What do Steve Jobs, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Chuck E. Cheese have in common? This early Atari hit
Games Features Steve Jobs
We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,297,990-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Breakout
What it’s about: One of the simple-yet-addictive games of the first wave of video games, 1976’s Breakout took the basic mechanics of 1972’s pioneering Pong (in which a paddle slides back and forth and hits a ball), and gave it a twist—instead of hitting the ball to an opponent, it smashes a wall of bricks. That simple concept not only gave the Atari 2600 console one of its first big hits, it set a chain of events in motion that would change the world of computers forever.
Biggest controversy: Breakout’s simplicity made it easy to play, but harder to copyright. Atari’s copyright filing was initially rejected, with the government arguing the game didn’t have enough distinctive graphics or sounds. Atari appealed, and then-appellate court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg found in Atari’s favor.
Strangest fact: Most games of the 1970s would simply repeat a handful of screens, sometimes increasing the speed or difficulty with each iteration. But Breakout simply stopped after the second screen was cleared. You could keep bouncing the ball around an empty screen once all the bricks were gone, and once you got tired of that, you could let the ball go and lose on purpose, or restart the game. As such, the highest possible score was 896, as each screen was worth 448 points. But players discovered a loophole in the game: If you played in two-player mode, and player one completed the first screen with their last ball, and immediately died once the screen was clear, player one’s score would carry over to player two. If player two could complete two screens without losing a ball, they’d get a score of 1344.
Thing we were happiest to learn: Breakout’s development team went on to bigger and better things. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell came up with the general concept for the game, but he assigned its development to one of his young programmers, Steve Jobs. Jobs roped in his friend, a hardward whiz named Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was employed by Hewlett-Packard at the time, and couldn’t work on an Atari project outright—so Jobs promised to give Wozniak half his fee for the game in exchange for his help.
Wozniak came into Atari after hours for four consecutive nights, after which the duo had created what would become a hit game. But Wozniak saw something bigger. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members would built simple computers. Having successfully designed the hardware for Breakout, he set his sights on something bigger: a personal computer, one that wouldn’t just play games like the Atari 2600, but would be able to run Integer BASIC, the programming language Wozniak was also developing. The result was the Apple I, a limited-edition, hand-made home computer Wozniak and Jobs sold out of Jobs’ garage the year after collaborating on Breakout. The year after that, Wozniak refined his ideas and built the Apple II, still building on ideas from Breakout like the color graphics and sound he had developed for the game.
Wozniak rightly deserves the lion’s share of credit for inventing the personal computer, but it’s not clear that it would have been the world-changing invention it became without Jobs’ marketing vision. Based on a quote in the Wikipedia article, it sounds like Wozniak invented the personal computer so he could show it off to his friends—he cloned Breakout in BASIC, to run on the Apple II, and said it, “was the most satisfying day of my life,” when he was able to demonstrate the game. (Apple later marketed the knockoff as Brick Out.)
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Jobs couldn’t resist screwing over his friend, and that move could’ve doomed one of the most important partnerships of the 20th century. Bushnell was aware of Jobs’ friendship with Wozniak, and Wozniak’s hardware savvy. Atari games were getting more complex, and using more transistor-transistor logic chips, which were expensive to produce. But Bushnell knew Wozniak had designed a version of Pong that used 30 chips—a typical Atari game used 150 to 170—so he was hoping Jobs would lean on his friend for help.
To further incentivize Jobs, Bushnell offered a payment of $750 for the game, but also a bonus for every chip fewer than 50 the final design used. Jobs and Wozniak delivered a game that ran on 44 chips, claiming they had a design for 42, but “were so tired [they] couldn’t cut it down.” Their design was actually too good—so compact that it would’ve been difficult to manufacture, so Atari’s own hardware designers re-created Wozniak’s design and used approximately 100 chips to do it.
Nonetheless, Bushnell kept his promise, giving Jobs a $5,000 bonus for the 44-chip design. Except he never told Wozniak. Jobs pocketed the $5,000, and split the original $750 fee with is friend. Wozniak didn’t find out until years later, still believing in 1984 that they “only got 700 bucks.” By the time he learned the truth, Apple had made both men millionaires, but had he discovered Jobs’ duplicity at the time, their partnership would likely have splintered, and who knows how many years would have passed before someone else brought the first home computer to market.
