If you’ve never heard of Computer Space, you aren’t alone. The game was a dud. It sounded simple—the player’s rocket has to destroy two alien flying saucers powered by the computer—but it came with several pages of difficult-to-understand instructions.
The Caribbean island of St. Barts is named for Bartolomeo Columbus, Christopher’s brother.
The fact that it was the world’s first arcade video game only made things worse. Neither players nor arcade owners knew what to think of the strange machine sitting next to the pinball machines. “People would look at you like you had three heads,” Bushnell remembered. “‘You mean you’re going to put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it?’”
NUTTING IN COMMON
Still, Bushnell was convinced that Nutting Associates, not the game, was to blame for the failure. And he was convinced that he could do a better job running his own company. So he and a friend chipped in $250 apiece to start a company called Syzygy (the name given to the configuration of the sun, the earth, and the moon when they’re in a straight line in space).
That’s what Bushnell wanted to name it…but when he filed with the state of California, they told him the name was already taken. Bushnell liked to play Go, a Japanese game of strategy similar to chess. He thought some of the words used in the game would make a good name for a business, and company legend has it that he asked the clerk at the California Secretary of State’s office to choose between Sente, Hane, and Atari.
She picked Atari.
FAKING IT
Bushnell hired an engineer named Al Alcorn to develop games. Meanwhile, Bushnell installed pinball machines in several local businesses, including a bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern. The cash generated by the pinball machines would help fund the company until the video games were ready for market.
Alcorn’s first assignment was to build a simple Ping-Pong-style video game. Bushnell told him that Atari had signed a contract to deliver such a game to General Electric and now it needed to get built.
According to the official version of events, Bushnell was fibbing—he wanted Alcorn to get used to designing games and wanted to start him out with something simple. Ping-Pong, with one ball and two paddles, was about as simple as a video game can be. In reality, there was no contract with G.E. and Bushnell had no intention of bringing a table tennis game to market. He was convinced that the biggest moneymakers would be complicated games like Computer Space. “He was just going to throw the Ping-Pong game away,” Alcorn remembers. But then Alcorn gave him a reason not to.
Q: How did nettles get their name? A: People used to weave them into nets.
OUT OF ORDER
Instead of a simple game, Alcorn’s Ping-Pong had a touch of realism: if you hit the ball with the center of the paddle, the ball bounced straight ahead, but if you hit it with the edge of a paddle, it bounced off at an angle. With Alcorn’s enhancements, video Ping-Pong was a lot more fun to play than Bushnell had expected.
As long as the game was fun, Bushnell decided to test it commercially by installing Pong, as he decided to call it, at Andy Capp’s Tavern.
Two weeks later, the owner of Andy Capp’s called to complain that the game was already broken. Alcorn went out to fix it, and as soon as he opened the machine he realized what was wrong—the game was so full of quarters that they had overflowed the coin tray and jammed the machine.
That was only half of the story. The bar’s owner also told Alcorn that on some mornings when he arrived to open the bar, people were already waiting outside. But they weren’t waiting for beer. They’d come in, play Pong for a while, and then leave without even ordering a drink. He’d never seen anything like it.
That was their first indication that Pong was going to be a hit.
JUST A COINCIDENCE?
But did Nolan Bushnell really come up with the idea for Pong… or did he lift it from another video game company? Video history buffs still debate the issue today.
Here’s what we do know: In the late 1960s, a defense industry engineer named Ralph Baer invented a video game system that could be played at home on a regular television. The system featured 12 different games, including Table Tennis.
Magnavox licensed Baer’s system in 1971 and prepared to market it as Odyssey, the world’s first home video game system. The company planned to sell the system through its own network of dealers and distributors. In May 1972, the company quietly began demonstrating the product around the country…and on May 24 it demonstrated it at a trade show in Burlingame, California.
What do you expect? When groundhogs predict the start of spring, they’re wrong 72% of the time.
“In later litigation,” Steven Kent writes in The Ultimate History of Video Games, “it was revealed that Bushnell not only attended the Burlingame show but also played the tennis game on Odyssey.”
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Did Bushnell have a revelation when he played the Odyssey game? Did it convince him that simple games like Pong would be more popular than complicated games like Computer Space?
Or was it just as he claimed—that he instructed Alcorn to invent a ping-pong game, perhaps inspired by the Magnavox Odyssey, only because it was the simplest one he could think of? We’ll probably never know for sure.
As far as the law is concerned, the only thing that really mattered was that, unlike Willy Higinbotham (Tennis for Two) and Steve Russell (Spacewar!), Ralph Baer actually had patented his idea for playing video games on a TV screen and had even won a second patent for video Ping-Pong. His patents predated the founding of Atari by a couple of years.
Bushnell never applied for a patent for Pong, and didn’t have a case for proving that he’d invented it. And even if he did, he didn’t have a chance fighting a big corporation like Magnavox in court.
