Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and we are about to launch into a series of three classic episodes. So for the next couple of weeks, we're gonna have these classics play out. These were episodes that I recorded and published the week of March second, two thousand fifteen, so quite some time ago. Ties into some stuff that I've touched on in some other episodes recently, Like I talked about the video game crash in Ree, We're gonna talk about the Rise and Fall of Atari. Now, this was a three part series that I did have a special guest on these shows, so I hope you enjoy that. But let's listen to the Rise and Fall of Atari, Part one, which published March second, two thousand fifteen. Enjoy. Hi, Jonathan, since you asked, I do have a suggestion for a topic to cover that I don't think you have yet. Could you do an episode or two if needed to cover the rise and fall of Atari. Actually worked in the store that sold only Atari home computers and game systems in the early nineties. Uh Atari's products are at the time were as good or better than what was being put out by their competitors, and yet they failed big time. Thank you for the entertaining and educational show. I enjoyed part one of the two thousand fourteen review this morning. So clearly this request came in some time ago, I guess so. But yeah, this was one that when I brought it up to you, you said, absolutely we should do an episode about Atari. Well, you and I are the same age roughly, and we are children of Atari every way, you know, we grew up in the seventies and eighties during the Atari's heyday. Yeah, and it was huge, huge in my life. And uh my brother actually uh has set his up recently and I was just playing uh Combat last week. That Combat and we'll get to this obviously was the game that shipped with and it kind of holds up. You know what it really does. I it's it's an incredibly simple game and has incredibly simple graphics, but it's the playability comes in the fact that it's a two player game and uh, trash talking galore can happen. We had a blast. It really was a lot of fun, and not just for nostalgia. The gameplay, like you said, still holds up to a certain degree. I think, yeah, yeah. I mean it's obviously for someone who's like, no, I need to have you know, the fourteen different controls mapped out on my keyboard and my my gaming mouse and everything, it's not gonna appeal to you. But but it's still a compelling experience. So we wanted to go through the rise and fall of Atari, and it is an epic story. I mean, it has so many different elements to it, and it's at least gonna be two episodes. We're gonna see how how far we can go before we have to take a break and replenish our our, our vital bodily fluids before we break out. Exactly. Good good reference there, Mr Chuck. So, starting off a little little information before we get into the actual Attari days. Computer games have been around pretty much since the days that computers were first built. You know, you you have computer programmers who often had these analytical minds that were also fond of things like puzzles and games, and so naturally, when those early computer programs were being designed, programmers were thinking, huh, I wonder if I could actually make this machine do something fun, not just something functional. Yeah, I think that's one of the things you probably heard a lot in the early days. But well, maybe they'd be fun if dot dot dot and before you know what, they were playing some you know, to us an archaic form of a video Yeah, maybe like a game version of like Tic Tac toe, you know, but instead of it having a video screen, because video screens were late in the game in the computer days, they would print this stuff out like you would have maybe a tape printer, and it would print each move, so every time something changed, it had to print a new piece of paper to look at or a new strip of tape. Really, because a friend of mine, his name's Richard Garriot, and he's a big game developer. He created one of the big computer game successes and then in the eighties and nineties called Ultima, and he talks about in his days when he was in computer programming classes in high school, it was all printed to tape and it was like a little adventure game and we'll talk about adventure in a bit too, where it would print out the room and your little position, like you'd be a little X in the room and you'd say, go left. It would to print a new version of it where the X was just slightly to the left. In the pre eco friendly days as well, these days such a game would probably be frowned upon. So uh, but you know, it sets the stage to show that that people realize there was potential or electronics in the game world. And that gets us up to ninety eight when a man named William Higginbotham of Brookhaven National Laboratory developed an electronic game called Tennis for two on a Donner Model thirty analog computer. And uh, it would simulate table tennis, and it simulated velocity and changes in direction, all this kind of stuff. Um, yeah, I looked it up just to see what it looked like. It looked like sort of like a like a ship's sonar or something. Yeah, exactly. It was taking an oscill lator, I mean, the same sort of thing that you might see as like a heart monitor in hospital, kind of kind of like that. And by you change by fiddling with the voltage, essentially he could change the different images so that you would have essentially to paddle like things and the ball like thing and play a very basic game. And he said that he had made it because people would come to visit the lab and there wasn't a whole lot of stuff that was actually interesting to look at the bar, and so this was the way to entertain them. That's pretty funny to like to impress people. He had stuff that was far more advanced, but he's like, oh, but look at this tennis for two and people probably, oh, yeah, exactly like hisn't cutting edge. So have you ever seen the mel Brooks films Silent Movie? All right? In Silent Movie, there's actually a scene where Sid caesar Is is in the hospital and his character is in the hospital and to uh, Dom Deloise and Marty Feldman who walk up to his heart monitor and turn it into this game and they play a game of Pong on his heart monitor, which totally forgot about causes him to totally freak out. Yeah, but it's this game which is interesting because the original well we'll get into pong, but