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 (7 page)

While waiting for the Magnavox negotiations to finalize, Baer slipped into a deep depression. The military contracting industry was undergoing difficult times. Burdened both by Sanders Associates’ troubled financial state and doubts about the value of his invention, Baer wondered if perhaps his bosses at Sanders were correct and he had wasted the company’s time and resources.

After helping Magnavox set up an Odyssey engineering group, Baer returned to New Hampshire. He went back to working on military projects. This was after the layoffs, and few of Baer’s friends remained with Sanders. During this period, he checked into a local hospital for an operation he had been putting off.

Ralph Baer and Steve Russell never met socially. They would, however, meet on opposite sides of some very important litigation. Russell, who never filed for a copyright or patent, would become the symbol for those trying to break into the business. Baer, whose employers jealously guarded all of his patents, would become the spokesman for people trying to protect their intellectual property rights.

Russell and Baer are the forgotten fathers of the industry. Because Steve Russell’s game ran only on extremely expensive computers, it had no practical application. Outrageously priced and poorly advertised, Ralph Baer’s game machine might also have gone unnoticed. But in 1972, the year Magnavox finally released Odyssey, another, rather similar, machine was about to change the way America played games.

Father of the Industry

T
he son of a small-town cement contractor, he became a citizen of the world. A critic once called him “the smartest man who ever walked the earth,” but a close friend describes him as having “the attention span of a golden retriever.” He is Nolan Bushnell, an electrical engineer and inventor whose only true invention is a $16-billion industry.

Nolan Bushnell was born a Mormon in Clearfield, Utah, in 1943. Though he left both Mormonism and Utah behind early in life, he still speaks warmly of both. Bushnell has eight children. The rest of the country would call this a large family, but in the intensely Mormon town of Clearfield, Utah, the Bushnells would fit right in.

Bushnell’s father died in the summer of 1958, leaving behind several unfinished construction jobs. Whether driven by youthful bravado or a sense of responsibility, 15-year-old Nolan, who already stood over six feet tall, fulfilled the contracts himself. “When you do something like that as a 15-year-old, you begin to believe you can do anything,” says Bushnell.

Throughout his life, Bushnell demonstrated his love of ideas. In high school, he was a champion debater and studied philosophy as a hobby. He also demonstrated a deep-seated need for fun. As a teenager he strung electric lights along a kite and fooled neighbors into thinking it was a UFO. He stopped college roommates from using his toiletries by putting a deodorant label on a can of green spray paint. According to Bushnell, one rather unaware student painted both underarms before realizing he’d been duped.

In 1962, Bushnell enrolled in the University of Utah. As a freshman, he wrote a term paper stating his philosophy for an interesting existence: it expressed a constant need for change and a wanderlust that would punctuate his life.

Bushnell describes himself as having received “two educations.” After losing his tuition money in a poker game, he took a job running arcade games at Lagoon, an amusement park located north of Salt Lake City.

Bushnell worked full time during the summer. During the slower spring and fall seasons, he worked weekends. He began on the midway, talking people into trying to knock down milk bottles with a baseball at a quarter a shot. According to Bushnell, stacking bottles was the least important part of the job. The real trick was attracting players. The job taught him lessons he’d use the rest of his life.

Eventually, he moved from the midway to an in-park pinball and electromechanical game arcade. There he watched customers play games like Chicago Coin
Speedway.
He helped maintain the machinery and learned how it worked. Most important, he further honed his understanding of how the game business operates.

Though he majored in engineering, Bushnell divided his academic career among many interests, with special emphasis on philosophy. He eventually discovered the computer lab.

By this time, the University of Utah had emerged as one of the top schools for computer science. Led by Professor David Evans, who worked with ex-Harvard professor Ivan Sutherland to build a head-mounted virtual reality display in 1968, the Computer Science Department had some of the best equipment in the country.

As an undergraduate, Bushnell had only limited access to the computer lab. He was determined to explore, however, and eventually befriended some of the teaching assistants. In the end, Bushnell would become a regular, spending many late nights in the lab. He learned to program in FORTRAN and Gotran, two of the earliest computer languages.

Bushnell also learned about computer games. His favorite was
Spacewar
, Steve Russell’s pioneering two-man combat game. Bushnell played it incessantly.

He also created some games of his own. Naturally charismatic, Bushnell talked senior students into helping him. He made computerized
Tic Tac Toe
and
3-D Tic Tac Toe.
But his best creation was a game called
Fox and Geese.

Though the students at the University of Utah teamed up to write seven computer games,
Spacewar
remained Bushnell’s favorite. He continued his late-night
Spacewar
sessions all the way through school. By the time he graduated in 1968, he had committed the game and its many nuances to memory.

In 1969, a northern California engineering firm, Ampex Corporation, hired Bushnell as a research-design engineer for an annual salary of $10,000. He describes his first project as a “high-speed digital type recording system.” He
worked on the system for eighteen months before his wanderlust struck. For his life to be interesting again, he needed to slip back into “the steep part of the learning curve.”

Bushnell saw himself as a stifled entrepreneur. He had ideas, talent, and ambition. Looking back on “both” of his educations, he decided to combine engineering and arcade games. In his typically strong entrepreneurial fashion, he turned his daughter’s bedroom into a workshop. For the next few months, two-year-old Britta Bushnell slept in the living room while her father made a coin-operated version of Steve Russell’s computer game,
Spacewar.

Bushnell originally tried to build his game using a new and inexpensive Texas Instruments minicomputer but found that it was too costly and lacked the processing power to run a compelling game. The spaceships were shapeless and the game moved too slowly.

Undaunted, Bushnell found a way to improvise. Instead of building a general-purpose computer, he designed a specialized device capable of only one thing—playing his game. As an Ampex engineer, Bushnell was able to get most of the parts he needed free.

It worked. Though it lacked the crisp graphics Russell had created on the $120,000 PDP-1, Bushnell’s
Computer Space
retained all of the basic play value. It had the star and gravity field, the hyperspace jump, and the same outer-space physics. Even Steve Russell would have appreciated Bushnell’s brilliant hack.

Once he created the circuit board, Bushnell found other ways to save money. He went to Goodwill and bought an old black and white television
for a monitor. The coin-drop emptied quarters into an empty paint thinner can. Since the coin-operated video-game industry did not exist, and most of the electromechanical amusement industry was in faraway Chicago, Bushnell had to invent solutions constantly.

Having created a working prototype of his game, Bushnell now looked for a partner to help manufacture it. He found that partner in Bill Nutting, founder of Nutting Associates. Nutting, who had already begun dabbling in the coin-op business, hired Bushnell and licensed his game.