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Chapter 2 | Nolan Bushnell: Cofounder, Atari
Bushnell: Not at all.
Ramsay: They didn’t want to take control of any rights or anything?
Bushnell: No, they actually encouraged us to do “hobby jobs,” as they
called it.
Ramsay: With a total of $500 startup capital, did you try to get any more
money through mortgaging or credit cards?
Bushnell: Nope, we didn’t need to really. Once we had the unit going, we
were able to license the game, and then the company that licensed it from
us paid for the rest of the development and the premanufacturing costs.
Ramsay: How did licensing with Nutting work? What were they thinking?
Bushnell: They were very happy to license with us. They had a dry spell,
and they had a single product that their company was built around—a thing
called Computer Quiz. It was really a big strip of slides, of 35mm slides. It
was a trivia game and had pretty much run its course. Their business devolved
into supporting new questions for the trivia machine, but they weren’t
selling any more than five or six a month of their regular Computer
Quiz, so they were really looking for a product. I hit them at the right time.
Ramsay: And what was that product? Pong?
Bushnell: No, this was Computer Space.
Ramsay: Computer Space. I’ve never seen Computer Space. Was it a liveaction
game like Pong was?
Bushnell: It was a rocketship flying-saucer game. You’ve seen the pictures
of the cabinet, haven’t you?
Ramsay: Yeah.
Bushnell: Yeah, and you’d fly the rocketship around and try to shoot down
the saucer.
Ramsay: Was that sort of dynamic on-screen interaction and animation
different from what Nutting had been doing before?
Bushnell: Oh, yeah. Remember, they essentially had just an automated
slide projector.
Ramsay: Then I’m guessing they were really impressed!
Bushnell: In some ways, I feel like they were actually quite clueless and
were kind of jumping at anything that looked like it might rescue them. I
think they were in trouble.