the original pongs were silent. Yes, yeah, that's actually true. And in nineteen sixty two, that's when we get up to the time when m i T. Professor Steve Russell developed a game called Space War, which is one of the earliest video games. He did this with two of his students, and they built it for a big mainframe computer. Yeah. It was the only way they could really at the time exactly. So if you wanted to play a computer game, you had to go someplace where essentially a room is dedicated to that computer. Yeah. They were largely still using vacuum tubes for a lot of this technology. I mean, transistors had had started to come out, but they hadn't been integrated into computers deeply at this point. Uh. And that's when around this times when an electrical engineering student named Nolan Bushnell, the probably the most important person in this story, that's when he discovered space war because the computer lab at the university was going to the University of Utah College of Engineering, had Space War on one of its computers. Yeah, he was. I saw an interview with him earlier today on YouTube where he was talking about at the time. He said there were only like four universities in the entire country that had graphical displays period, and University of Utah just happened to be one of them. And it seemed like when you start hearing about the story and how it all just fell into place, it's I don't know if I'm a believer in fate, but all these little puzzle pieces came together in just the right way to get his motor running. Basically, if if they hadn't, if any of the elements that took place, then the whole arcade industry could have been delayed by several years if he had just gone to a different university that didn't have computer screens. Right, Yeah, because the University of Utah was a pioneer in that space, and so he really got his introduction to it. Uh. Another interesting thing about him is that he would work in his off time, like when whenever school was out at the Lagoon Amusement Park. Yeah, that was a huge deal because that inspired the thought of, you know what, people are shoving quarters in the ski ball games and pinball and you know all manner of sort of boardwalk arcade games. And he obviously had some sort of business sense to him because he thought, why not try and do this really fun thing that I've been sneaking into the lab and doing every night and charge people money for it? Right? What if we were to create an experience using an electronic game where on a per coin basis you would get either an allotted amount of time to play or some other metric like in pong. It might be the number of lives. In most video games as number of lives, but in a few it's time. Um. And that that would determine how much of that experience you could have before you had to plunk in another quarter. And if I find it so compelling that I'll sneak into the to the lab, people be willing to pay a quarter for it. Yeah, it was a stroke of genius. It was absolutely, I mean you. There are a lot of criticisms that are leveled against Bushnell and Cord, including people who used to work with him. Um. And a lot of people claim, well, he never invented anything. I have to object to that because he took two separate ideas and turned them into something that spawned an entire industry. And if that's not invention, I don't know what is. Yeah. And whether or not he was um, I guess it wasn't coding, but whether or not he was soldering the games and inventing the games themselves. Those games are worthless unless someone comes along and says, you know what, I know how to package this right and take it to the public for them to enjoy, right, And so I mean so without this this vision again, I'm sure we would have eventually come around to the arcade industry. Anyway, someone would have come up with that idea, but it would have been later and the story might have been much different. So Bushnell graduates from college and goes to work for a company called Ampex. This is around nineteen sixty nine. Ampex is an electronics company, and I got a little bit of trivia something I thought you would appreciate, Chuck, you're a musician. So Ampex developed a tape recorder that less Paul used to pioneer the sound on sound technique. Yeah. Less Paul used an Ampex tape recorder which was designed to have a secondary writing head that would allow him to record a track and then play along with that recorded track to create a new mixed track of both of them together. So this would allow one musician to essentially back him or herself up. However, what it did do also is destroy the original track, the original recording, because it records over it, so you no longer have that, so you have plus yes, and that's the new base. Yeah, which is kind of cool. I thought that you would appreciate that. So I am tex. Ampex has had a real important part in the electronics industry in general. But it also plays host to the meeting of the two people who would really push Atari in the early days. That's uh Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Yeah, and Dabney they met in nineteen nine and like you said, both employees of Ampex and both um very much interested in uh pioneering Space War as the very first video game. Yeah, they were looking at Space War and they thought, how can we make this as a coin operated game. Now, clearly we can't do the same thing that Space War is doing because having a mainframe computer not something you can install in your local bar. Yea. So we have to figure out how to take this same concept but do it in a much smaller form factor that could be a coin operated game. Yeah, And that turned out to be sort of a recurring UM thing in Bushnell's career was this guy did something really neat. Let me sort of make a very similar version, but in a much like sleeker package that's consumer oriented. Yeah. I read a transcript of an interview that UM that Ted Dabney did. I read a lot of that actually Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean there's clearly some bad blood between the two of them. But Dabney talked about how what would happen is Bushnell would come up to him and say, I want to do this. How is that possible? Dabney would figure it out, tell him, and then Bushnell would go off and do it. So Bushnell had skills, but Dabney always dismissed it as saying he wasn't an engineer. He could do something if you told him how to do it, but he