Страница 57 из 155
One of Pong’s most ingenious features was its simplicity. Computer Space had required complex instructions; there were enough directives on its opening screen (among them, for example, “There is no gravity in space; rocket speed can only be changed by engine thrust”) to baffle a computer engineer. Pong, by contrast, was simple enough that a beer-sloshed barfly or stoned sophomore could figure it out after midnight. There was only one instruction: “Avoid missing ball for high score.” Consciously or not, Atari had hit upon one of the most important engineering challenges of the computer age: creating user interfaces that were radically simple and intuitive.
Bushnell was so pleased by Alcorn’s creation that he decided it should be more than a training exercise: “My mind changed the minute it got really fun, when we found ourselves playing it for an hour or two after work every night.”22 He flew to Chicago to persuade Bally Midway to accept Pong as a fulfillment of their contract rather than push for a car racing game. But the company declined to take it. It was wary of games that required two players.
This turned out to be a lucky break. To test out Pong, Bushnell and Alcorn installed the prototype at Andy Capp’s, a beer bar in the working-class town of Su
Bushnell and Alcorn knew they had a hit on their hands. An average machine made $10 a day; Pong was taking in $40. Suddenly Bally’s decision to decline it seemed like a blessing. The true entrepreneur in Bushnell came out: he decided that Atari would manufacture the game on its own, even though it had no financing or equipment.
He took the gamble of deciding to bootstrap the whole operation; he would fund as much as possible from the cash flow he made on sales. He looked at how much money he had in the bank, divided it by the $280 cost of making each machine, and figured that he could build thirteen of them initially. “But that was an unlucky number,” he recalled, “so we decided to build twelve.”24
Bushnell made a small model of the console shell he desired out of clay, then took it to a boat manufacturer who began producing them in fiberglass. It took just a week to build each complete game and another few days to sell it for $900, so with the $620 profit he had a positive cash flow to keep things going. Some of the early proceeds were spent on a sales brochure, which featured a beautiful young woman in a slinky sheer nightgown draping her arm over the game machine. “We hired her from the topless bar down the street,” Bushnell recounted forty years later to an audience of earnest high school students, who seemed somewhat baffled by the tale and unsure what a topless bar was.25
Venture capital, a realm that had just begun in Silicon Valley with Arthur Rock’s financing of Intel, was not available for a company proposing to make video games, which were not yet a known product and were associated with the mobbed-up pinball industry.II Banks demurred as well when Bushnell ambled in for a loan. Only Wells Fargo came through, providing a credit line of $50,000, which was far less than Bushnell had requested.
With the money, Bushnell was able to open up a production facility in an abandoned roller-skating rink a few blocks from Atari’s Santa Clara office. The Pong games were put together not on an assembly line but in the middle of the floor, with young workers ambling up to stick in the various components. Workers were dragooned from unemployment centers nearby. After weeding out the hires that were heroin addicts or stole the television monitors, the operation scaled up rapidly. At first they were making ten units a day, but within two months they could make almost a hundred. The economics were improved as well; the cost of each game was held to just over $300, but the sales price was raised to $1,200.
The atmosphere was what you might expect from the fun-loving Bushnell and Alcorn, both still in their twenties, and it took to the next level the casual style of Silicon Valley startups. Every Friday there would be a beer bash and pot-smoking party, sometimes capped by ski
Bushnell bought himself a nice house in the hills of nearby Los Gatos, where he sometimes held board meetings or staff parties in his hot tub. When he built a new engineering facility, he decreed that it should have its own hot tub. “It was a recruiting tool,” he insisted. “We found out that our lifestyle and the parties were hugely good for attracting workers. If we were trying to hire somebody, we’d invite him to one of our parties.”26
In addition to being a recruiting tool, the culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. It was based on a philosophy that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At its core were certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured. Unlike at East Coast corporations, there were no fixed working hours and no dress code, either for the office or the hot tub. “At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something,” said Steve Bristow, an engineer. “At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.”27
The success of Pong prompted a lawsuit from Magnavox, which marketed the Odyssey home-television game that Bushnell had played at a trade show. The Magnavox game had been devised by an outside engineer named Ralph Baer. He could not claim to have invented the concept; its roots went back at least to 1958, when William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Lab rigged up an oscilloscope on an analog computer to knock a blip back and forth in what he called Te
I