All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (9 page)

Wozniak pocketed $375, but Jobs kept the remainder of the $5,000. When Wozniak discovered what Jobs had been paid, his hacker heart, which had led him to work on Breakout for art’s sake,
was broken. Wozniak never really trusted Jobs completely again—even though they went on to create Apple together.
*

Breakout was indeed a tour de force of design—even though Wozniak’s work was ultimately scrapped because many at Atari didn’t understand how to replicate the genius design on a mass production level. Still, breaking bricks with an oddly and slowly bouncing ball was one thing. When the ball sped up and the paddle became smaller, your heart seemed as though it would break out as well, right through your rib cage. Just when you believed you could beat it, that dastardly internal computer chip that seemed so superhuman would beat you into submission. Breakout did so well in the United States, Namco came calling to license it in Japan.

When the Atari team arranged to meet the Namco president, Masaya Nakamura, in Japan, the head of the company was late to the gathering. As the Atari executives, still not much older than teenagers, sat around shooting the breeze in the president’s fastidious office, they felt so loose and confident that Steve Bristow positioned himself behind Nakamura’s desk. Comfortable in the power broker’s chair, he brazenly put his feet up on the finely polished desk. When Nakamura entered, he said nothing, but his face grew red as he steamed inside. He had that “Get the fuck out of my chair” look on his face. After the meeting, Namco partnered with Atari. But Namco suspiciously soon requested that Bushnell stop all overseas shipments of Breakout because the game wasn’t a hit. The Japanese company reported selling fewer than fifty machines. In reality, the game was a breakout success for Namco, placing the company that started with coin-operated mechanical horse rides on a department store rooftop, in the mid-1950s, near the top of the Japanese arcade
scene. Throughout Japan, massive pachinko parlors had their gambling machines removed, only to be replaced by Breakout clones. Japanese businessmen flocked to these parlors, often using them for betting illegally. Though they couldn’t prove it, everyone at Atari was certain Namco was behind the Breakout clones. And it wasn’t only Namco that was a thorn in Bushnell’s backside. Dozens and dozens of companies were knocking off clones of Atari games.

Beyond that annoyance, others were beating Atari’s 2600 console to market with gaming machines that were high tech for the time. A company called Fairchild released the Channel F in August 1976, beating Atari by over a year. Imagined by future Intel founder Robert Noyce and engineered by Jerry Lawson, the Channel F introduced the idea of cartridges to home videogames. Its large, palm-sized Videocarts featured rudimentary graphics and barely recognizable characters made of pixels. But the primitive artwork gave life to characters and saucers in lurid living color. Beyond chess, the finest of these was a bowling game with cinnamon red pins and an alley that returned your ball. If the ball didn’t speed from left to right and back again before you rolled it, and if there was no beeping when pins were hit, it would have been a very accurate simulation. You could even play the Fairchild F via a telephone connection and via a partnership with a syndicated TV show called
TV POWWW
.

But Coleco’s Telstar was the most successful pre–Atari 2600 console, bringing in nearly $100 million in sales to the Connecticut company. Between 1976 and 1978, the variants of the console were so numerous, a game head would look at the systems as a wolf looks at a flock of sheep, salivating. The oddest addition was 1977’s Telstar Arcade, a seemingly haphazard mishmash of plastic that looked something like a triangular umbrella holder with places for a Wild West pistol, a steering wheel, and a gearshift. It made you think you were about to play as Clint Eastwood in a futuristic cowboy racing game.

While the 2600 wasn’t the first to market, Bushnell was still
seen as a videogame god among men. After Home Pong sold 150,000 units, the
New York Times
dubbed him “The Man with the Golden Touch” and alluded to him with the same respect Silicon Valley tech wizards did: They called him King Pong. Every member of the team was excited about launching the 2600 in the fall of 1977. It was Atari’s biggest design idea yet, a comparatively inexpensive gaming console that used far fewer chips than most of the competitors. But Atari was out of money. Its millions weren’t nearly enough to accomplish the three things Bushnell aspired to do: keep manufacturing Atari’s home version of Pong, make more double-wide pinball machines for Bally,
and
create the microcomputer multi-gaming console that for a time bore the code name of Stella. It was not named after the current office hottie, but after a turquoise blue ten-speed bike that sat up against one of the carrels and was owned and pedaled each day to the office by Atari engineer Joe Decuir. Stella, with its eight-bit graphics processor, became the Atari 2600, proudly nicknamed the Video Computer System (VCS).