Also noteworthy: The Atari 2600 console attached to your TV, so its games were naturally in color. But for the stand-up arcade version of Breakout, a black-and-white screen was cheaper, so Atari put strips of cellophane over the screen to make it look like the rows of bricks were in color. The game was still a hit—there were 11,000 Breakout cabinets made, and Atari sold 1,650,336 copies for the 2600. (The arcade version alone brought in $11 million, making even Jobs’ $5,000 bonus seem chintzy by comparison)
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: While he’s a minor player in this story, Nolan Bushnell is a fascinating figure in his own right, and a giant in the early world of computing. He had dreams of working for Disney, but when they didn’t hire him after college, he got a job as an electrical engineer and met Ted Dabney, who would play the Wozniak to Bushnell’s Jobs. Dabney took Bushnell to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to show him Spacewar!, the first computer game to be installed on more than one computer. Bushnell immediately saw the potential, and convinced Dabney to create a coin-operated Spacewar! to sell to arcades. They formed a company called Syzygy, and their Spacewar! knockoff, Computer Space, was the first arcade video game, and the first computer game available to the general public.
Astonishingly, the two discovered the name Syzygy was already taken, so they renamed their company Atari. Their next project was a coin-op video tennis game, which they named Pong. Pong was a huge hit, although Bushnell used his proceeds to buy out Dabney, who was complaining about being pushed aside by his partner. Dabney went on to develop a home version of Pong. That was a huge hit, and Atari built on its success with the 2600, which could play multiple games.
While Bushnell did hire Jobs and Wozniak for Breakout, afterwards he turned down their design for the Apple I, which they had hoped Atari would manufacture. He also declined an offer to be an initial investor in Apple, Inc., later saying, “It’s kind of fun to think about that, when I’m not crying.” Instead, he put his money into a pet project: a combination pizza parlor and arcade, a venue that could show off Atari’s arcade games in a more family-friendly environment than the bars that usually stocked the company’s products. He named the place Pizza Time Theatre, but looking to add attractions, he drafted an animatronic band modeled on Disneyland’s Country Bear Jamboree. He planned to rename the restaurant Coyote Pizza, after the coyote main character, but when the costume arrived, it turned out to be a rodent, prompting a new name: Chuck E. Cheese.
Having built two thriving companies, Bushnell has spent the years since founding several more, including one of the earliest tech business incubators, Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group. (One of Catalyst’s investments: Etak, whose digitized maps laid the groundwork for modern navigation systems.) There was also talk in 2008 of a biopic, with Leonardo DiCaprio producing and possibly starring, but it never materialized.
Further Down the Wormhole: From its humble beginnings selling Wozniak’s home-made computer out of Jobs’ garage, Apple, Inc. has become the world’s most valuable company. While it has taken flak for its environmental footprint, Tim Cook, Jobs’ successor as Apple CEO, has pushed the company to be far greener. 93% of their global operations run on renewable energy, and the company has protected 36,000 acres of forest in North Carolina and Maine, with plans to work with the World Wildlife Fund to preserve a million acres of forest in China.
Maine, is of course largely forest, occasionally broken up by the small towns where all of Stephen King’s stories take place. The state is rural enough that it only has two airports large enough to handle passenger jets, Portland International Jetport, and Bangor International Airport. In the early days of air travel, Bangor was a key refueling stop for planes making a transatlantic crossing. And in 1977, it momentarily delighted the nation when a German tourist landed there and mistook Bangor for San Francisco. We’ll hear the story of misbegotten traveller Erwin Kreuz next week.
70 Comments
A critical step – the arcade version of Space War was removed from the places it was tested because the customers found it too complicated to use and it took up floor space. So they came up with Pong, a very simple game. After the first cabinet was installed they got an angry call from the business owner that the customers were essentially rioting because the game was broken. Fearing they had struck out a second time they went to see what had happened. Which was that the coin box had filled so much that the coin acceptor jammed. Bushnell had a knack for finding things that seemed to make him happy which also made other people happy. I’ll just sneak in a reference to Jay Miner, who did for Atari computers what Steve Wozniak did for Apple. Jay later went to Amiga which produced a full pre-emptive multi-tasking GUI operating system essentially a decade before Microsoft did.
Jay later went to Amiga which produced a full pre-emptive multi-tasking GUI operating system essentially a decade before Microsoft did. The sad story of Commodore and what could have been has been told, but is certainly worth the retelling. So much potential lost at the time.
I’ve always found it funny that Jack Tramiel (who founded Commodore) went on to lead Atari during the Atari ST era. And that Jay Miner went to Amiga, which was purchased by Commodore before the Amiga computer even hit the market. So basically Atari became Commodore and Commodore became Atari.
Now that is a fun fact.
I reckon I’d still have a better time with my old A500 OS than trying to use a goddam Apple machine. Fucking things are impenetrable to me.
Steve Jobs was definitely an asshole. Nolan Bushnell’s career is pretty nuts and would make a pretty good biopic. Kinda surprised there haven’t been more biopics about the early 80’s home computer industry. There are some great YouTube channels with documentaries about that time. Everything was advancing and people were constantly getting screwed over.