couldn't engineer it himself. Yeah, he he was. He's sort of like a producer almost, Yeah, and really get at getting super talented people together to create a vision. Yeah, sort of like you could think of other pairings that this this applies to, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who will come up later, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates. I mean, there are a lot of Ben and Jerry, uh Itchy and Scratchy. We can just keep throwing out pair of names out there. Uh So, yeah, it was it wasn't. It was the beginning of a partnership that would end up launching this arc caid industry idea. Yeah, so they got together and they they said, well, let's sort of copy that game in a in a cabinet version. But we don't really have the money to fund this, so they took it to a few different people. Finally landed at a place called Nutting Associates, who agreed to finance a game, which was really the very first arcade game called Computer Space. Yep, yep. They got a programmer by the name of Larry Brian to come on board. Larry Brian had also worked at Ampex. Uh. They formed a company that they originally called Scissor G. Yeah. They just said the name kind of sounded and look cool. Yeah, which, by the way, if you if you don't know how to spell it, it's it's of course one of those uh spelling B words. It's s y z y g y and it refers to the planetary alignment and things come into alignment there in sissy G. I didn't even know that. Oh yeah, that real meaning. It was one of my my father's one of my father's favorite words, no joke. Uh, so I was instilled in my brain at an early age. Uh. They come up with this name, which they wouldn't stick with for reasons. We'll get to Uh. They thought about using a computer called the Data General Nova eight hundred, but it's pretty expensive and it still wasn't really going to fit their needs, so they weren't really sure how they were going to do this. Originally, the idea was that all three of the initial founding members Dabney, Bushnell, and Brian were going to contribute a hundred dollars into a group fund to be like the owner operating capital. Only Dabney and Bushnell did. Brian never did. So do you know why did he? Was it because he didn't want to throw I don't know, I I never came across. It was just a lot of matter of fact of Brian never put his under. It's just never an explanation. Yeah, And so eventually both Bushnell and and uh Damney would put in an extra two hundred and fiftyes, so that brought the owner's equity up to a incredible seven hundred dollars princely some for this company. Uh, like you were saying, Chuck. They went to Nutting to say, like, uh, maybe you can help us by manufacturing this thing. We'll retain the rights to the game, you'll be able to manufacture it and sell it, but we get royalties for it as well, and it's the next big thing. Yeah, they convinced Nutting that it's the next big thing. So Nutting Associates has no clue about this stuff. They essentially give them the space to do whatever they want to do, thinking like, all right, well we we can't do this ourselves. We're gonna let this group do this. And if it pays off, it's huge. We'll be making lots of money. And if it doesn't, well it will just call it a loss. So the agreement included a five percent royalty on unit sales, so that's what the group would get um and the units were relatively inexpensive. They were like a thousand dollars, which in today's money is about six grand a piece. But it was it was not for the home consumer. It was this, yeah exactly. This would be like a restaurant, you know that's or maybe a bowling alley something like that. Uh. But remember there's no market for these yet. Yeah, no one knows because they didn't exist. It's just crazy to think about. No one knew if it was going to work at all, and it sort of didn't sort of didn't It wasn't a big success for them at all, right, Right, And the one of the problems was that this game that was based off Space War, just like Space War, was kind of complicated. It was a game built by engineers for engineers. So you see like all these buttons and dials and stuff, and you think, all right, uh, this does not appear to be intuitive in any way. No one really understood how to play it. It looked a little like Asteroids. Yeah, um, as far as just the look of the game, yeah, And it's one of those that when you look at you think, uh, you know, I I don't even know what it is, like how I control the things, nor do I know what I'm supposed to do. So it had some limited success, but it wasn't a runaway hit. It just wasn't that simplistic experience that the average person could immediately identify. Well yeah, plus it was I mean, I mean people are used to seeing a pinball machine, maybe, but if you look up this thing online, there's all of a sudden it seems there. You know, arcade games to us, now there were so ubiquitous, the game cabinet itself, but when you look at this thing at the time, no one knew what the heck it was. Right, there was this weird looking yellow pod with a TV screen in it in the corner, and I have no idea with all the this little game pad on the front of it, and what am I even supposed to do with that on my way to the bathroom. I mean, the whole thing wouldn't have even been possible except for the fact that Dabney made a breakthrough while he was he was tooling around in his home. According to the interviews I've seen, in his daughter's bedroom, he used that as his work space. He moved one of his daughters in with the other. He had two daughters. He's like, I need your room. This is going to be my lab. And uh. He started playing with cathode ray to video screens without the use of a computer as as an input, and he used counters and gates basic electronic components to manipulate that CRT display to create the images on a screen that you can control by changing the values directly. So, uh, think of you know, you remember the tracking on a TV when the screen would be rolling and you have to adjust the tracking snature. Because we're old, we remember this stuff. That was the basis of him being able to control vertical movement on the screen. He just essentially he manufactured a way of doing that where by using a control you could change the the input into the television and make that vertical movement possible. For horizontal, we had to change voltages in a really interesting way so that you could get horizontal