Despite the potential of this new invention, and in addition to imitators that seemed to grow and flourish like so many Elvis impersonators, Bushnell had to deal with a poor economy that put a dent into video arcade sales across the country. Only Midway with Sea Wolf truly thrived in 1976. When you stepped up to the fancy metal periscope that hung from the Sea Wolf cabinet and heard the underwater-like sonar sounds, it made you feel like you were a heroic undersea gunner who would save the world from attack. Many quarters were spent trying to torpedo the swift-moving PT boat that sped across the screen.

The year 1976 saw unemployment in the United States rise to nearly 8 percent. As the economy slumped and inflation skyrocketed, a weakened President Ford tried desperately to steer the country toward better days with the specious WIN (Whip Inflation Now) program. Swiftly emerging from the wrecked economy wasn’t to be.
Bushnell, Valentine, and Atari’s board of directors had dreamed of taking Atari to the stock market and of amassing unimaginable fortune while producing popular and artistic games for the VCS. They even had the prospectus ready. They had dolled themselves up in business suits and traveled to Wall Street to speak to prospective underwriters. But there was no money to be had. The IPO turned into a no PO. Bushnell and the board determined, after a tense, sometimes acrimonious meeting, not to go public.

It was then that Bushnell decided to sell Atari.

Yet there were no immediate takers. Quaker Oats and MCA didn’t believe the dancer had legs, especially with the economy the way it was. Disney, which was a conservative, family outfit, thought Atari was too radical, with unsustainable success. Bushnell was getting nervous and so was the board. But like the undaunted, fascinating talker he was, he interested Warner Communications—upon the urging of Don Valentine, who was one of Warner’s largest shareholders. If Warner chose to purchase the videogame company, Valentine would get a huge finder’s fee.

By late summer, Bushnell had been in contact with Warner Bros. CEO Steve Ross, the smart, greedy, show-biz-loving entrepreneur who had turned his family’s funeral parlor business into gold before striking greater lucre with music and movies at Warner. While the dashing Ross liked to tell the press that he got the idea to purchase Atari after he couldn’t pull his kids away from Atari’s arcade games at Disneyland, Ross really had been talking with Bushnell prior to this fabricated eureka moment. Ross certainly knew how to charm. He flew Bushnell and Valentine to New York on Warner’s corporate jet. Clint Eastwood and his waifishly fetching girlfriend Sondra Locke were on the plane too. Eastwood and Locke were perfectly chatty with Bushnell and feigned interest in Atari. Eastwood even made Bushnell sandwiches. On the ground, there was a suite fit for a king in midtown Manhattan, and the screening of Eastwood’s
upcoming Dirty Harry film,
The Enforcer
. The starstruck Bushnell felt special, accepted, appreciated beyond his niche. There were drinks and conviviality and all-night negotiations. By the time the early September sun rose over the East River, Bushnell had agreed to sell the company for approximately $28 million. Later, Bushnell would say that he sold the company for far too little and called Warner’s people “incompetent” executives who committed company suicide and homicide.

He was both right and wrong. In December 1978, there was an ugly argument between Bushnell and Warner executives. Bushnell felt in his heart that the Atari 2600 Video Computer System, the $199 console that shipped with a Combat game, was not high tech enough to continue selling well. Yet upon release in October 1977, the machine sold 250,000 units, and the next year 550,000 units. Warner expected to manufacture a second run that produced a million more systems. To outside eyes, 800,000 consoles sold within two years seemed like a huge amount. But due to production and marketing costs, the VCS was not making money. Though he had sold the company, Bushnell was still a part of Atari, and he had something to say.

“The market isn’t holding. Stop making it. Stop selling it. Forget it!” Bushnell told the startled suits. “We’ve got to make a newer, better machine. Let’s sell the 2600 for cheap and do something with better graphics and better games. Prepare for the future. That’s the only way to go. The only way.”

