The power of 'crystal clear Rules'

The US video game industry was created by Atari in 1972 with the debut of Pong and almost crashed in 1983. It was not completely dead, but no one knew how to cure it.

In 1985, Nintendo sent a hero named Mario to North America and magically revived the industry. Although it was five years later that the plumber became "Dr. Mario", he had the perfect prescription for the disease - what I called the three elements of successful modern video games.

Pong was able to achieve success because it owned two of them.

As I wrote before, the first and most fundamental element is "instinctive Pleasure" or Fun. When it was released, the vast majority of people didn't know anything about the new kind of entertainment. So, the fact that they could control objects on a TV screen was simply a fun experience for them. Besides, the iconic "pong" sound amplified their pleasure.

But, that doesn't explain why Nolan Bushnell's first attempt, Computer Space, didn't go well. What made the difference was whether it had "crystal clear Rules" or not.

Of course, that's the second element.

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Here, the phrase "crystal clear" means easily understandable for anybody.

Some students at Stanford did enjoy playing the game. So, for those who could understand its rules, it was a fun game to play. But it ended up as a commercial failure because the rules were hardly understandable for ordinary people.

Every video game has two parts. To understand and remember new rules is the painful part and to enjoy gameplays is the fun part. Importantly, only those who endured the pain can have maximum fun. Therefore, unfortunately, they only experienced hardship and stopped playing it before getting any rewards for the effort.

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Playing a game is somewhat akin to investing in financial markets.

We reluctantly invest our precious time and money in a game anticipating it will eventually pay out some rewards which at least offset the cost. Currently we know from experience that most video games published by large companies are worth the cost, but people back then weren't so sure about it.

People tend to become cautious when they invest in an asset about which they know little.

Let's take Bitcoin for example.

Until first half of this decade, few people considered the crypto-currency had real investment value and no one knew how many dollars each Bitcoin should be worth. So, people had to invest their money keeping in mind that the asset might turn out to be completely worthless.

I assume those who played Computer Space should have felt the same way. They didn't know how much fun the game could provide. So they spent only a moderate amount of time to understand its rules.

But, the rules were not crystal clear. To enjoy it, they had to understand at least:

* How to control the spaceship with three buttons (rotate left, rotate right and thrust)
* How enemy UFOs behave
* How to shoot down UFOs with missiles
* How to avoid being shot by UFOs

There was no tutorial stage in the game and its arcade cabinet wasn't equipped with a handy instruction manual. Therefore, if they really wanted to enjoy it, they would first have to discover rules by conducting experiments like scientists and next would have to practice controlling the spaceship again and again like a trainee pilot. In short, it was far from an entertainment for everybody.

On contrary, Pong had only two essential rules to remember:

* You can move the racket vertically with a knob
* You'll never lose unless you miss the ball

After learning them, the fun part begins immediately. Moreover, there was no need for you to discover the rules because they were designed to be crystal clear at a glance. Its arcade cabinet had only one input device (the knob) and the second rule was written on its center as "avoid missing ball for high score".

Most people would have grasped the rules in their first attempts or by watching other people playing it. So, they only had to invest just a little time to enjoy maximum fun. Although Computer Space was much more fun and deep game, they preferred Pong because it was a sure investment for them.

Having crystal clear rules is especially beneficial for multi-player games.

In a game with easily understandable rules, it takes a relatively small amount of time and effort to learn essential skills. Moreover, it's almost impossible to fool your opponents because there are no vague or hidden rules you can exploit to gain advantages.

So, crystal clear rules provide level playing field for everybody.

Therefore, once a person played Pong and found the game fun, he would invite his friends to play with. Since the game provided only a few strategies and techniques, it would take just a little time before they caught up with him. After that, they were able to compete with him on a level playing field. It's not hard to imagine they would also invite their own fiends. So, that's why the game became a social phenomenon.

By the way, you may think the rules of Pong are easily understandable because of their simplicity, but that's not true. You can understand them easily because they are very intuitive.

In the case of Table Tennis, a predecessor of Pong, you can also move the racket horizontally. This too is apparently a simple rule. But it made the game much complex in a bad sense. It might not be the case if the game was made for NES. However, to play it on Magnavox Odyssey, you had to use two almost identical knobs to controls the racket, which was far from intuitive.

