by Steven Kent
But it’s a good thing we had him, because he helped put us on the map.
—Ralph Baer
To keep Rusch productive, Baer allowed him to continue working on a project that involved playing guitar chords through a box that dropped the sounds an octave, changing the notes to the pitch of a bass guitar. With Rusch on board, the games began to take shape. Rusch made a game in which one player chases another player through a maze.
The first ones were all two-person games. Baer’s game machine was not powerful enough to control objects or run any form of artificial intelligence. In May or June of 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hard-wired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players’ dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping-pong.
So here we had a respectable ping-pong game going, and it wasn’t long before we called it a hockey game. Remove the center bar, which we put up there to emulate the net, and now it’s a hockey game. We put a blue overlay for blue ice on top of the screen so it looked more like hockey. We later added a chroma signal to electronically generate the blue background.
We always had three controls—vertical control for moving the paddles up and down, a horizontal control for moving the paddles from left to right (so you could move close to the net if you wanted to), and what we called an “English control,” which allowed us to put English on the ball while in flight.
—Ralph Baer
Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late 1960s, downsizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn’t suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. He nearly licensed it to a cable company, but the depressed state of the cable industry prevented the deal from ever taking shape. As a last resort, Baer urged his bosses to notify television manufacturers about the project.
He had come up with the right audience. General Electric, the first TV manufacturer to evaluate Baer’s toy, showed some interest. Then came Zenith and Sylvania. Both GE and Sylvania returned for second evaluations. RCA almost bought into the project—contracts were written but never signed.
In 1971, Magnavox hired a member of the RCA team that had nearly purchased the project. He then told other Magnavox executives about the television game he had seen at Sanders. Magnavox arranged for a demonstration of the television game and immediately saw merit in the idea. After months of the team working out details, negotiations were completed and the contract was signed by the end of the year. Production started in the fall, and early units were shown at Magnavox dealerships in 1972. Magnavox called the finished product Odyssey.
Magnavox did a really lousy engineering job—[they] over-engineered the machine. Then they upped the price phenomenally so that the damn thing sold for $100. Here’s this thing I wanted to sell for $19.95 coming out at $100. Then in their advertising they showed it hooked up to Magnavox TV sets and gave everyone the impression that this thing only worked on Magnavox TV sets.
—Ralph Baer
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.
So I decided I was going to have my back operated on. I just wanted to get away from things. I went to the hospital. While I’m in the hospital, the first $100,000 comes in from the Magnavox license. And it was like somebody sticking the key in my motor and turning on the engine. My depression disappeared overnight.
—Ralph Baer
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.
* Some historians argue that Willy Higinbotham, a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, actually invented the first game. In 1958, Higinbotham programmed an oscilloscope to play an interactive tennis game. While this appears to be the first interactive game, it is an isolated instance. Apparently, neither Steven Russell nor Ralph Baer were aware of the existence of Higinbotham’s game.
Father of the Industry
Nolan at one point decided, as only Nolan can, that he wanted to run for the House of Representatives. And the way that Nolan’s mind works, he decided that if he wanted to be a congressman, he’d better buy a house in Washington, D.C.
—Tom Zito, former reporter, the Washington Post
The 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.
I said [in the term paper] that a bright person should be able to fundamentally master any discipline in three years—mastery meaning to hit the 90-percentile level. To become a truly immersed master, if you would, you could spend the rest of your life on the last 10 percent. But I felt that I wanted to be constantly on that 90 percent curve, which required me to keep changing venues.
The way to have an interesting life is to stay on the steep part of the learning curve.
—Nolan Bushnell
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.
Remember I started out on the midway, selling balls to knock milk bottles over. So I’d say, “Come on over.” If I got you to take one of my baseballs and give me a quarter, I was doing my job.
I always said that I was doing the same thing with Pong, only I was putting myself in the box. The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games, I put those sales pitches in my automated box.
—Nolan Bushnell
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.
In the late 1960s, if you wanted to connect a computer up to a telephone or to a video screen, you only did it four places in the world or in the known uni verse: the University of Utah, MIT, a college in Minnesota, or Stanford. And it was just serendipity that I went to school there.
