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The History of Atari /|\ Presented by: Craig Maloney http://decafbad.net Penguicon 2020 What we’ll cover ● The origins of Atari ● The rise of Atari ● The time Steve Jobs worked at Atari and got Steve Wozniak to do his work for him ● The excesses of Atari ● Atari’s sale to Warner Communications ● The spin-offs (Activision, Imagic, etc.) ● The Video Game Crash ● Atari’s sale to Jack Tramiel and some of the aftermath ● Afterword and additional resources What we won’t cover ● Many of the stories from the developers at the time (not enough time, but will give references) ● Atari Home Games like Stunt Cycle, Video Music, Video Pinball, etc. ● The Atari Portfolio, even though it was a cool machine. ● A deep history of the Atari ST ● Atari Coin-Op / Atari Games, save for a few notable games ● Any Atari game development in great detail (save for a couple of notable exceptions) ● Atari’s contests (Swordquest) ● Atarisoft and Tengen What we’ll conveniently ignore (because it’s just a bunch of folks cashing-in on a beloved brand and that’s boring compared to the real thing) ● Atari Corporation’s sale to JTS, Hasbro, Infogrames and so on ● Atari Games sale to Namco, back to Time Warner, Midway, and so on ● The various Atari bankruptcies, reorganizations, and what-not since the 1980s ● The “Atari Estate” (my term for the company handling branding of merchandise and other “ventures”. Believe me, it’s not pretty). ● Whatever the hell the Atari® VCS™ is. Our story begins... The 1960s By Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan - Steve "Slug" Russell manipulating PDP-1, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2099682 By Kenneth Lu - Spacewar!, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2060215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! By Pretzelpaws - Own work by uploader. Taken with a Canon 10D camera. Cropped 1/8/05 using the Gimp., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6579740 Nolan Bushnell Ted Dabney Ted Dabney ● Engineer at Ampex. ● Office-mate of Nolan Bushnell. ● Convinced by Nolan to start up Syzygy with Nolan to produce “Computer Space”, a clone of Spacewar!. ● Is often overshadowed by Nolan when talking about the founding of Atari, but was instrumental in helping get Atari off of the ground. ● Fan of the game Go. Nolan Bushnell ● Originally from Utah. ● Worked at an amusement park for a few summers. Got interested in coin operated machines there. ● Was interested in making “adult” money at the age of 10. ● Charismatic, fast talker. More salesman than engineer but very persuasive and always looking to reinvent himself. ● Huge fan of the game Go. ● Had visions of making a pizza place with animatronics back when he and Ted Dabney could barely afford a pizza. Syzygy (alignment of clestial objects) ● Formed as a partnership to work on what would become Computer Space. ● Named by Larry Bryan, another developer who would leave mid-way in the project. ● Bushnell and Dabney contributed $100 each to form the company. Data General Nova ● 16 bit computer that sold for $4,000 (about $25,000 in 2019 dollars). ● Work on the Spacewar! Clone continued, but the computer wasn’t powerful enough to do a faithful implementation of Spacewar!. It couldn’t refresh the screen quickly enough to make a playable game. ● Abandoned in favor of custom hardware. Nutting Associates ● Nutting had a “Computer Quiz” game released in the late 1960s, and was looking for their next big hit. ● Bushnell approached them with the idea of building their clone of Spacewar! ● At this point the game used a cheaper TV for a monitor and displayed one point on the screen that moved. Competition ● Six miles away Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck were making a Spacewar! Coin-operated game, but their prototype was a $14,000 DEC PDP-11/20 and a $3,000 vector display. ● Nolan, Bill, and Hugh met over coffee to discuss their different games. ● Nolan was relieved that their set-up was so expensive. It meant their machine would be too costly for the arcade market. Nutting Associates ● Nolan convinced Ted Dabney to leave Ampex to join Nutting to help build their Spacewar! Clone in 1970. ● Lots of amazing engineering went into the game, including a clever four-position “ROM” image for the ship, and rudimentary AI. ● Nolan built the case out of modeling clay and had it manufactured. ● 1,500 units were made, which was optimistic considering hit games hit 2,000 units manufactured. Computer Space ● Did well around college campuses and technological areas ● Did poorly in other locations (too complex) ● “While this was a commercial success, making over US$1,000,000 (equivalent to about $6,112,000 in 2019), it was a disappointment