Replay: The History of Video Games Read online

  Pitts had done some introductory computing courses and wanted to get to grips with the space-age computer he had discovered. He persuaded Lester Earnest, the head of the artificial intelligence project, to let him use the machine when no one else was waiting. “Les said: ‘You can use it as long as no-one else is using it’,” said Pitts. “So I ended up going up there every night probably at eight or nine o’clock and working through ’til six or seven in the morning when other people showed up. I didn’t go to classes anymore. I couldn’t care less about classes; I wanted to play with computers. My dad was going crazy, my parents were well aware of the fact that I wasn’t going to classes. My dad would tell me you’re just going to be a computer bum.”

  At the facility Pitts saw first-hand the cutting edge of computer science. He worked with Arthur Samuel, who had quit IBM for academia at the start of the 1960s, on the latest incarnation of his Checkers game. He heard the first music created by the software that would form the basis of Yamaha’s keyboards. He watched postgraduate students connect robotic arms and cameras to the PDP-6 and teach it to recognise, pick up and stack blocks. And he got to play Spacewar! .

  “ Spacewar! was one of the cool things at the A.I. lab,” he recalled. “I had a friend from high school, Hugh Tuck, and when he was in town I’d take him to the A.I. lab and we’d play Spacewar! .” And it was during one of these Spacewar! sessions in 1966 that Tuck remarked that if only they could make a coin-operated version of the game they would get rich. With computers still hugely expensive and large, the idea was little more than a daydream. But then, in 1969, the Digital Equipment Corporation unveiled the $20,000 PDP-11. At that price, Pitts thought, a coin-op version of Spacewar! might be possible: “I called Hugh up and said we could now build one of these things.”

  While $20,000 was still prohibitive for arcades that were used to buying slot machines for around $1,000, th pair figured they could make one and work out how cheap they would need to make the machine for it to be commercially viable. With money from Tuck’s wealthy parents, the pair started adapting a PDP-11 to create their coin-operated version of Spacewar! , which they named Galaxy Game . They decided to charge players 10 cents a game or a quarter for three games. The winner of each game would get a free game. The idea was to ensure the machine was in constant use and therefore always taking money.

  By August 1971 everything was almost in place: The Tresidder student union on the Stanford University campus had agreed to be the test site for Galaxy Game and the final touches were being made. Then the pair got a call from a man named Nolan Bushnell, who worked for a company called Nutting Associates. “He had heard of us through mutual contacts,” said Pitts. “He called me up and said ‘Hey, come on over and see what I’m doing. I know you’re building a version of Spacewar! using a whole PDP-11 and that’s gotta cost a lot of money and I just want to show you the one I’m doing because I think you’re going to lose a lot of money.”

  * * *

  Bushnell, like Pitts, discovered Spacewar! during his student days at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s and had fallen in love with the game. But, unlike Pitts, Bushnell had long-standing interest in the amusements business. At school he wanted to design rides for Disney’s amusement parks and, after gambling away his tuition fees at university, had started working for the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, a town just north of Salt Lake City where the University of Utah was based. Bushnell’s love of Spacewar! , interest in electrical engineering and involvement with the amusement business, coupled with his entrepreneurial spirit, caused him to immediately think about turning the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game into a coin-operated machine. “When I first saw Spacewar! on the PDP-1, I was working summers at Lagoon so I was intimately aware of arcade economics,” he said. “It occurred to me that if I could put that game on a computer screen and into the arcades, it would make a lot of money. But with the million-dollar computers of the time it wouldn’t work.”

  But the idea refused to go away. After graduating in 1968, Bushnell became an engineer for Ampex Corporation, a company best known for its breakthroughs in audio and video recording technology. While working there he read about the Data General Nova, a computer that cost $3,995, and immediately thought again of Spacewar! . “I thought if I could get that computer to run four monitors and have four coin slots, it would make enough money to pay for itself,” said Bushnell. Bushnell teamed up with Ted Dabney, another Ampex engineer, to try and design his Spacewar! coin-op machine on paper. “We were good friends and Ted had a lot of analogue computer skills that I didn’t have,” said Bushnell. “I was a digital guy. I knew how to deal with bits and bytes and logic and things like that and Ted really understood a lot more about how tonterface with a consumer television set and power supplies and things like that.”