movement. Otherwise you would only be able to move up and down. Now, was that the spot in motion circuit? Yes, okay, and that changed everything because this meant for the first time that well, not I, he could create a game that didn't need a computer attached to it, right, you could do a home version of this game, yes, exactly, and then everything that you would need for the game you could build onto the circuit. And that meant that every circuit for every game was unique, right, Like like one, if you look at two different arcade games from this era, the game is all hardwired on the circuit try and those circuit boards are going to look different because it's those physical components that create the assets of each game. Which is kind of cool to think about because these days we're used to the general purpose machine, right, the computer, and then everything else is controlled on the software. Side. But this was all hardware, which you know for such in every game was a little different from the next two. Yeah. Yeah, and you look at it you think like, well, you know, there could even be production errors and that that could create weird glitches that are only for that unit of the game. It's not like a game shipped with glitches would be that many. Maybe some solder wasn't complete and so something in the game's not working properly. So it made it more like those early Arcaden machines were really more like pinball games than they were like the modern games. We'll be back with more of the rise and fall of Atari. After these messages, we get to August of nineteen seventy one. That's when the team had produced the test unit of their game, which was, as you were saying, called computer Space, and they set it up in a in a restaurant and bar called Dutch Goose in Palo Alto, California. What they officially debut the game at the nineteen seventy one Music and Amusement Machines Exposition in Chicago, and by the end of nineteen seventy one they begin to ship the game. So that first game was just sort of a test run to see if they could get it to to look it doesn't do great business because it was units total sold um, but it was enough money um for for Dabney and Bushnell to sort of continue to fund their company. Right. They decided at that point that they wanted to incorporate Sissy g And then they had a speed bump because they realized I found out there was already another company using the name sissy Gy. Yeah. Apparently it was a little candle company in Mendocino, California, like some hippies, So that that put their plans on pause as they had to rethink the name. And also at that time, in nineteen seventy two, Bushnell would attend a meeting that would later come back to haunt him. Yeah, he attended a meeting that had a presentation of the Magna Vox Odyssey, which is a home video game console that featured very several silent games, the most notable one being a table tennis game. Yeah, and who was it was? It was a man same bear was the head of Magna Box at the time. He advented I think called the Brown Box, which was later changed to the Magnavox Odyssey. And like you said, I think a lesson to be learned here has never signed the guest book, right, because Bushnell um signed the guest book as an attendee. And these before they took the Odyssey to market, they had these very special small batch screenings for invitees only, and which wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do either. Yeah, because they did have a patent on it, it would allow people that chance to maybe we could beat them to market by creating exactly similar and that's exactly what happened in the case of Bushnell. Yeah, so this was like this would come back to haunt him later. And yeah, if you are going to go to one of these meetings, don't leave a paper trail. That's the lesson there. So by June, Bushnell and Damney incorporate as a Tory Incorporated. Yes, which the name got came from a Japanese game board game called go Ye, which Pushnell was just crazy for. And apparently the meaning of it is basically the equivalent to I've got you in check. I'm about to take all your stones, is what he said, right right, And and I think the root word was a taru, which means to hit a target and uh, just a cool sounding name, like it jumped out at him at the time. It's like, I like it, right, And they they create some common stock, which collectively would value the company at about seventy five thousand dollars, big jump from the seven D dollars that they had to the bank at the time. Uh. And the famous Attari logo. I didn't put this in the notes, but it was designed by a gay named George Opperman. Now, according to Auberman, the two side pieces, like if you look at the Atari logo, it's it's got three kind of columns, the two on either side sort of slope away. I've always wonder what that was. It's a stylized A. So that's one thing. Some people call it the Mount Fuji logo because I think looks like Mount Fuji. Opperman says. The two side pieces represented opposing players in the middle straight section represented the center line in pong, which is kind of cool. The whole logo was that stylized day and Apperman was the in house artist for Atari and created a lot of the art that the arcade cabinets were you were sporting. Well, it's certainly iconic now, you know, Yeah, you see that logo and it just for guy's our age, that just really conjures up a lot. Well. Yeah, and he and he had a big influence on that early artwork of Atari, especially in the arcade world. He would sadly pass away in nineteen Yeah, only fifty years old, I think. Um. But also in June of that year, Al Alcorn, who had worked at Ampex, he joins Atari and he begins working on one of Atari's biggest hits, Pong, which is odd in a way. It's odd for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being no one ever intended Pong to be a hit. Yeah. Bushnell at the time was working on a driving game. He said that was really hard. Uh, driving games still are, I think one of the tougher ones to get right to really nail. Yeah, And he said he hired Alcorn and was like, well, I just wanted to give him a little test to see how good he was, because I wasn't gonna throw him on this driving game right away up for failure. Can you program using this circuit that damn produced, right, And because this is this is a whole new thing, like the designing games using this circuit that had been pioneered for the computer space games. So