All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg Read Free Book Online

and was entranced by board games that required strategy, like Clue. His charming nerdiness bloomed at the University of Utah, where he spent way too much time in a then state-of-the-art computer lab playing Spacewar!, the fascinating precursor to the more well-known Asteroids.
    Spacewar! was created by Steve “Slug” Russell and his engineering school friends at MIT as a lark in February 1962. On the then-futuristic, enticingly round screen of a massive PDP-1 computer, two green dots representing spaceships flew in zero gravity. They shot at each other on the ebony background of a star-filled galaxy. Players captained the ships by sitting at a panel and moving switches up and down. It was a transporting, transformative experience, and for players like Bushnell, it was a vision of the future, a future in which you could be Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon in your own imaginary science fiction universe. In Spacewar!, you even had to avoid planets that rushed in your direction as you tried with all the energy your brain and body could muster to annihilate your opponent’s ship. Viewing the minimalist screen with such early graphics, Bushnell’s neurons fired thousands of excited messages to his axons and millions of vesicles struck his synapses. Spacewar! was it for Bushnell. He just couldn’t get it off his mind. When he lost his tuition money in a card game and went to work as a barker and weight guesser on the midway at Utah’s giant Lagoon Amusement Park(where everyone from Count Basie to the Rolling Stones played), he schemed about it. He thought about it when he was rejected for a job at Disneyland because he didn’t have enough engineering experience. He began work on what he called Computer Space when he toiled at Ampex, which made tape recorders, recording tape, and an early VCR, as a research designer for $12,000 a year. He didn’t like the gig much, feeling that the only way to make real money was to become an entrepreneur who made his own games for an audience that had yet to be targeted or mined.
    At Ampex, Bushnell and straight-shooting former navy man Ted Dabney got to know each other during lunches. They ate their brown bag ham sandwiches, turned over a wastebasket, put a Go game table on top, and played the strategy game almost daily. When he created the oddly named Syzygy, his first company, in late 1971, Bushnell’s vision for games was all he could talk about. Syzygy would be primarily based around pinball arcade routes in the Bay Area and a deal to make double-wide pinball machines for Bally in Chicago. Videogames weren’t exactly an afterthought, but they certainly wouldn’t be the primary cash cow in those early months of existence.
    Superiors like Charlie Steinberg, a future Ampex president, thought Bushnell had gone mad and tried everything to rid him of the idea of starting his own company. He wanted to keep Bushnell at Ampex as a career man. All this made Bushnell even more obsessed with forging his own path. When he had trouble with his wife and the two divorced, a prime reason was that Bushnell was spending too much time on his plan for world domination through games.
    It has been widely written that Bushnell began work on his first arcade machine in 1970 in his daughter’s bedroom. Soon, the story goes, there were pieces of wood, wires, tools, and parts of a black-and-white TV set strewn about everywhere. The work proceeded with such passion and zeal that Bushnell’s child had to sleep elsewhere in the house. In fact, Bushnell worked on the game inhis partner Ted Dabney’s daughter’s bedroom. It was young Terri Dabney who had to bed down in the master bedroom, which she shared with her parents. In that cramped inner sanctum filled with a child’s stuffed animals, the two inventors spent countless hours burning the midnight oil. The elder Dabney, a balding beanstalk of a man with a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and a penchant for plaid shirts, worked hard to make a charily crafted,