  Using the Nova proved to be a dead end. For a start the computer was so slow it couldn’t update the television screen quickly enough to keep the game moving at the necessary speed. Bushnell and Dabney sought to ease the demands on the computer by creating separate pieces of hardware to handle jobs such as displaying the stars that formed the backdrop of the game. It still didn’t work. Even reducing the number of screens supported by the computer failed to get the game working. By Thanksgiving 1970, Bushnell concluded the project was doomed to failure. “I got frustrated and decided to abandon it,” said Bushnell. “But I kept worrying about the problem and thinking about it and then I had that ‘a-ha’ moment where I thought I’m going to get rid of the computer and do it all in hardware. From that point, it just flew together.”

  Bit by bit Dabney and Bushnell created dedicated circuits to perform each of the functions they originally hoped Data General’s computer would handle. The approach not only overcame the technological difficulties but also made the machine a lot cheaper to build. So much cheaper that it no longer needed to support multiple screens to justify its price tag to arcade owners. But the new approach did force a rethink of the game itself. Out went the two-player duelling and the gravitational field of Spacewar! . Instead players controlled one spaceship that had to shoot down two flying saucers controlled by the hardware. In short it was no longer Spacewar! .

  By the summer of 1971 the game was nearing completion and Bushnell was starting to wonder who they could sell the game to. A trip to the dentist solved that problem. “I was at my dentist and, with a mouthful of cotton, I told him what I was doing and he said ‘you should talk to this guy’,” said Bushnell. “One of his other patients was the sales guy at Nutting Associates, so he gave me the telephone number and I called him up, told him what I was doing and we went in and negotiated a deal.”

  * * *

  Nutting Associates started after Bill Nutting, a resident of the Californian city of Palo Alto, invested some money in a local company that made teaching equipment for the US Navy. Among the company’s products was a multiple-choice quiz machine that projected film with the questions on a screen and then prompted naval trainees to press a button to give their answer. He figured that if a coin slot was added to the machine it could be popular bar game and turned to his brother Dave Nutting, a former first lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, to adapt the technology. “It appeared to me as a fun challenge. I re-engineered and repackaged the concept and we then called it Computer Quiz ,” said Dave. “In the meantime Bill contacted various coin-op distributors who liked the idea.”

  With interest high, Dave moved to Milwaukee to start a manufacturing operation closer to Chicago, the hub of the amusements business. “I rented space and began to build up inventory when Bill announced his wife Claire did not go along with the plan,” said Dave. “Claire was a complete control freak and I was a threat to her.” The clash led the brothers to part ways and Dave formed his own company Nutting Industries to make the same machine under the name I.Q. Computer while Bill went ahead with Computer Quiz . Both games became a success with around 4,400 Computer Quiz and 3,600 I.Q. Computer machines being built at a time when a popular pinb
all table would have a production run of 2,000 to 3,000.

  Computer Quiz got Nutting Associates off to a good start, but by 1971 it needed a new hit and Bushnell and Dabney’s radical video game machine looked just the ticket. So in August 1971 Bushnell left Ampex for Nutting Associates to complete work on the game he believed would transform the amusements business. And in a nod to Computer Quiz , the game was named Computer Space . It was then that Bushnell got word of the video game being made by Pitts and Tuck. [2] He decided to call them up. “I was curious. I didn’t know what was inside their game and I expected it to be a PDP-8 or PDP-10 at the time. I was curious about what their economics were.”