SMART MOVE
So why did Atari become synonymous with video games instead of Magnavox? It was skillfull maneuvering by Bushnell.
Since he couldn’t win in court, Bushnell paid a flat fee of $700,000 for a license to use Baer’s patents. That meant that Atari bought the rights free and clear and would never have to pay a penny in royalties to Magnavox. And because Magnavox was now the undisputed patent holder, they had to sue Atari’s competitors in court whenever competing game systems infringed the patents. Atari didn’t even have to chip in for the legal fees.
Magnavox had Odyssey on the market while Atari was still years away from manufacturing a home version of Pong. But Magnavox wouldn’t capitalize on their exclusive market. Their first mistake was selling the product exclusively through their own network of dealers, when it would have been smarter to sell them in huge chain stores like Sears and Kmart. Their second mistake was implying in their advertising that Odyssey would only work with Magnavox TVs. That wasn’t true, but the company was hoping to increase TV sales. All they ended up doing was hurting sales of Odyssey.
In 1975 they discontinued the 12-game system and introduced a table tennis-only home video game to compete against the home version of Pong. Then in 1977 they introduced Odyssey2 to compete against Atari’s 2600 system.
Yet in spite of all the effort—and in spite of the fact that they, not Atari, owned the basic video game patents—Magnavox was never more than a me-too product with a marginal market share. Magnavox finally halted production in 1983.
Turn to page 411 for the story of how videogames found their way into the home.
CELEBRITY GOSSIP
Meryl Streep. After the 1979 Academy Awards, she lost the Oscar statuette she’d won for Kramer vs. Kramer. Where was it found? On the back of a toilet in the ladies room, where she had left it.
Thomas Edison. As a boy he tried to invent a way for people to float by feeding his friend “gas-producing powder.” It didn’t work.
Jimmy Stewart. His father was so disgusted with Stewart’s role in Anatomy of a Murder, he took out a newspaper ad urging people not to see it.
Richard Burton. “When I played drunks I had to remain sober becau
se I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.”
Tom Cruise. He enrolled in seminary school at age 14 to become a priest. He dropped out when he was 15.
Joan Crawford. She was married five times. Weird habit: Every time she remarried, she replaced all of the toilet seats in her mansion.
A single ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 65 miles long.
TEE-SHIRT WISDOM
BRI member Eva Perry found this on the Internet.
I childproofed my house, but they still get in.
I’m still hot. It just comes in flashes.
At my age, “getting lucky” means finding my car in the parking lot.
Life is short. Make fun of it.
I’M NOT 50. I’M $49.95 PLUS TAX.
I NEED SOMBODY BAD. ARE YOU BAD?
Physically pffffffft!
I’m not a snob. I’m just better than you are.
MY REALITY CHECK JUST BOUNCED.
It’s my cat’s world. I’m just here to open cans.
Buckle up. It makes it harder for the aliens to snatch you from your car.
KEEP STARING…I MAY DO A TRICK.
We got rid of the kids. The cat was allergic.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash, and it’s gone.
EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD “EXERCISE,” I WASH MY MOUTH OUT WITH CHOCOLATE.
Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture.
Live your life so that when you die, the preacher won’t have to tell lies at your funeral.
(On the front of the shirt)
60 is not old…
(On the back of the shirt)
…if you’re a tree
Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.
In God we trust. All others we polygraph.
How do they know? According to lizard experts, iguanas can feel joy.
SAGE OF THE SIXTIES
For anyone who lived through the 1960s, Timothy Leary’s name is synonymous with LSD. But this former Harvard psychology professor and counterculture guru had some really far-out wisdom to share.
“Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.”
“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
“You can’t stop the human instinct to think for oneself. You can hold it down, but in every situation it springs forth.”
“All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you’re unhappy where you are, move.”
“The critics of the Information Age see everything in the negative, as if the quantity of information can lead to a loss of meaning. They said the same thing about Gutenberg.”
“Think for yourself. Know what you’re doing. Question authority.”
“The problem with the sixties, the problem with most hippies, the problem with television watching, is it’s passive consumption. You’re just sitting there.”
“Our genetic assignment is the receiving, processing, and producing of digital information.”
“Man’s best friend is his dogma.”
“Never before has the individual been so empowered. But in the Information Age you do have to get the signals out. Popularization means making it available to the people.”
“The universe is an intelligence test.”
“You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”
“Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.”
“We have this incredible brain, 120 billion neurons; the complexity is beyond our ability to conceive. The challenge of the human species is to learn how to operate this wonderful equipment.”
“Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
If you could drive to the sun at 60 mph, it would take 176 years…not including “pit stops.”
THEY WENT THAT-A-WAY
Sometimes the circumstances of a famous person’s death are as interesting as their lives. Take these folks, for example.