Hollywood probably thinks no one wants to watch a movie about nerds.
And yet, they gave Steve Jobs TWO biopics.
Steve…”Two Flicks”…Jobs…
But Wozniak none. Nobody wants to see a movie about an actual nerd, not the hippie turned yuppie that Jobs was.
Actually three if you count the awesomeness of the teevee movie with Bill Gates played by…Anthony Michael Hall!
JOBS: GET INSPIRED, is one of, if not the most douchiest movie title in history.
The other Steve Jobs movie was better in every way: title, structure (focusing on just 3 days in his life was a good call), and tone (it portrayed Jobs more realistically rather than idolizing him).
thats funny.
as long as one of the nerds has a crush on an impossibly beautiful woman female.
What if instead of an impossibly beautiful young female we substitute Kathy Griffin?
you live your fantasy!
The History Channel made an excellent doc about the video game era called Game Changers. They still show it in between all the shit they churn out now.
If I could put together a superhero team of nerds it’d be Bushnell, Woz, and Richard Garriot. They’d be fighting the duo of Jobs and Gates (I know, a weird teamup but…seriously, I have a feeling they talked all the time).Sid Meier would be the true mastermind working behind the scenes. Nolan Bushnell really is ripe for a biopic. Crazy, fascinating life.
“Valley of the Boom” was excellent.
The game was still a hit—there were 11,000 Breakout cabinets made, and Atari sold 1,650,336 copies for the 2600. (The arcade version alone brought in $11 million, making even Jobs’ $5,000 bonus seem chintzy by comparison) So you’re saying it was a breakout hit?
Take your star, and off you fuck.
My favorite Atari 2600 game was Adventure, a simple but brilliant fantasy games. The dragons were scary! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1980_video_game)
I was an Intellivision kid (ASTROSMASH uber alles), but most of my friends had Atari. We played the hell out of Adventure.
My older cousin had an Intellivision. My uncle offered to sell it to me sometime in the mid-90’s for like $750 with all the games. I laughed, but I really miss those paddles and playing Burgertime.
The bat… the bat… Though to be fair, one of my favorite things to do was get eaten by a dragon that then got picked up by said bat and taken on a tour of the game.Between this one and the bats from the old D&D Intellivision game it’s no surprise they’re usually STILL one of the most hated monsters. Little bastards deserve it.
I forgot about the bat. Damn him
I still play the Intellivison D&D games on my PC especially Treasure of Tarmin
I introduced my nephews to that over Christmas (I have one of the Flashback consoles) though they had their curiosity already piqued by it due to Ready Player One.
You know, as much as modern games put into realistic graphics and sound, a pixelated dragon that looked like a duck made of Lego with a roar that sounded like a modem breaking down was terrifying in the context of that game.
The generation here that grew up with Atari, I sure hope you kept your console and cartridges minty.Atari Game selling for $9600https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/promotional-use-only-atari-2600-console-nfr-condition-fn-unopened-new-2600-atari-1981-usa/a/7236-93074.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515Or for that matter your PS 1 Cartridges.Twisted Metal $22,000.00Or for the real mind blower $660,000 for a Super Mario Bros. from 1985https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/super-mario-bros-wata-96-a-sealed-hangtab-1-code-mid-production-nes-nintendo-1985-usa/a/7242-93028.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515I work at an auction house that is slow to get on the bandwagon of the collectibles young titans of Silicon Valley are buying. I just got a collection of Pokemon Cards, about 900 and so far I have the estimate on them conservatively around 77,000.00. The owners are looking at me like I’m insaneBut a few auctions past I sold a handwritten manuscript of 5 sentences by Darwin that almost word for word are in his On the Origin of the Species for $104,000. Great sale but the newer generation could give a shit.
I have a ton of old Pokemon cards from when they were first introduced that would be fun to go through and egregiously self-appraise. I don’t think I had any first edition stuff (at best some holographics) so it probably wouldn’t be worth my time. Anyway, back to mindlessly browsing the internet.
I almost replied “I still had my 2600 a few years ago!”, but then realized “a few years ago” was probably 1991 at the latest.
At some point in the distant past my parents put my old 2600 and box of games in their attic, and promptly forgot it was there. Sometime in the current millenium (probably 2010 or so) I ended up in their attic looking for Christmas decorations and found the box. It had been sitting up there, in Midwestern cold and heat and humidity, for nearly 30 years. I brought it down, let it thaw out, and the damned thing still worked, as did about half the games. Those systems were built like trucks.