  Pitts and Tuck accepted Bushnell’s invite and headed to Nutting’s building in Mountain View, California. “We went in there and Nolan was literally an engineer with an oscilloscope in his hand working on Computer Space ,” said Pitts. “It was at a point where he could demonstrate it to us, although it was still in development.” Bushnell’s hopes of learning from the pair came to nothing. “I thought they were clever guys but I was hoping they had cut costs down somehow and they hadn’t. I left a little disappointed that they hadn’t and yet at the same time relived because I felt they weren’t going to be competition for me.” Pitts thought Bushnell’s technology was great but believed he and Tuck had a better game: “I was very impressed by his engineering skills but our game was absolutely true to Spacewar! . It was a real version of Spacewar! . Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardised version.”

  A few weeks later, in September 1971, Galaxy Game , the first coin-operated video game, made its debut at the Tresidder Union. From the moment it was switched on the machine attracted a crowd. “We had people 10-deep, packed around the machine trying to look over each other to watch the guys play the game,” said Pitts. The generous approach to charging meant Galaxy Game earned nowhere near enough to justify its cost, but the game’s popularity encouraged Pitts and Tuck to persevere.

  “Everybody was really excited about it, so Hugh and I decided to build version number two,” said Pitts. The pair went to town on version two, constructing proper fibreglass casing and reprogramming the computer so it could support two games at once just like Bushnell originally planned to do with Computer Space to cut costs.

  By the time vrsion two was complete, Tuck’s family had spent $65,000 on the project – a huge sum in 1971 – but the machine still couldn’t justify its cost and soon the pair had to give up. “The truth is Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay attention to business issues at all, my driving goal was to recreate Spacewar! with coin receptors on it,” said Pitts. “Nolan was much more of a businessman than I was. His emphasis was to take Spacewar! and try to drive it down a business path, whereas I was trying to drive it down a geek path by being honest to the game.”

  * * *

  In November 1971, two months after the launch of Galaxy Game , the first Computer Space machine was installed at the Dutch Goose bar near the Stanford University campus. Its black and white TV screen sat encased in colourful and curvy fibreglass that could have come straight from the set of the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella . Computer Space screamed the future and to Bushnell’s delight the drinkers at the Dutch Goose seemed to like it. “The Dutch Goose was the first location where we tested Computer Space and it did fantastically well. What we didn’t realise is that it had a very high percentage of college students,” said Bushnell.

  With the initial test having gone well, Nutting Associates pushed ahead with the production of Computer Space hoping to woo arcade operators with its revolutionary technology and lack of moving parts. [3] Nutting Associates produced more than 1,500 Computer Space units expecting a smash hit, but the reaction away from student bars proved less favourable. “When we put it in a few working man’s beer bars it did no money,” said Bushnell. “It didn’t do anything because it was too complex.”

  People in the arcade business were equally confused by the game. “In 1971, my brother Bill came out with Computer Space ,” recalled Dave Nutting. “Empire Distributing was handling my electro-mechanical game Flying Ace and was also distributor for Nutting Associates. I was at Empire meeting the principals Gil Kitt and Joe Robbins when a call came through from Bill and Nolan Bushnell asking for their response on receiving their first Computer Space . Gil and Joe had the speakerphone on so I could hear. Joe responded that the game play was very confusing and his people were having trouble understanding the controls. Nolan came on to say that Computer Space was just the beginning of a new era and the future of the coin amusement would be video games and pinball would no longer be the industry staple. Gil stood up and loudly stated: ‘There is no future in video games and if the day comes that video games take over, I will eat my hat’everal years later at a convention I ran into Gil and asked him if he remembered his comment. He blushed and laughed and said: ‘Boy was I wrong, it is a good thing I retired’.”

