the way it sucked quarters from your pocket as it dared you to master it. Once you became its master, you could brag about your achievement throughout the tavern—which men and women did constantly. And it wasn’t cheap. Pong broke the coin-op barrier with its quarter-per-game charge; at the time, pinball still gave pinheads three games for one quarter.

Once it hit the arcades and was distributed beyond the borders of California’s Bay Area, Pong took off around the country. From town to town, Bushnell preached his gospel of selling machines. At the peak of Pong mania, there were 35,000 of Atari’s machines in the United States. Each machine brought in an average of $200 weekly, a staggering amount. Merely carrying the quarters from a machine on Atarite Steve Bristow’s Berkeley arcade route was a pain in the, well, back. Seven days of quarters could equal 100 pounds from each machine.