The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 56

He was fortunate as well in landing at the University of Utah. It had the best computer graphics program in the country, run by professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, and became one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. (Other students included Jim Clark, who founded Netscape; John Warnock, who cofounded Adobe; Ed Catmull, who cofounded Pixar; and Alan Kay, about whom more later.) The university had a PDP-1, complete with a Spacewar game, and Bushnell combined his love of the game with his understanding of the economics of arcades. “I realized you could make a whole lot of quarters if you could put a computer with a game in an arcade,” he said. “And then I did the division and realized that even a whole lot of quarters coming in every day would never add up to the million-dollar cost of a computer. You divide twenty-five cents into a million dollars and you give up.”¹⁴ And so he did, for the moment.

When he graduated in 1968 (“last in his class,” he often bragged), Bushnell went to work for Ampex, which made recording equipment. He and a colleague there, Ted Dabney, continued to concoct schemes for turning a computer into an arcade video game. They considered ways to adapt the Data General Nova, a $4,000 refrigerator-size minicomputer that came out in 1969. But no matter how they juggled the numbers, it was neither cheap enough nor powerful enough.

In his attempts to push the Nova to support Spacewar, Bushnell looked for elements of the game, such as the background of stars, that could be generated by the hardware circuits rather than by the processing power of the computer. “Then I had a great epiphany,” he recalled. “Why not do it all with hardware?” In other words, he could design circuits to perform each of the tasks that the program would have done. That made it cheaper. It also meant that the game had to be a lot simpler. So he turned Spacewar into a game that had only one user-controlled spaceship, which fought against two simple saucers generated by the hardware. Eliminated, too, were the sun’s gravity and the panic button to disappear into hyperspace. But it was still a fun game, and it could be built at a reasonable cost.

Bushnell sold the idea to Bill Nutting, who had formed a company to make an arcade game called Computer Quiz. In keeping with that name, they dubbed Bushnell’s game Computer Space. He and Nutting hit it off so well that Bushnell quit Ampex in 1971 to join Nutting Associates.

As they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had competition. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11 minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game. When Bushnell heard this, he invited Pitts and Tuck to visit. They were appalled at the sacrifices—indeed sacrileges—Bushnell was perpetrating in stripping down Spacewar so that it could be produced inexpensively. “Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardized version,” Pitts fumed.¹⁵ For his part, Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge ten cents a game. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said. “Surprised and relieved. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no competition.”

Galaxy Game by Pitts and Tuck debuted at Stanford’s Tresidder student union coffeehouse in the fall of 1971. Students gathered around each night like cultists in front of a shrine. But no matter how many lined up their coins to play, there was no way the machine could pay for itself, and the venture eventually folded. “Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay attention to business issues at all,” conceded Pitts.¹⁶ Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

Bushnell was able to produce his game, Computer Space, for only $1,000. It made its debut a few weeks after Galaxy Game at the Dutch Goose bar in Menlo Park near Palo Alto and went on to sell a respectable 1,500 units. Bushnell was the consummate entrepreneur: inventive, good at engineering, and savvy about business and consumer demand. He also was a great salesman. One reporter remembered running into him at a Chicago trade show: “Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game.”¹⁷

Computer Space turned out to be less popular in beer halls than it was in student hangouts, so it was not as successful as most pinball games. But it did acquire a cult following. More important, it launched an industry. Arcade games, once the domain of pinball companies based in Chicago, would soon be transformed by engineers based in Silicon Valley.

Unimpressed by his experience with Nutting Associates, Bushnell decided to form his own company for his next video game. “Working for Nutting was a great learning experience, because I discovered that I couldn’t screw things up any worse than they did,” he recalled.¹⁸ He decided to name the new company Syzygy, a barely pronounceable term for when three celestial bodies are in a line. Fortunately, that name was not available because a hippie candle-making commune had registered it. So Bushnell decided to call his new venture Atari, adopting a term from the Japanese board game Go.

PONG

On the day that Atari was incorporated, June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell hired his first engineer. Al Alcorn was a high school football player from a rough neighborhood of San Francisco who taught himself television repair through an RCA correspondence course. At Berkeley he participated in a work-study program that brought him to Ampex, where he worked under Bushnell. He graduated just as Bushnell was forming Atari.

Many of the key partnerships in the digital age paired people with different skills and personalities, such as John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But occasionally the partnerships worked because the personalities and enthusiasms were similar, as was the case of Bushnell and Alcorn. Both were burly and fun-loving and irreverent. “Al is one of my favorite people in world,” Bushnell asserted more than forty years later. “He was the perfect engineer and funny, so he was well-suited to video games.”¹⁹

At the time, Bushnell had a contract to make a new video game for the Chicago firm Bally Midway. The plan was to do a car racing game, which seemed likely to be more appealing than spaceship navigation to beer drinkers in workingmen’s bars. But before tossing the task to Alcorn, Bushnell decided to give him a warm-up exercise.

At a trade show, Bushnell had checked out the Magnavox Odyssey, a primitive console for playing games on home television sets. One of the offerings was a version of Ping-Pong. “I thought it was kind of crappy,” Bushnell said years later, after he had been sued for stealing its idea. “It had no sound, no score, and the balls were square. But I noticed some people were having some fun with it.” When he arrived back at Atari’s little rented office in Santa Clara, he described the game to Alcorn, sketched out some circuits, and asked him to build an arcade version of it. He told Alcorn he had signed a contract with GE to make the game, which was untrue. Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people. “I thought it would be a great training program for Al.”²⁰

Alcorn got a prototype wired up in a few weeks, completing it at the beginning of September 1972. With his childlike sense of fun, he came up with enhancements that turned the monotonous blip bouncing between paddles into something amusing. The lines he created had eight regions so that when the ball hit smack in the center of a paddle it bounced back straight, but as it hit closer to the paddle’s edges it would fly off at angles. That made the game more challenging and tactical. He also created a scoreboard. And in a stroke of simple genius, he added just the right “thonk” sound from the sync generator to sweeten the experience. Using a $75 Hitachi black-and-white TV set, Alcorn hard-wired the components together inside a four-foot-tall wooden cabinet. Like Computer Space, the game did not use a microprocessor or run a line of computer code; it was all done in hardware with the type of digital logic design used by television engineers. Then he slapped on a coin box taken from an old pinball machine, and a star was born.²¹ Bushnell dubbed it Pong.