“The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work-then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.īushnell began work on video games when he toiled at Ampex, which made tape recorders, recording tape, and an early VCR, as a research designer for $12,000 a year. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well-crafted myth. It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley.
Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. Reprinted by Permission of Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Instructions seen on the first Pong arcade game, September 1972Įxcerpted from All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture.
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