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 (9 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
From his tenure at Ampex, Alcorn was already familiar with the transistor-to-transistor logic (TTL) involved in creating electronic games. He tried to work from the schematic diagrams that Bushnell had drawn while designing
Computer Space
but found them illegible. In the end, Alcorn had to create his own design, based on what he knew about Bushnell’s inventions and his own understanding of TTL.
As he worked, Alcorn added enhancements that Bushnell had never envisioned. He replaced the expensive components with much less expensive parts. Bushnell’s original vision included paddles that simply batted the ball in the direction it had come from. Feeling that this was inadequate, Alcorn devised a way to add English to the game and aim the ball with the paddles.
Instead of using solid lines to represent paddles, Alcorn broke the paddles into eight segments. If the ball hit the two center segments of the paddle, it flew straight back at a 180-degree angle. If the ball hit the next segments, it ricocheted off at a shallow angle. Hitting the ball with the outer edges of the paddle would send the ball back at a 45-degree angle.
Alcorn also added ball acceleration. The original game simply buzzed along at the same speed until someone finally missed the ball. Alcorn found the game dull and thought that speeding the ball during extended rallies might lend some excitement. He wrote the game so that after the ball had been hit a certain number of times, it would automatically fly faster.
A certain mythology has arisen about the creation of
Pong.
People have written about the meticulous effort that went into creating the resonant pong-sound that occurred whenever the ball struck a paddle. According to Alcorn, that sound was a lucky accident.
Here I was developing this thing and feeling kind of frustrated because it already had too many parts in it to be a successful consumer product. So I
felt like I was failing, and Nolan didn’t mention that the game had come off better than he’d expected.Now the issue of sound … People have talked about the sound, and I’ve seen articles written about how intelligently the sound was done and how appropriate the sound was. The truth is, I was running out of parts on the board. Nolan wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands—the approving roar of cheering people when you made a point. Ted Dabney told me to make a boo and a hiss when you lost a point, because for every winner there’s a loser.
I said, “Screw it, I don’t know how to make any one of those sounds. I don’t have enough parts anyhow.” Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in a half a day. They were the sounds that were already in the machine.
—Al Alcorn
Pong
played more like squash than ping-pong. Thanks to Alcorn’s segmented paddle, it had become a game of angles, in which banking shots against walls was an important strategy. Players controlled inch-long white lines that represented racquets, which they used to bat the small white square that represented the ball. The background was black.
The game was streamed through a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television that Alcorn picked up at a nearby Payless store. He set the television in a four-foot tall wooden cabinet that looked vaguely like a mailbox. Since the printed circuit boards hadn’t been made, Alcorn had to hard-wire everything himself. The inside of the cabinet had hundreds of wires soldered into small boards and looked like the back of a telephone-operator’s switchboard.
It took Alcorn nearly three months to build a working prototype. His finished project surprised Bushnell and Dabney. Instead of giving them an interesting exercise, Alcorn had created a fun game that became their flagship product. Bushnell named the game
Pong
and made a few changes, including adding a bread pan for collecting quarters and an instruction card that read simply, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” To test the game’s marketability, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a location along the Atari pinball route.
Our initial idea was to go into business as a contract design firm and sell our ideas to others for licensing. We had a contract with Bally to design a video game for them, and we saw it as being a big, pretty long project.
So I had Al do this
Pong
game, this ping-pong game. And, dammit, it was fun. We tweaked it a little and it was more fun, and we thought to ourselves, we’ll get Bally to take this. We’ll complete our contract way, way, way ahead of schedule and life will be happy in the Valley.So I took
Pong
and offered it to Bally. I said, “Hey, you know we contracted to do a driving game but we got this game instead. Do you want this instead? Will this fill our contract for you?” They played it and said, “This is kind of fun, but it requires two players and if a guy’s there all by himself he can’t play it.” And I said, “Well, we could probably put a one player version in.” I sold them pretty hard.—Nolan Bushnell
Andy Capp’s was a peanut-shell-on-the-floor beer bar in Sunnyvale, California. It was nothing special, other than it had a game room in the back that was larger than any that you would see in a bar at that point in time.
—Nolan Bushnell
Once, when feeling particularly generous, Bushnell described Andy Capp’s Tavern, the location where Atari first tested
Pong
, as a “rustic location.” It was a shabby bar located in Sunnyvale, a much smaller town in the pre–high technology days of the early 1970s. Alcorn, who visited the bar while running the pinball route, remembers it as having four or five pinball machines, a jukebox, and a
Computer Space
machine
.
They installed the prototype in late September 1972.
We put it [the
Pong
prototype] on a barrel. He had old wine barrels to use as tables and we just put it on top of the table. It wasn’t even a full size.—Nolan Bushnell
Nolan and I sat there the first night and watched people play, and here’s the scene. We’re sitting there with a couple of beers, and a young man goes up and plays
Computer Space
while his friend plays
Pong.
While we’re watching, the first guy goes over and tries
Pong
with his friend.We went over to him afterward and asked, “Well, what did you think of that machine?” And the guy says, “Oh, it’s a great machine. You know, I know the guys who designed it.”
“Really! What are they like?”
So [he tells us] this whole bullshit story. I think he was practicing a line for picking up babes.
—Al Alcorn
One of the legends of video games is that two days after installing
Pong
in Andy Capp’s Tavern, Alcorn got an angry late-night call from Bill Gattis, the tavern manager. According to the story, the machine had stopped working and Gattis wanted it hauled out of his bar.