—Nolan Bushnell
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.
Fox and Geese was a very primitive game in which there were, it was either four or six Xs, which represented the geese, and one O, which was the fox. And if the geese completely surrounded the fox, they could kill it. But if the fox got any of the geese off by himself, he could kill the geese.
So the idea was to have three geese touch the fox at the same time. And they were actually run by the computer. They had a very simple algorithm: They looked to see whether the fox was to the left of them or to the right, and they’d click one space toward that side in both the X and Y. So they’d constantly be converging on him.
You were driving the fox around, trying to go after the goose and isolate it.
—Nolan Bushnell
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.
Ampex had a policy that for hobbies, they’d give you the parts. Everybody called them “G-jobs.” As long as it wasn’t excessive…. they were just 15 or 20 cent items.
And the ones Ampex didn’t have, I got from Marshall Electronics. Every engineer ends up having friends who are salespeople—salespeople all have samples. So you just work your friend network and say, “Can you give me some of these? I’m working a new thing and I’ll give you the order if it works.”
—Nolan Bushnell
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.
We got Computer Space going and got a deal with Nutting. Nutting said they’d build it for us, but they had no expertise. They wanted me to join the company as chief engineer, and I agreed because Nutting had a couple of projects that they needed me to do. So I worked on their projects during the day and finished up Computer Space at night and on weekends.
That’s how I maintained my rights to things. And they actually later on tried to litigate and said they had a shop right and video game patents.
—Nolan Bushnell
Nutting Associates was owned by Bill Nutting, who had had a successful machine called Computer Quiz. It was one of the very first, if not the first, solid-state amusement machines ever developed. It came out probably around 1970. Computer Quiz was a trivia game, simple as that.
But what’s interesting is that Bill Nutting had a brother, Dave—they started out in the business together but had an argument that ended with them splitting up. Bill Nutting had Nutting Associates and Dave Nutting started Nutting Industries. Bill Nutting made Computer Space and Dave Nutting made I.Q. Computer Quiz.
—Eddie Adlum
Always aware of the importance of presentation, Bushnell put special emphasis on creating an elaborate futuristic cabinet to hold his game. In his mind, the cabinet would be the huckster convincing people that they wanted to play—the same job he’d performed on the midway at the amusement park. He ended up sculpting a cabinet with rounded corners out of modeling clay. Engineers at Nutting molded the final version out of fiberglass.
Because of its complex game play, Computer Space had pages of instructions explaining how to maneuver ships, steer clear of gravity, and jump into hyperspace. Nutting used the Dutch Goose, a bar just off the Stanford University campus, as a test site. No one in the bar had ever s
een such a thing. Although Computer Space attracted some curious stares, it did not attract many players.
Whether he had succumbed to Bushnell’s salesmanship or simply believed in the project, Bill Nutting went on to make 1,500 Computer Space machines. Bushnell personally demonstrated the game to coin-op distributors at the 1971 Music Operators Association* convention in Chicago.
It was called Computer Space, and I saw it in 1971 at the MOA show in Chicago. As a reporter for Cash Box [a vending machine trade publication], I was strolling up and down the aisles where the machines were exhibited, with my camera and notepad. I ran into a great big, long, skinny hiker individual who appeared summarily to be known as Nolan Bushnell, who worked for a company named Nutting Associates.
Nolan was hired on at Nutting Associates to fool around developing a game that had a television monitor in it. In those days the general public didn’t call them monitors, they called them TV tubes.
Nolan came up with a game called Computer Space. It was a wonderful try that went absolutely nowhere. It had a bizarre sculpted fiberglass cabinet, hourglass shape, lots of curves. I never played the game. All I can remember is that Nolan Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game, describing it so much that I was backing up, trying to get away, while he was talking.
—Eddie Adlum
The music operators at the convention saw little potential in Computer Space, and very few of them bought machines at the show. In the end, the game turned into a marginally expensive gamble for Nutting. The company didn’t sell all of the original 1,500 machines and never built more.*