BUDDHA (SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA)
Claim to Fame: Founder of Buddhism
How He Died: From indigestion, following a meal of spicy foods
Postmortem: Like many spiritual people who search for enlightenment, Prince Siddhartha Gautama hoped to find it by fasting, eating only mosses and roots. When that didn’t work, he went back to eating a normal diet…and soon acquired the huge belly that became as famous as the religion he founded.
He also acquired what modern historians believe were ulcers—he suffered terrible stomach and intestinal pains—and they caught up with him in 483 B.C. when he sat down to a lavish meal of sukara-maddava ( spicy pork) in the village of Pava, India. While eating, Gautama suffered an attack of stomach pain so severe that he wasn’t able to finish the meal. He and his followers promptly left the banquet and began walking to the village of Kusinara. Along the way, Gautama collapsed from dehydration and may have worsened his condition by drinking tainted water. By the time he arrived at Kusinara, the Buddha—or Enlightened One—was bleeding, vomiting, and near death. Fading in and out of consciousness, he finally passed away after instructing his followers, “Try to accomplish your aim with diligence.” He was 80.
PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Claim to Fame: Sixth president of the United States
How He Died: Shouting the word “No!”
Postmortem: Adams served as president from 1825 to 1829. In 1831 the ex-president was elected to the House of Representatives. He was still there 17 years later, when the House took up the matter of honoring U.S. Army officers who had fought in the Mexican-American war. Adams was vehemently opposed to the idea.
Having friends for dinner: Jellyfish eat other jellyfish.
When the vote was taken and the House erupted into a chorus of “Ayes” in favor of the idea, Adams stood up and shouted, “No!” Right then and there he suffered a stroke, collapsing into the arms of another congressman. Four of his colleagues carried him out to the capitol rotunda for some air, and he regained consciousness long enough to thank them for their effort. He drifted in and out of consciousness for the next two days before dying on February 23, 1848.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
Claim to Fame: William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066, in what became known as the Norman Conquest
How He Died: From a riding injury
Postmortem: In 1087 William and his soldiers attacked the French town of Mantes, destroying an enemy garrison and burning the town to the ground. Rather than waiting for the fires to go out, William decided to survey the ruins while they were still burning. Big mistake—his horse stepped on a hot coal and lurched violently, lifting William up off his saddle and plopping him on top of the pommel, the hard metal protrusion in the front of the saddle. The injury ruptured William’s intestine, causing a severe infection that spread across his entire abdomen. He spent the next five weeks in excruciating pain, finally dying on September 9, 1087.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Claim to Fame: Former First Lady, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
How She Died: From a stroke, possibly the result of medical errors made while she was being treated for anemia
Postmortem: In April 1960, the 75-year-old Mrs. Roosevelt was found to be suffering from aplastic anemia, which means her bone marrow wasn’t producing enough red blood cells. By April 1962, she was also suffering from a shortage of white blood cells and platelets, so doctors prescribed prednisone, a drug that stimulates the bone marrow to produce more blood cells. But prednisone has a side effect: it suppresses the body’s ability to fight off infections.
In August 1962, Mrs. Rooselvelt was back in the hospital, this time with a fever and a cough. Her doctors considered the possibility that she was suffering from tuberculosis, but when a chest X-ray showed no signs of the disease, they declined to do any further tests.
The average American home has 15 cookbooks.
Mrs. Roosevelt was discharged from the hospital…but six weeks later she was back again, this time
in even worse shape and still suffering from a “fever of unknown origin.” On September 27, her doctors finally took a bone marrow sample and sent it to a laboratory to test for tuberculosis, a process that takes four to six weeks.
By October 18, Mrs. Roosevelt was so miserable and so convinced her end was near that she had herself discharged so that she could die at home. Her test results came back on October 26: she had tuberculosis…and months of treatment with prednisone had made it impossible for her body to fight it off. Not only had the doctors’ diagnosis been wrong, but the medication was the worst possible thing they could have given her.
Nine days after finally receiving the correct diagnosis, Mrs. Roosevelt, still at home, suffered a stroke and slipped into a coma. She died three days later.
TWO (VERY) DUMB CROOKS
“Charged with murder in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Donald Leroy Evans wanted a little respect. Evans filed a motion which would allow him to wear a Ku Klux Klan robe during his court appearance. The motion also requested that Evans’s name be officially changed on all court documents to ‘the honorable and respected name of Hi Hitler.’ Apparently, Evans thought Hitler’s subjects were chanting ‘Hi Hitler’ instead of ‘Heil, Hitler.’”
—Presumed Ignorant
A man was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday for trying to break into the Rideau Correctional Center. Shane Walker, 23, was believed to be bringing drugs to his friends last week when he was foiled by striking corrections workers who heard bolt-cutters snapping the wire fence and apprehended him.
Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader Page 36