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

handsome cabinet for Bushnell’s Computer Space that looked somewhat like an arcade version of Munch’s
The Scream
. It certainly appeared alien. Inside it was, as in Baer’s prototypes, a mess of wires. But a small Texas Instruments computer was in there, too.
    After it was made at Nutting Industries, where Dabney and Bushnell consulted, the machine was sent to pinball arcades in the region. However, the black-and-white Computer Space was ahead of its time and deemed too tricky for an industry that was just being born. It needed a joystick, not those confusing buttons, to make it easier to play. Yet the game had a tantalizing pitch line: “A simulated space battle that pits computer-guided saucers against a rocket ship that you control.”
    Computer Space wasn’t the key to the kind of Ali Baba—type riches Bushnell knew were within his grasp. Only three thousand machines were made and fewer than a thousand were distributed. Few at the penny arcades and bars wanted to play. The fact that the saucers made an annoying, high-pitched whine when they emitted laser beams probably didn’t help the game’s popularity. Yet the fifties retro futuristic machine made it to the silver screen to be forever part of the B-grade science fiction message movie
Soylent Green
. In its thirty seconds of fame, there was much sexual innuendo as a giggling and ravishing Leigh Taylor-Young begged her much older gift giver to “come on and play” Computer Space. Then she begins to kiss him. It was the kind of scene that led a young moviegoing nerd to fantasize.
    Bushnell and Dabney each put $250 into their Syzygy company, but a California roofing contractor already bore the odd moniker. Undaunted, Bushnell changed the name immediately. He loved Go, the strategy-oriented game from ancient China—everything from the way the smooth stone game pieces felt to the way the board looked. So for his company’s name, Bushnell settled upon a word from Go, the game he loved so much: Atari. The definition is the equivalent of the word “check” in chess but also means “you are about to become engulfed.”
    The twenty-seven-year-old’s first employee was a former Ampex engineer, twenty-two-year-old Allan Alcorn. Alcorn was a genial, hefty award-winning high school football player with a carefully trimmed beard. Obsessed with learning, he was an engineering whiz with a bachelor of science degree out of the University of California Berkeley, who worked his way through college by fixing TVs while the older guys in the local shop got drunk and played cards in the back room. Alcorn, who grew up on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, enjoyed the San Francisco psychedelic music scene, and fell in love with computers in college. But he had a mischievous side and almost got in trouble for hacking into and using a college professor’s access, which was very expensive at the time.
    Bushnell impressed Alcorn with a free lunch and his turquoise Buick station wagon. He offered Alcorn a $1,000-a-month salary, which Bushnell hoped to pay from the contracts he was aggressively seeking. Alcorn’s pay was $200 less than he made at Ampex, but the package included a generous 10 percent of the company. At their meeting, Bushnell started telling Alcorn of all the contracts he had suddenly amassed. In actuality, he had only
planned
on getting those deals. Alcorn took it in stride, understanding that there was something entrepreneurial about Bushnell that made him utter the most outrageous things. While some were offended by that, Alcorn saw it as a talent. In their small office lab in one of the shabbier districts ofSanta Clara, Bushnell walked back and forth and gestured with his hands as he told Alcorn, “I want to make a game that any drunk in any bar can play. Simple. Simple enough for a drunk to play.”
    Alcorn thought the idea was simplistic, not simple. He had believed that their first project was going to be a spiffy driving game, maybe with sleek-looking cars.