to Nutting, who had been hoping for a large-scale success like Computer Quiz.” Syzygy Engineering to Atari ● Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney left Nutting Associates to create Syzygy Engineering ● “Bushnell later stated that he was encouraged by the success of Computer Space in regards to future game ideas, as he had never before created something that made so much money, and additionally felt that his time at Nutting gave him confidence in running his own company because he "couldn't screw it up more than they did"” (source: Wikipedia) ● Name was too close to another company, so they had to change the name ● Nolan was a huge fan of the game Go, and “Atari is a term used in Go for a situation where a stone or chain of stones has only one liberty, and may be captured on the next move if not given one or more additional liberties.” (source: Wikipedia) ● (Note: Never call out Atari in your Go games. It’s considered rude to do so.) Atari is born ● Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972. ● Nolan had a contract with Bally to develop a driving game for them. ● Nolan envisioned Atari as an engineering-driven company (a true Aquarian-Age company). Pong Allan Alcorn ● Given as a training exercise by Nolan to Al Alcorn (Though Nolan told Allan that it was a product for General Electric) ● Al Alcorn was an engineer at Ampex when Ted and Nolan worked there. Pong is a hit! ● Prototype (right) is installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern ● Bushnell and Alcorn placed the prototype on one of the tables near the other entertainment machines: a jukebox, pinball machines, and Computer Space. ● Al Alcorn receives a call from Gaddis (the bar’s owner). The machine is malfunctioning two weeks after installation. ● Al discovers that the coin box is jammed full of quarters, causing the machine to fail ● Machine develops a following. People line up at the bar when it opens to play the game and then leave without buying anything else. By Frmorrison at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52231746 Pong in production ● Got a bunch of folks from the unemployment office to assemble machines ● Machines were slow to produce, about 10 a day, many of which failed quality testing ● Eventually Pong has several versions including Pong in a Barrel (a wine-barrel version that suffered from the wine barrels coming apart), Barrel Pong, an unlicensed Snoopy Pong, Puppy Pong, and a slew of others. 1973 Ted Dabney leaves ● Ted Dabney left Atari in March, 1973 ● Felt he was left out of a lot of higher level meetings ● Discovered Nolan Bushnell patented his video circuit for Pong, and didn’t name him in the patent. 1974 Pong (home version) ● Code named “Darlene” after an Atari employee ● Al Alcorn and Harold Lee worked on a single- chip version of Pong in ‘74 ● Shopped around at toy fairs ● Sears ordered 150,000 units By Evan-Amos - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18298737 Pong explodes ● Multiple companies make Home Pong consoles, including Coleco, Magnavox, and more ● Nolan Bushnell ironically calls these folks Jackals, but Atari didn’t patent the chip in time so they could do little to stop them. ● Atari continues to innovate different games, including Video Olympics, Quadrapong, Pong Doubles, etc. Ralph Baer (an aside) ● Ralph Baer came up with one of the first television paddle games called “Tennis”. ● (William Higgenbotham came up with the first electronic games to use a graphical display called “Tennis for Two” in 1958) ● Al Alcorn believes that Nolan knew about Ralph Baer’s Tennis prior to Al working on their version of Pong ● Nolan claims he played a similar paddle game back in college ● Ralph Baer and Magnavox later sued Atari in 1975 for patent infringement and won a settlement where Magnavox would gain the rights to Atari’s products for the next year. Atari delayed releasing any products for a year and witheld information from Magnavox’s lawyers. Atari the Video Game Company ● Atari cranked out a bunch of TTL-style games, mostly racing and paddle-style games between 1972-1975 ● Home Pong and its variants were Atari’s first foray into consumer electronics Kee Games ● Atari formed a shadow company “Kee Games” headed by Nolan’s friend Joe Keenan in 1973 ● Kee Games was formed as a wholly owned subsidiary so Atari could offer “exclusive” contracts with multiple pinball distrubutors at once ● Kee Games also hired several ex-Atari employees ● Kee Games was more profitable and better run than Atari so when the ruse was discovered in 1974 Kee Games was merged into Atari and Joe Keenan began running the business side of Atari, leaving Nolan to focus on the engineering side of Atari.
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