The executives looked like they’d had the wind knocked out of them. It was as if the 2600 itself had grown boxing gloves and sucker punched them repeatedly. Steve Ross felt an ache in the pit of his stomach, and as a master of the universe, he found that feeling unknown and unwelcome. Though he didn’t trust Atari as a long-term play, he genuinely liked the idea of Atari as a new kind of entertainment and he appreciated the ingenuity that went into each
cartridge. He even played the games well into the night in his tony East Hampton mansion.

But that day, that confusing day, made him angry. “What the fuck is going on here?” Ross asked. Swearing was unusual for the CEO. His ticker wasn’t what it once was, and he would have a heart attack in just a few years.

Manny Gerard, the most senior Warner vice president who dealt directly with Atari, tried to calm Ross. He urged Ross to stay the course with the older machine, at least through the holiday season. His wait-and-see approach proved lucrative in the long run. The 2600, because of the variety of games available, began to sell like bottled water during a heat wave. During 1979 and 1980, videogame fans bought more than three million VCS machines. The knockoffs of Space Invaders and Pac-Man together sold an astonishing fifteen million copies. But it wasn’t just the thrill of playing familiar arcade games without constantly adding quarters. It was the idea that they could be played in the home on your own TV set with your friends—at any time. And you didn’t have to dress up or spend money on beer to play. The console features themselves weren’t so savagely amazing. It was the games that led people to buy in droves. And in the stores, Atari had the brand name that was the most familiar and most up-front. While the competing Fairchild Channel F console was the first to have cartridges, it never had the essential licensed hits, nor was it seen to be as hot as the familiar Atari brand. Atari was gaming nirvana, endless, eternal fun, the highest happiness you could find in entertainment. It was games like Superman, where you changed in a phone booth and flew over tall buildings in a single bound, your cape waving confidently in the wind as you saved the world. Later, it was Yars’ Revenge (comic book included) in which the David-like flying insect Yar, angry about the destruction of planet Razak IV, mandibled carefully or shot cannons adamantly
through a vast rainbow-colored boundary. Beyond, he faced off with a brown Goliath named Qotile who bore a looming, repulsive alien visage. It creeped you out royally.

After the confrontation with Warner, Bushnell showed up to the Atari offices infrequently, feeling strongly that the layers of corporate politics at Warner were destroying his baby. He was soon fired. Then came the sad exodus. The designers, the soul of Atari, became restless. While Bushnell had given them cushy offices and sexy secretaries, most of their salaries now hovered below what the market would bear. Moreover, they weren’t getting credit for the games the way the cast and crew did in each movie’s credits or the bands and their sidemen did in the liner notes of records. Nor did they receive a percentage of the profits, even though Atari was making hundreds upon hundreds of millions as one of the world’s fastest growing companies. And despite all his faults, Bushnell’s influence was missed. Bushnell understood games. The suits at Warner didn’t; they came from staid industries like clothing and shoes. They knew diddly-squat about a technology product that did something to the senses beyond giving the wearer a sense of pride. In fact, they knew little about the world of entertainment in general. So between 1979 and 1981, the vast majority of Atari’s original designers left to form their own companies, like Imagic and Activision, the latter of which is still a mighty company to this day. Like those aliens being shot as they fell from the night sky in Space Invaders, Atari was being decimated.

Still, some essential designers remained. Though it wasn’t easy, they would do their best to make the quality games for which Atari had been known before the purging. For example, Tod Frye, a former Berkeley carpenter, was in love with computers and games. Even while in high school, on punch cards for a giant HP 2000 Timeshare computer Frye made a text-based adventure game about dealing drugs. It was a well-thought-out simulation in which you managed
your resources to become a better pusher. It wasn’t a strange game to make in a Bay Area enjoying the drug culture of the seventies.

The opinionated Frye, along with a handful of other designers, was bold enough to bring some literate and almost literary games to Atari. He dreamed up the Swordquest series, an early action role playing game that integrated various forms of pop culture, like comic books, with philosophy, like
The I Ching
, into game play. While Swordquest didn’t sell like the popular arcade ports of the time, it set a kind of standard. Games that were based on deeper thought and philosophy could occasionally stand out if given tender loving care. But Frye was best known for designing a maligned version of the bestselling Pac-Man arcade game for the Atari 2600.