Hopewell Valley Student Podcasting Network
Show Name: From Pong To Pixels
Episode Title: The Start of an Era
Episode #2
You are listening to From Pong To Pixels the podcast with your host Andrew.
In this episode of From Pong To Pixels the Podcast we discuss: new video games that came out during this time, different industries starting to build their platform, and what advancements were made during this era.
Hello everyone, my name is Andrew and welcome to another episode of From Pong To Pixels. I’m glad to be back making another episode, and I’m even more glad that you decided to listen. If you remember last episode, we covered the development and building of some of the first games and game consoles to be made. And if you haven’t seen that episode, make sure to go check it out. Lots of good info in there, trust me. But now this episode is where things get really interesting. I'll be covering different companies and games that came out during the 70’s, which is a lot of big ones. So enough introduction, let's just get into it. The 70s is where games really started to pick up in popularity, with arcades doing better than ever. One of the most well-known arcade companies, Atari, was founded and created during this time. Atari is a video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by American businessman Nolan Bushnell, and electrical engineer Ted Dabney. Bushnell had a part-time job working at an arcade, slowly learning more and more about EM games. After Bushnell graduated, he became an employee at Ampex, an American electronics company. There is where he met Dabney, and after the two started talking, they found out that they shared a lot of common interests. Bushnell decided to take Dabney to a computer lab at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to see games there. After seeing them, they jointly developed a concept using a standalone computer system with a monitor and attaching a coin slot to it to play games on. To actually create the game, Dabney and Bushnell decided to start a partnership called Syzygy Engineering, both of them putting in $250 of their own funds to support it. Bushnell and Dabney worked with Nutting Associates to manufacture their product. Dabney developed a method of using video circuitry components to mimic the functions of a computer at a much cheaper cost and smaller space. Bushnell and Dabney used this to develop a variation on Spacewar! called Computer Space, where the player had to shoot at two UFOs, thus creating their first game. About 1,500 Computer Space cabinets were made, but they were a difficult product to sell. While Bushnell blamed the associates for its poor marketing, he later realized that Computer Space was too complex of a game as players had to read the instructions on the cabinet before they could play. Bushnell began seeking other partners outside of their previous ones, and approached pinball game manufacturer Bally Manufacturing, who showed interest in funding future efforts in arcade games by Bushnell and Dabney. Bally offered them $4,000 a month for six months to design a new video game and a new pinball machine. With those funds, they hired Al Alcorn, a former co-worker at Ampex, as their first design engineer. In May of 1972, Bushnell had seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, which included a tennis game. According to Alcorn, Bushnell decided to have him produce an arcade version of the Odyssey's Tennis game, which would later go on to