uh, you know, Alcorn takes this concept and he works on on pawing and unlike the earlier table tennis electronic games, this one had sound. It sounds so silly, but it was a huge difference to actually hear that little boom and uh, it had a few other noteworthy characteristics to differentiate it that also sound a little bit like of course, but it really made a big difference. The ball sped up as you played the game, which was a huge, huge difference. Um. And then you talked about some of these sort of happy accidents. One of them occurred with Pong. There was that little space at the very top and the bottom of the screen where you couldn't block and in other words, a game couldn't go on forever. At some point you were going to lose it to that corner, right, so some at some bounce, it's going to hit that trajectory where no matter what, you can't block it. And it just it made it more fun. And it was a two player games, so again it'll it pitched people against each other, just like we were talking about with combat. That creates an experience that just invites that kind of fun sort of you know, one upsmanship, trash talking sort of stuff. Nothing. I don't think anyone was making, you know, horrible uh statements like you hear on something like Xbox Live because you're in person, next to the next to whomever. But it also was a much simpler game. It was easy to grasp, the controls were simple. Everyone who saw it knew exactly what the gameplay went, so it had far greater appeal than something that was much more dense like computer space. Yeah. And the name obviously comes from Ping pong, but they couldn't call it ping pong, and they couldn't call it ping because of the golf clubs, and so Pong was just sort of the no brainer. Yeah. So the first Pong game was installed in a tavern, Andy Taps tavern. Yeah. I look that up to see if it's still existed, and I don't think it does. Sad. Uh So the original Pong was black and white, had a black and white television for a screen, and people would come in and play even if they weren't planning on buying anything to eat or drink. It became a destination game. Yeah, to the point where I read that early in the game's life, they got a call saying, hey, the game's not working. You need to come out here in service its like amount to find out what was wrong. And what was wrong was that they were using an old milk jug to catch the coins inside the cabinet, and the milk jug had filled to overflowing and no more coins could come in, so the game was malfunctioned. Great story. We had to empty the coins from the things that they could play it. Uh and uh. It was kind of interesting like this we'll talk more about in the second. But the the plan was that in order to give an incentive to businesses to buy into the arcade games, they said, all right, well we will split revenue down the middle, goes to you, comes to us, which literally we will count out the quarters and we will get half of them. And they literally went from place to place employees of Atari picking up sack fulls of quarters at the end of every year, possibly suffering enormous back pain, one of whom apparently carried a roofing hatchet for protection. Um but they were bringing in They said a single unit typically would earn about forty dollars a day, which is over two hundred and twenty dollars today, um, which is that's fantastic for the first thing of its kind. And um it said that they believe machines were ordered by the end of nineteen seventy three. By nineteen seventy four, over eight thousand of these were all over the country now and abroad, I think at this point, yeah, and keep in mind these are like, you know, a grand apiece, and they're getting there, getting this this all of the money at this point because originally they went to uh Nutting and said do you want to do this? And they thought, well, no, we don't really want to work with Nutting anymore. We want to be able to do this with someone else. They they started shopping around to see if they could work with a different distributor of of games, like like the kind of games you would find at an amusement park. So they look at Bally because Bally of course was famous for their pinball as well as there are other there are other games that they were pioneering in, but Bally wasn't wasn't sold on the idea pong. They wanted Atari to make a game for them. In fact, a couple of games one would be a pinball game and one would be a video game, but they weren't interested in Pong, and ultimately the guys that Attari decided, you know what, we're gonna do this ourselves. But it was a huge, huge jump for them, you know, they didn't have the background of manufacturing. No, it turned out to be a great move though. Yeah, no, it's absolutely it. It really set them for success for at least the next couple of years. So some interesting things happened in nineteen seventy three. At the tail end of seventy two, Atari would file a patent for Pong. Now keep in mind that when you file a patent it can take years before you get you know that approved or declined. And it was already released at this point when they filed. Yes, they didn't pre file, right, so they file after the games already released. Uh. In nineteen seventy three, they do something that at first I was confused about until I read more details, which is that they established a second company called Key Games k E. Yeah, I didn't quite understand this all right, So they set up a second company that's essentially appears to be a competitor to Atari, not just a competitor, but they are producing knockoffs of Atari games. And here's the reason why. There are rules for certain types of companies where they can only work with a single distributor. So if they create a title and and enter an agreement with that distributor, all of their titles have to go through that distributor. So it limits the options of the company producing the games. By creating this second company, they could produce the exact same games with a different name under the name of this other dummy corporation. Practically it's a little more than a dummy corporation, but not much more, and then offer that to different distributors. Makes sense, So it opens up a lot of options. So a little bit of yeah, a little little little uh spoken mirrors a little bit of guests, which cut the ball is under some stuff, and so you know, it was the way of getting around that. Bushnell, by the way, clearly