In truth, Alcorn received the call from Gattis two weeks after installing the machine. It was a friendly call in which the bartender suggested that they fix the machine quickly, since it had developed quite a following. Alcorn frequently visited Andy Capp’s while making maintenance runs on Atari’s pinball route. He and Bushnell had selected the bar as a good test site because Gattis had always been cooperative.
He said to me, “Al, this is the weirdest thing. When I opened the bar this morning, there were two or three people at the door waiting to get in. They walked in and played that machine. They didn’t buy anything. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
I went to fix the machine, not knowing what to expect. I opened the coin box to give myself a free game and low and behold, this money gushed out. I grabbed handfuls of it, put it in my pockets, gave the manager my business card, and said, “Next time this happens, you call me at home right away. I can always fix this one.”
—Al Alcorn
Nolan Bushnell left for Chicago to visit a couple of pinball manufacturers a few days before Alcorn received the call from Andy Capp’s Tavern. He had brought a portable
Pong
game to demonstrate to executives at Bally and Midway. Though Bushnell already had an inkling that
Pong
was doing good business at the test site, he had no idea how well it had done. When he returned, an excited Al Alcorn told him that the machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern had stopped working because the quarters had overflowed. The news struck Bushnell like a revelation.
Surprised by
Pong’
s success, Bushnell decided that he should manufacture the game himself rather than sell it to an established game maker. The problem was, he had discussed the game with executives at Bally and Midway and stirred up some interest. Now he had to find a way to steer them away from
Pong
while keeping the door open for future projects. In the end, Bushnell played one side against the other.
Nolan decided he didn’t really want Bally to take
Pong
because he knew it was too good. So he met with Bally and Midway and decided to tell Bally that the Midway guys didn’t want it. And so the Bally guys decided that they didn’t want it.Then he told the Midway guys that the Bally guys didn’t want it. He got them convinced that it was no good. [Once they heard Bally didn’t want it] it … didn’t take much convincing.
—Al Alcorn
There are unanswered questions in the history of video games. One question involves Ralph Baer, the designer of the Magnavox Odyssey, and Nolan Bushnell. It is a question of ownership.
In 1972, while Nutting Associates tried to market
Computer Space
as the beginning of a new generation of arcade games, Magnavox quietly circulated the Odyssey television game around the country in special demonstrations for dealers and distributors. Most demonstrations took place in private showings, but the new device was also displayed at a few trade shows.
The first show began on May 3, 1972, in Phoenix, Arizona. Three weeks later, Odyssey came to the San Francisco Bay area in a large trade show held in the town of Burlingame. According to Magnavox, a Nutting Associates employee named Nolan Bushnell attended the show on May 24. Depositions taken from Magnavox witnesses claimed that while at the show, Bushnell tested Odyssey.
Some time after Atari began marketing
Pong
, in 1972, Magnavox took the California start-up to court.
Pong
, Magnavox argued, violated several of Baer’s patents. It infringed upon his patents for projecting electronic games on a television screen, and, more important, it infringed on his concept of electronic ping-pong.
What they’ve always alleged was that there was a meeting or a distributor show somewhere in the valley, and I should have, would have, could have been there. So it’s one of those pissing matches.
—Nolan Bushnell
Atari was up against a stacked deck. First of all, the methodical Ralph Baer considered filing for patents an integral part of the invention process. During his life, Baer was awarded more than seventy patents and was once named “inventor of the year” by the state of New York. He documented everything.
By comparison, Bushnell, with his haphazard style, allowed the mundane details of invention and legal filing to escape him. Even when he created schematics, like the one he had made for
Computer Space
, they were often illegible.
More important, whether Bushnell attended the Magnavox show or missed it, there had been a show.
*
Magnavox could prove that it had demonstrated Odyssey in Burlingame prior to the creation of
Pong
and even prior to the incorporation of Atari. Magnavox also had Baer’s patents and notes, all of which clearly predated
Pong
and
Computer Space.
Bushnell considered his options. Magnavox had more lawyers and resources than Atari could ever hope to afford. His attorney urged him to take the matter to court, claiming they would win; but when Bushnell asked how much it might cost, the lawyer thought the expenses could be as much
as $1.5 million—more money than Atari had to spend. Atari could not afford to fight, even if it won.
In order for his company to survive, Bushnell had to find another alternative. It came in the form of a settlement. Magnavox offered Bushnell a very inexpensive settlement proposal. Bushnell followed up by asking for special terms in the agreement.
It was all settled outside and Nolan and Atari got extremely favorable terms. They paid very little. He got away with a very, very, very small licensing fee up front.
Atari became a licensee under a prepaid arrangement. It paid some fixed sum, some ridiculous number like a few hundred grand. I don’t remember the details. But he [Nolan] had an extremely advantageous, nonburdensome license from us. And as far as we were concerned, that was the end of our problems with Atari.
If anybody had had any inkling of what was going to happen to this business at Atari, they would never have gotten those terms.
—Ralph Baer
Bushnell played the legal action like a chess game. In exchange for settling, Atari became Magnavox’s sole licensee. By this time other companies had begun making similar games. While Atari had already paid its licensing fees, future competitors would have to pay stiff royalties to Magnavox. In several later litigations, Magnavox zealously prosecuted all violators.