IEEE Spectrum November, 2016 - 24

tALes of AtArI
new stories of A legenDAry
compAny come to light

thought I'd heard them all.
Atari stories, that is. I started covering the company in 1981, followed cofounder Nolan Bushnell and first
engineer Al Alcorn through their later adventures, and became personal friends with
more than a few Atari alumni.
But in September the IEEE Silicon Valley
History Committee hosted a sold-out
100-person event, in Santa Clara, Calif.
With key Atari players on hand, behind-thescenes stories came out that were new
to me-and even to some of the players. It's
hard to get startups off the ground, particularly those trying to do something as revolutionary as start a new industry. So let's
just say the truth, at times, was stretched
back then-or simply ignored-in order to
make things happen. A few examples:
Bushnell began moonlighting on coinoperated video games while working at
Ampex, a Silicon Valley electronics company. He and some colleagues developed
Computer Space in 1971, an arcade version of
Spacewar, a game written for the DEC PDP‑1

NOV 2016

NORTh AMERICAN

siliCon VAlleY leGenDs: [From left] Former
Atari engineer Owen Rubin, head of engineering
Al Alcorn, and cofounder Nolan Bushnell.

minicomputer. Recalled Atari's head of engineering, Alcorn: "You were doing this [on the
side] in the evening, borrowing parts."
"Liberating parts," corrected Bushnell.
"A fine tradition," said Alcorn, "that Atari adopted. That's how the Apple II was made, with
Atari's parts."
Steven Mayer, who was Atari's chief architect for home games and computer systems, chimed in: "There was a long tradition
at Ampex of supporting people [to go out
and do other things]. A guy working on a
database at Ampex was Larry Ellison. A guy
working in audio was Ray Dolby. Ampex was
incredibly generous about letting these people start their own companies."
Computer Space was a failure, but Atari's
second game, Pong, turned the company
into a huge success in 1972. "I wanted world
domination," said Bushnell. "And it turns out
that there are two coin-op [game] distribu-

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tors in every city. One would have Gottlieb
pinballs, one Williams. We had chosen the
best distributors, but the [distributors] who
didn't have the Atari brand were doing everything they could to spawn a competitor. So I
thought, let's make that happen."
So in 1973 Atari secretly started a second company, Kee Games, with Bushnell's
next-door neighbor, Joe Keenan, at the helm.
"We took our No. 2 engineer, our No. 1 manufacturing guy, and every other game in our
lineup, and gave it to Kee.... We told the distributors, 'Those bastards are stealing our
games!' and then the distributors would run
off and grab the games."
Moving on to how Atari operated internally,
"Nolan [Bushnell] and I had a vibrant, contentious relationship," said Alcorn. "Nolan is this
dreamer doing all this crazy stuff, and I'm the
one who gets the short end of the stick and
has to make it happen."
"Nolan would come into engineering,"
Alcorn continued, "where we had three teams
who had been working on things for months.
And he would say, 'This game is s-t; let's do
this instead.' That got to be a problem, so I
gave our secretary a pager only to be used
to page me in the event Nolan got into engineering. I would go in and stand behind him,
and as soon as he left I would remind engineers who they worked for."
The first major customer for the home version of Atari's seminal Pong was Sears. Says
Bushnell, "We were in a conference room
with Tom Quinn [the Sears executive], and he
says, 'How many can you build?' We had no
clue. A big run for us at the time was 10,000
units. So I went out and asked our manufacturing guy. He said 25,000. Then I went back
to Quinn and told him 75,000. He gave us an
order for 150,000."
The Atari alumni also mentioned the importance of location for their entrepreneurial
success: "One of the nice things about Silicon
Valley is you all have worked next to an idiot
who has gone off and been successful," said
Bushnell. "So you think if he did it, I can do it too.
"And, of course, Steve Jobs was working for
me, so it goes along." -TeKlA s. perrY
An extended version of this story is available online.

teklA s. perry

RESOURCES_GEEk LIfE

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2016