very savvy when it comes to working. Meanwhile, Long is going crazy. Yeah, it's going crazy for for many reasons that we already talked about. But um, another big reason I saw the interview with Bushnell said is that women were very good at it for some reason, and it appealed to women, and it was the first UM I guess sort of the first time he said that women felt comfortable going up to a man in a bar and say, hey, you know, do you want to play this game with me? And he said that made a big difference. It appealed to both sexes and um and it also brought it down as the this great I g N article says to you know, where real people congregated. It brought it into the bars, into the bowling alleys. And it wasn't like you know, engineering students exactly. It wasn't. It wasn't some computer lab where you had to have uh, you know, student access to get there. We've got more to say about Atari in just a moment, but we're going to take a quick break. Another interesting thing that happened in nine was that they got a new space for putting together their pong machines. Did you hear about this? The ten thousand square foot space they got. So there was one story that Dabney told about how originally the little space they were in they found out that their neighbor had stopped paying rent and essentially scaddled. So they cut a hole in the wall and used the next door space, but even that wasn't big enough because then they were like, well, what happens when we get caught as well, we'll just ask how much we owe them, like when they when we get caught, we'll we'll pay for it, but until then we won't. Um. But then they decided that they would lease a space and they found an a business that was no longer doing this. It was ten thousand square foot roller rink and they turned it into their manufacturing center for pong. Yeah, and then there's the story about how that that that signed guest thing comes back to Hank and see Magnavox a patent, yes, for electronic table tennis, so Atari did not have a patent for pong. Magnavox had a patent for electronic table tennis. And this starts to raise some important conversations between the two where Magnavox is looking at pong and saying, that's our game, so we're going to go after these guys. Meanwhile, Bushnell buys out Ted Dabney from the company. Depending upon whom you asked, Abney sometimes just says no, I was just kind of canned. Yeah. He says that he was forced out basically that his old friend came up to him basically said, um, if you don't accept this buy out, then I'm going to take all the assets over to a different company and you're you'll be left with nothing. Right, So he took the opportunity to get bought out. I didn't see numbers. Yeah, I didn't either. I don't think anyone has ever about it. It It sounds like, yeah, the the interview, definitely he portrays Bushnell as misrepresenting the truth. Let's say, that's a very kind way of putting it. And I haven't heard Bushnell talk much about it. He seems to, I don't know, gloss over that or least not even address it's from what I've seen. Well. Uh. Nineteen seventy three was also when Atari got a new hire in the electrical engineering department. You may have heard of him. His name is Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs joins Atari in nineteen seventy three, and by the end of the year, Key Games in Atari, which remember are really being operated simultaneously by the same heads of people, into a licensing agreement for ATRII to produce a version of the game Emanation, which was key games first first title. Yeah, and by the way, can you guess do you want to guess what the game elimination was? The title makes it sound like it's something terrible. It was not. It was not. It was a four player version of Pong, and so uh, the Atari version would become known as Quadrupong. So it's funny that Atari is licensing a game that essentially the same folks had developed, right Like, it's all again, it's all this sort of shell game going on. So moving up to nineteen seventy four, this is where we start seeing the Magnavox thing come to a head. The inventor Ralph Bayer convinces Magnavox to sue Atari, claiming that the company copied the electronic table tennis game from the Odyssey, which they did, Yeah, pretty much, and Bushnell basically comes up. The guy makes all the right moves, it seems like for a while. Yeah. Um. He basically says, you know what, we'll settle for some money and will become a licensee so you don't have to worry about us. You go and sue everybody else because Paul was getting knocked off all over the place and you spend all your time doing that. We'll settle for some money. We'll be a licensee and we'll make that and some other Magnavox some titles and just don't worry about us anymore. And Magnavox is like, all right, yeah, it was good to me, brilliant. I mean, they no longer a Torii, no longer has to go after these copycats because Magnavox is going to do it on their behalf and they're not being uh come after for Magna. Yeah. So the settlement shield basically exactly a settlement amount. We don't it's not publicized, but according to different accounts, it could be anywhere between four thousand dollars and a million bucks. So not change. Yeah, but still when you when you know now you've got like your big brother looking out for you, you don't know, they can just make money now exactly. It freed them up to be super creative. Uh, And that's what they started doing right away pretty much. And this is also the year Dabney, who had who had left buys the name the rights to the name scissor Gy Game Company from Atari. Uh. And then he also would leave the board of directors in nineteen seventy four, which was his last connection to the company that by that time, Dabney's connections are now severed. Uh. And then meanwhile, Key Games releases its first original game called Tank, which ends up being a massive hit. Uh. And then so such a big hit, keep in my nineteen Tank comes out. The demand is so high they go ahead and develop and produced Tank two in that same year. Like you think about how video games are produced, and now, granted it's a totally different ball game these days, but the way video games are produced these days, they go in for years of development. If you get a game, and you won't expect a sequel for several years to come, unless with a few exceptions like the Assassin's Creed series appears to have a sequel come