  Computer Space did have fans though. Owen Rubin, who would later work at Atari, was one: “It was the first video game I ever saw. I was always hooked on pinball and other coin amusements in arcades near me, so when I saw this, I was immediately hooked.” Another future Atari employee Dave Shepperd also fell in love with the game: “I remember thinking it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I loved that space-age, shaped-metal, flaked-fibreglass cabinet too.” Inspired, Shepperd built a video game himself: “Being basically a cheapskate and not wanting to drop any more quarters into such a thing, I went home and proceeded to design and build my own video game using parts scrounged from junk bins.” For Bushnell, Computer Space had done well enough: “Compared to the games that came after it looks like a flop. But I had never created a million-dollar product before. It represented a reasonable royalty stream for me.” His experience at Nutting Associates also inspired him to form his own business: “I got to see Nutting operating and they gave me a huge amount of confidence to go out on my own because I knew I couldn’t screw it up more than they did.” And with that Bushnell and Dabney, who had stayed behind at Ampex, decided to form Syzygy Engineering with the goal of delivering on Bushnell’s claim that video games would replace pinball as the mainstay of the arcades. [4]

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Ralph Baer’s Brown Box was about to finally make it into the shops. Efforts by his employer Sanders Associates to find a licensee for the games console had hit the buffers in early 1968 when the potential buyer TelePrompter went bust. “Nothing happened for a year and a half because we didn’t know what the hell to do with it,” said Baer. “It finally dawned on me that television manufacturers were the companies most likely to manufacture, advertise, distribute, and sell something that’s made with exactly the components and manufacturing techniques as the television sets themselves.” Sanders demoed the Brown Box to the television manufacturers who dominated the US market at the time: General Electric; Magnavox; Motorola; Philco; RCA; and Sylvania. “When we demonstrated to these companies in ’69 everyone of them went ‘that’s great’, but nobody would offer a dime except RCA and when we worked out the agreement we said we couldn’t live with that and walked away,” said Baer.

  Once again it looked like the Brown Box was destined for the scrapheap. Then Bill Enders, one of the RCA executives who had been involved in the talks with Sanders, left to join Magnavox and convinced his new employer to look again. The Brown Box’s creators – Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch – headed to Magnavox’s headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to demonstrate their work once again. This time Magnavox said yes. In January 1971, Magnavox signed a preliminary deal with Sanders and began work on turning the Brown Box into a marketable product. Magnavox redesigned the casing for the machine and briefly renamed it the Skill-O-Vision before settling on the Odyssey.

  The Brown Box’s collection of seven games was built up to 12 titles including the maze-chase game Cat & Mouse , an educational title called States! and the Ping-Pong game developed back in 1967. The rifle game that convinced Sanders to keep the proje
ct alive became the sold-separately Shooting Gallery add-on for the Odyssey. Magnavox then decided to add paper money, playing cards and poker chips to enhance the games and plastic overlays that attached to the TV screen to make up for the Odyssey’s primitive visuals. And with so much packed in with the game console, the $19.95 price tag Baer originally hoped for became $99.95. Baer was appalled: “I saw the box and out comes 10,000 playing cards, paper money and all this crap. I just knew nobody’s ever going to use this stuff.”

  With the enhancements in place Magnavox set a launch date of August 1972 for the world’s first games console, which the company decided would only be available through Magnavox dealerships. In the build up to the launch, Magnavox demonstrated the Odyssey to Magnavox dealerships and the media. On the 24th May 1972 it put the Odyssey on display at the Airport Marina in Burlingame, California, near San Francisco. One of the people who decided to take a look was Nolan Bushnell.

  At the time Syzygy, the company Bushnell founded with Dabney, had struck a deal to create video games for the Chicago-based pinball giant Bally Midway. Bushnell wanted Syzygy to make a driving video game for Bally Midway, convinced this would win over the punters alienated by Computer Space . Seeing the Odyssey and its Ping-Pong game in Burlingame did little to change his mind and so the following month Syzygy, which had been getting by repairing broken arcade machines and running Computer Space machines in arcades near its rented offices in Santa Clara, started preparing to create Bushnell’s driving game. Dabney and Bushnell agreed to invest $250 each in the company to incorporate it only to find that another company already had the Syzygy name. Bushnell turned to his favourite game – the Japanese board game Go – for inspiration and suggested the company’s new name should be Atari, a term from Go similar to check in Chess. Dabney agreed and on 27th June 1972 Atari Incorporated was born.