´╗┐ ´╗┐At the age of 11, Nolan Bushnell was charging 50 cents to repair television sets. Seventeen years later he was running a video game empire. The crowd that gathered at Sunnyvale, California's Andy Capps bar in early 1971 had never seen anything like Pong.
Encased in a two-foot cabinet was a video screen containing a crude picture of a ping-pong table and an invitation for customers to put in a quarter and test their luck. It didn't take long for the game to catch on. Two days later, the bar owner called up the game's creator, a new software startup called Atari, to complain their machine had malfunctioned.
An engineer quickly discovered the source of the problem: Pong was so flooded with quarters from eager patrons its system had completely shut down. That first test case launched an electronic entertainment revolution that would eventually transform the way the world played. It also launched the career of its creator, 27-year old Salt Lake City native Nolan Bushnell.
A born entrepreneur, Bushnell had spent his teenager years developing a succession of small businesses to finance his love of HAM radios. I was technically pretty sound, and as an 11-year old, I started up a TV business, he remembers of his childhood in the early 1950's. In those days TVs were pretty expensive, and it was hard for people to let an 11-year old come in and start working on your set. So I undercut the competition by charging 50 cents for a house call at a time when it cost ten bucks.
It was during his years at the University of Utah that Bushnell developed his interest in video games. He spent much of his time there in front of the school's bulky minicomputers, pursuing an electrical engineering degree during the day and playing video games through the night. We used to play on the big computers from two until six in the morning. That was instrumental in starting a video game company.
But while the university exposed Bushnell to the games, the idea of marketing them to the public stemmed from an altogether different environment. Summers I used to work in an amusement park, and it became very clear that if I could put the games I was playing at the university in the park, I would have a successful product. And that was the link that went into making Atari. After completing his university degree and relocating to Sunnyvale, Bushnell started Atari ÔÇô named after a move in the Japanese board game Go ÔÇô with $250 and the intention of designing games that could be produced by other companies.
His first attempt, a modified version of the Spacewar games that had been a mainstay at universities, was released in early 1970 with little commercial success. Then came Pong. According to Bushnell, It was a game that had been around in various platforms. It was actually simpler than our first game and it had come about serendipitously as a training project for an engineer that I hired. He put a few spins that made it fun and engaging, and as they say, the rest is history.
Pong's popularity propelled Atari from Silicon Valley obscurity into the realm of computer legend. I knew the company was a success when we had a million dollars a month in sales  somehow that seemed like a whole bunch of money for a little company. It was kind of a shock It also transformed the life of the 28-year old creator, who now found himself atop a mountain of technology-generated wealth. It was just great, he remembers of that period. It was a very heady, fun experience. I was sailboat racing, flying around in a private jet  all the trappings.
The company capitalized on its success by recruiting some of Silicon Valley's top programmers to produce new video game titles at a rate of one every six weeks. Among the developers hired during that period were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, two friends in their early twenties who would later go on to found Apple. Atari also gained international notice in the business world for its informal corporate culture, which included hot-tub conferences, flexible working hours and an ÔÇÿanything goes' dress code.
In 1974, amidst a barrage of competition from established and upstart games manufacturers, the company developed a home version of Pong for the Christmas sales season. The item quickly became a top seller, and Atari set to work on what most video game connoisseurs would identify as the definitive ÔÇÿclassic' home game system: the 2600. In contrast to the Pong system, the Atari 2600 allowed users to play an infinite amount of games simply by adding cartridges. It was a concept that led to a revolution in home recreation ÔÇô but one that required an enormous amount of money to design. That was when Bushnell made the decision to sell Atari.
The deal, valued at $28 million, is one he counts among the greatest regrets of his life. I really screwed that one up, he now admits. While continuing to serve as the company's chairman, Bushnell found his informal management style increasingly at odds with the hierarchical corporate culture that resulted from the takeover. He also disagreed with the new business strategy, particularly in its development of the 2600 game console, which he felt lagged too far behind the technology. We made so many compromises on the 2600 that by the time we were selling it on the marketplace the technology had advanced and we could have given everyone a much bigger bang for the same amount of money. And (the new owners) didn't want to do that.
In 1978, he resigned as chairman. I left because I thought they were all a bunch of bungling idiots, he says. And I think if I'd stayed in charge you would be seeing Ataris in living rooms today instead of PlayStations and NintendosÔǪ History has shown the larger management didn't run Atari well. Initially, that view seemed far from accurate: bolstered by top titles like Centipede and Space Invaders (a game that led to coin shortages in Japan) the company maintained its domination of the market throughout the late '70 and early ÔÇÿ80's.
However, by 1983, a series of bad business ventures and a glut of low quality games pushed the entire industry into a steep decline, with Atari at its forefront. The situation worsened after a corporate takeover a year later, when the company's new management rejected an offer to license and distribute Nintendo products in America. Today, Atari survives only in name as a video game line from European manufacturer. Meanwhile, the company's founder had moved to on to a very different type of venture: founding Chuck E Cheese! jp