out every few months. U certain sports franchise games obviously those are gonna come out each year to reflect the change. Yeah, but most most games, you know, you end up waiting years between sequels. But this is where things are just moving at a furious pace. Now that we have the home version of Pong yet not well, there were some early home versions. There was one that was being developed at this time and actually did come out. Yeah, so there were actually two different versions of that, right, Sears licensed it. I had that one, So you had the Sears version of Pons Yeah, and then there was a second one that was marketed under the Atari name. So again it was weird because it almost felt like Atari was competing against itself and had two different versions of the same thing on the market. Yeah. Well, because they didn't have that patent yet, I think, so Sears was the distributor and they had their own version. Yeah, and I think that I think the other versions outsold the official Pong version. Oh yeah, the Atari. I think Atari had like fifty thousand of them on the market and Sears had a hundred and fifty thousand of them. Those you know, easily eclipsing it. But yeah, that ended up being a big hit that would come out in nineteen. It was limited to only playing the Pong games there was. This was not a cartridge. Yeah, so it's all again it's hard coded into the console, right. Yeah. I I had UM. I don't I had I had one that was I don't think it was Pong UM and I don't think it was. It wasn't the Magnavox Odyssey because I seemed to remember there were sound effects. But I did have one that was the collection of essentially variations on pong. Pong was one, but you also had racquetball, which was pong but way faster. Um. Then there was one that was basketball that was essentially pong, but it was turned so that both paddles were maybe two inches above the bottom line, and then you had like little lines that represented goals. Yeah, like there was there's a whole selection of these style games. They're all variations on around exactly. So I had one of those. I don't know if hey, listeners, if you know what I'm talking about and you think, oh, that sounds like the blah blah blah, yeah, you just let me know. Um. But this is also around the time when Atari would announce the acquisition of Key Games. How did that work out? Tory buys its own company for Joe Keenan became Joe Keenan, who remember was the head of Key Games. He's also Bushnell's neighbor. Yeah. According to the story, Dabney Tody says, yeah. Bushnell says he walked up to Joe one day when Joe was mowing his lawn, said, Hey, would you like to run a company that looks like it's competing against me, I basically need a shell company owner because I have a company. But Joe Keenan would actually become the new president of Attari and Nolan Bushnell was becomes the chairman of of Atari Crazy. And this is also when a Tory starts working on a project code named Stella. Yeah, this is change everything again a home market approach. So two developments make this possible. One is the production of a microchip called the Moss technology six oh five to micro processor uh. And then the other one was creating the methodology of storing games on ROM cartridges. ROM stands for read only memory. So this is why if you had one of those old cartridge based systems, UH, they wouldn't let you do things like keep track of your high score. For example, like you plug your cartridge gen and you could get a high score. But as soon as you turned the machine off, that's a race because it was read only memory couldn't write anything. So the console would have all the stuff that would allow it to accept these cartridges. But the beauty of it was you were not limited to a select number of titles. As long as more cartridges would come out, you could play different games. Yeah, and UH, you know we should set this in here. In the early to mid nineteen seventies, Um, there was not a lot of options as a child. Um, you had crappy handheld games, yer electronics type stuff. Yep. You had, um a few TV channels that you could watch three maybe four if you could get a UHF station its pre Fox even Yeah, just the big three, ABC, NBC, and CBS. UM, and there were you know, all the all the games were like uh, you know, there were card games and and you know, or actually playing outside with your friends, which was great, but but there was not a lot. There weren't many options. So home computing in the home video console was to call it revolutionary. There isn't a word big enough to call it what it was, right, And so keep in mind this is this is the dawn of two eras that are coming about at the same time. They're both about to change children's worlds forever. One is that the r acade is on the horizon, like not not not just the you know, occasional game in a bar or restaurant or bowling out. Yeah, and they had arcades previously, but like we said, it was pinball and yeah, skee ball and stuff like that. Right, So the video the video arcade is just about to come to pass, and the home video game market is about to come to pass. Suddenly we have way more options than uh, you know, finding out who's really good at getting hit with a stick? That was That was my favorite game as a kid. I was really good at that game. I could get hit by a stick like crazy. Uh So, nineteen seventies six, we get a game coming out from Atari called Breakout. Yeah designed, um, well, we thought it was designed and perfected by Steve Jobs because he was the employee assigned to that job. Yeah, Bushnell and Bristow. Steve Bristow, who was another employee of Atari, came up with the concept and gave it to Steve Jobs and said, make this thing that we thought on of essentially kind of a racquetball style game. And so Jobs goes back, does some work, comes back with a circuit board and says I did it, and they hook it up. They're like, wow, this is great. Yeah, in fact, it's so great. You have done such a good job designing this where you've created a really efficient system like we would have thought that you would have to use, you know, a dozen or more other processors. To get this done, but you've managed to make a really elegant solution to it. We're going to give you a bonus. Here's an extra five grand. Yeah. And he was like a uh yeah. And that friend was it was maybe a little bit more responsible than I let on. Yeah, there's this guy I know. I went to college