![]() With his childlike sense of fun, he came up with enhancements that turned the monotonous blip bouncing between paddles into something amusing. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no competition.”Īlcorn got a prototype wired up in a few weeks, completing it at the beginning of September 1972. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said. For his part, Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge 10 cents a game. “Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardized version,” Pitts fumed. They were appalled at the sacrifices-indeed sacrileges-Bushnell was perpetrating in stripping down Spacewar so that it could be produced inexpensively. ![]() When Bushnell heard this, he invited Pitts and Tuck to visit. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11 minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game. He and Nutting hit it off so well that Bushnell quit Ampex in 1971 to join Nutting Associates.Īs they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had competition. In keeping with that name, they dubbed Bushnell’s game Computer Space. “I learned all the various tricks for getting people to put up their quarters, and that sure served me well.” He was soon promoted to the pinball and game arcade, where animated driving games such as Speedway, made by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company, were the new rage.īushnell sold the idea to Bill Nutting, who had formed a company to make an arcade game called Computer Quiz. While studying at the University of Utah, he took a job on the midway at the Lagoon Amusement Park. “ Steve Russell was like a god to me.” What set Bushnell apart from other computer bums who got their kicks by maneuvering blips on a screen was that he was also enthralled by amusement parks. “The game was seminal to anyone who loved computers, and for me it was transforming,” he recalled. Like many computer science students in the 1960s, Nolan Bushnell was a Spacewar fanatic. Nolan Bushnell scored a trifecta when he was 29, which is why he became the innovator who launched the video game industry. Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product. Excerpted from The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.
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