They had to be tough because kids like me were chucking that big-ass joystick at the console when that fucking red dragon ate me in Adventure or I mistimed a jump in Pitfall.
On the back of your name, I just sold that comment for $327, 265.
in this case the newer generation is right. Those games are shit. Even for nostalgia or historical value, no way are they worth money like that.
I remember selling my family’s 2600 and all games to some mustached, long-haired, 70’s-as-shit lookin’ dude and his slightly annoyed-looking girlfriend. This would’ve been like 1988. Look, eight years later I had to sell a generation’s worth of Lego too. We didn’t know it’d be a thing!
I’m still pissed I lost my original SMS (from 1987) and the Genesis I bought with my own money just a couple months after it came out here in the States. I still had both with original styrofoam interiors and original boxes in 2005. Put them in a storage unit and then it had a flood a couple years later. All the games for both got lost as well, also in original boxes with the manuals as well. My dad was never happy that I spent $80 on Stryder for the Genesis, but boy was it a blast to play. Out Run on the SMS was easily one of the best arcade conversions that Sega ever did. It was Pole Position on steroids, but with even better music.
…and there was a second version that worked with the SMS active 3d glasses..(Outrun 3D)
I’d be surprised if the vast majority of that era’s games ever have any value emulation has killed any collectability beyond that of rich guys looking for holy grail type items like the ones you’ve listed.
He planned to rename the restaurant Coyote Pizza
That would have been a…different entertainment experience.
Would there have been a terrible movie based on it?
Coyot E. Cheese doesn’t have quite the same ring…Also we wouldn’t have gotten the delightfully absurd factoid that the character’s full name is Charles Entertainment Cheese, which is amazing for any number of reasons.
Coyote Cheese sounds like something athletes get in their areas.
GTFO.
“how many years would have passed before someone else brought the first home computer to market.”
Zero. The commodore PET was released five months before the Apple II and the TRS-80 two months after.
Commodore was founded by Holocaust survivor, Jack Tramiel, who also founded … Atari. GET THIS MAN A BIOPIC!!!
Change that to Holocaust denier and Mel Gibson will produce!
Tramiel founded Commodore but he didn’t found Atari. He did end up running it in the mid to late 1980s, however.
I somehow don’t see the personal computing revolution being sparked by the Trash-80.
Am I the only one who initially read that sentence as Apple using 0.93% renewable energy due to the punctuation?
Arkanoid is probably the best of the Breakout clones.
93% of their global operations run on renewable energy“Operations” is a pretty important distinction. This doesn’t take into account the companies who manufacture their products.
Sure, but how much control do they have over those companies’ day-to-day operations?
They could choose to work with different companies.
Assuming such companies exist and would have any interest in upending their entire operation for the sake of one client. It’s rarely as simple as wishing and making it so, and it always bothers me when someone reads that someone’s doing something worthwhile and gets mad that they’re not doing more, given how many companies are fighting tooth-and-nail against renewable power.
It’s a far bigger lie than that, as the figure is based around them purchasing carbon offsets, rather than any actual change in their operations.
I remember the sounds of Breakout. Each level of the wall had a different tone when you broke a block, so you got semi-randomized beeps and boops, and it was lovely. There was also a game setting (maybe this was Super Breakout) where the ball would go straight through the wall, and do the same coming down, so you would get a lovely “doodileedee deedillydo” sound
“Jobs roped in his friend, a hardward whiz named Steve Wozniak.” Methinks the hardware you were looking for was up and to the left, a bit.
hardward is a hardward to spelldammit
Next week’s destination: Bangor, Maine. No word on whether we’re taking the midnight train, though, much less which boxcar.
You’ll have to wait until next week to see whether or not I got cigarettes.
Breakout was cool. Most paddle games on the 2600 kinda sucked, and most games from that era of any kind gave you all the game you were ever gonna get after about 30 seconds.
This is an exceptionally fascinating Wiki Wormhole!
This was one of the longest ones I’ve written in ages, and it could have been so much longer.
Astonishingly, the two discovered the name Syzygy was already taken no, not really, syzygy is a jungian archetype, like the anima or the shadow, for example. jung was very popular during the late 60s/ early 70s, so a lot of nerdy intellectuals would have known the reference. probably not a great corporate name, but definitely nerdy. 🙂
The guy who created the game got $375.The guy who screwed him got $5375.The company who screwed him got $11 million.Ain’t capitalism grand?
“He planned to rename the restaurant Coyote Pizza, after the coyote main character, but when the costume arrived, it turned out to be a rodent, prompting a new name: Chuck E. Cheese.”In my headcanon, the coyote costume got delivered to San Antonio, where the basketball team just said “shit, let’s roll with it.”