with him. He works for HP. His name is Steve. Wasn't he was really good at this stuff. He made this thing, so, yeah, wasn't he act actually built the integrated circuit that was used in Breakout, and Breakout was and it is still a great game. It's another one of those that holds up. It really does very challenging eight gameplay. It's still a challenge. And then uh, and then as soon as the success hit Jobs, he said, all right, guys, see you that he and Wozniak and a person who was one of the um developers over at Atari all go to form a little company called Apple. That's right. It took them a couple of years to get things going, but they, of course would end up kind of repeating the success that Attari was seeing in the video game market with the personal computer market. So in a way, you could think of Atari as being at least partially responsible not just for the video game industry, but also the personal computer industry, because otherwise jobs might not have had the the inspiration in the capital to really go out and say, let's do this thing. So it's kind of cool. Um Bushnell, by the way, decides he is time, it's ready, he's ready to cash out. Well, yeah, I mean one of the problems was they they had this great idea for the vcs or what would become the AT and they couldn't really fund it to the extent that they needed to scale this thing, and so he wanted to cash out, cash in and just have a little more uh backing basically, and so he made the well it's pretty interesting decision in the long run to sell to warners. Yeah, he sells to Warrant Communications for twenty eight million dollars. He walks away with fifteen million of that. Yeah, and they all of a sudden. Um. I saw an interview with al Alcorn that was he was like, we had real money in the bank for the first time. He said, we had backing, and we had we felt safe. But um, here's the problem. Atari was a a very fun company to work for, likely like, have you seen Wolf of Wall Street? Because I have a feeling that was really was They said, Um, there were a lot of marijuana smoking. They called an MRB session Marijuana Review you Board. Um, he said. One of the developers in the interview that I saw today said, we basically sit around and get high and brainstorm games. Um. They said it was the day's for sexual harassment. There were a lot of people going home with each other in the end of the night, and then cocaine came onto the scene. Another thing to think about is a lot of these game consoles, if you or the different projects they have, if you look, a lot of the the code names are women's names, and according to most of the interviews i've I've seen, the names were picked from attractive ladies who were receptionists or secretaries at Atari. Yeah. Really, you know, forward thinking, classy type stuff. At any rate, you know, Warner Is well, they changed everything. They're a big corporation. Yeah, that you couldn't come and go as you pleased anymore. They would talk about the way they dressed. Um, you were you know, like I said, you were responsible for being there at a certain time every day and leaving at a certain time, and that did not fly with these creative startup right. Yeah, so it caused a lot of tension. Meanwhile, Bushnell would go off to finally really work on a project he had been thinking about since the early seventies, something that he really wanted to do. He had this idea of creating a destination for families to be like just a money making machine, a pizza parlor where you would have entertainment and electronic games and other like Midway style games, and it would just be a license to print money. And that, my friends, is how Chucky Cheese was born. Yeah, and he um. I saw the interview with Dabney where he was talking to him about it at first, and Dabney was like, the pizzas crappy and in here it's like, well, I needed to be loud and the pizza just has to be mediocre at best. And you know what, he was right, because the pizza was never good and every one of us loved that place. I want I want to do an episode at some point. Looking I don't know if I can do it because I don't know if it really falls into tech stuff, but I would love to do the story of Chuck e Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. I grew up knowing Showbiz Pizza, not Chuck E Cheese. I remember, I remember Showbiz Pizza specifically. Yeah. Um, And if you think the two are kind of similar, and you were wondering, I mean, granted they both belonged to the same entity now, yeah, but if you thought the two were kind of similar, it's because the creators of Showbiz Pizza originally worked on the Chuck E Cheese and then there was a falling out in a split, so there was another one in Atlanta called Sergeant Singers. Oh yeah, Oh my gosh, I totally forgot. Yeah. And I had a little quick side story here. When I was like twelve, the new it might have been Showbiz actually opened up and for their grand opening they had an invitation only thing that somehow my dad was an elementary school principle that got an invitation to this and uh to come with his kids, and you basically walk in and everything was free that night. Wow, so free food. They gave you to sackfuls of tokens anytime you wanted them, and it was literally stands out as one of the best nights of my childhood. I still remember it to this day as being like one of the most fun things I've ever done. I could see that. I mean, that would that would be a dream come true. Man, it's it blew my mind. Well, we have talked for a long time. We've got a lot more to cover, but in order to do that, we're going to end here. I'm calling it now. I'm looking at the time. It's over fifty minutes already, So tease it right before the release of the I know, we gotta have a reason for people to come back next week. Yeah, we've got tons more to talk about. I mean, we haven't even left the seventies yet, and trust me, like we've got some drama coming up with the rise and fall of the video game industry as a whole, not to mention the crazy corporate shuffling of the Atari brand, which is kind of heartbreaking. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode about the rise and fall of Atari. Like I said, we've got two more parts coming up covering that your ease, So we will continue this story next week. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me the Twitter handle for the show is Text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.