Like this, a bad combination of simple rules suddenly makes a game counter-intuitive and difficult to comprehend. Then, how can we set up crystal clear rules?

You can understand it by observing your body through the lens of a microscope.

The age of Atari (3) - Pong

A few months after the release of Computer Space, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded their own company. They named it Atari, after a Japanese term used in Go, an old Chinese game.

Then Bushnell made two moves, one of which yielded almost nothing and the other one created the multi-billion dollar video game industry.

At first, he made a plan to develop a racing game. Although he and Dabney devoted most of their effort to the project, it didn't go smoothly.

As a separate move, he hired a young engineer named Al Alcorn, who belonged to his former employee, Ampex. To teach how to develop a video game, he gave the newcomer an assignment to make a simple ping-pong game. Initially, Bushnell didn't feel any enthusiasm about the game because he was busy working on his own project - and it was a borrowed idea.

About a month before the foundation of Atari, he visited a trade show in which Magnavox, an electronics company, demonstrated the world's first home video game console named Magnavox Odyssey. The machine contained several games such as Hockey and Football. Among them, a game simply titled "Table Tennis" attracted his attention.

Table Tennis for the Magnavox Odyssey

Of course, the core concepts of "Pong", the world's first commercially successful video game, came from it.

But, Pong is far from a perfect copy of Table Tennis - and that's the reason of its huge success.

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In Table Tennis, you can control the racket (a white rectangle) with two knobs; one for vertical and the other for horizontal movements. Following the rules of the sport, when your ball go out of the table, you'll lose a point. Besides, you can alter trajectories of return shots with a knob labeled "ENGLISH".

As a table tennis simulator, it was apparently too simple. However, as an entertainment for everybody, most of whom didn't know anything about video games, it was too complex.

Therefore, if Bushnell had had enough time to copy the game by himself, he would have made a perfect copy, and it would have ended up as a commercial failure just like Computer Space. But he didn't expect the same high standards for the newly hired engineer.

So, he took away excess parts from the game, and only its bare bones were left.

• Now you have only one knob which moves the racket vertically.
• When the ball touches an edge of the game field, it simply bounces back.

Thus, the development of one of the world's most simple and beautiful video game began.

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When he ordered Alcorn to make the ping-pong game, he didn't thought it would become a commercial product. So, it's understandable that he was very much surprised when he saw its first prototype three months later.

As he expected, it was a simple game. But it was much more fun than he expected.

At that time, his own project was a little bit stuck and seemed to require some more months to finish. So, he changed his plan and decided to make a commercial product based on Alcorn's prototype. He gave a name - Pong - to it after the iconic sound effect it produces when the racket hits the ball.

Having got support from the entire company, the game was improved and sophisticated day by day. Its arcade cabinet contained no excess parts. It had a monitor, two knobs for two players, and that's all. On its center, the objective of the game was written in just one line: "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score".

Pong (Atari, 1972)

In September 1972, its development was almost finished and they carried out its first location test at a bar.

The result was much above their expectation. A lot of people gathered around the machine and played it again and again. Some of them got so addicted to it that they would form a queue in front of the bar before its opening hour.

There's a well known story that the machine sometimes broke because too many people injected too many coins into it. Feeling people's enthusiasm for their game, he increased the number of testing locations one after another, and saw almost identical situation anywhere.

In short, it attracted people and money like a magnet. To build a machine, they spent around four hundreds dollars and each machine constantly earned more than a hundred dollars.

Seeing its strong performance, Bushnell decided to manufacture all machines to run Pong by themselves. Originally, his business plan was to create video games and sell their licenses to arcade game manufacturers. But at this point he realized it was a ridiculous idea.

Now that he's found a clear path to success, why not grab the chance? That was the moment when he began to walk the path to become a millionaire.

Of course, he didn't have money to build a large factory. So, at first he rented a garage office as a temporary factory. It was truly temporary because they relocated its factory to larger places for three times in less than a year.

Eventually, they rented a bankrupted recreation facility and refurbished it as a factory, in which around two hundred people worked and as many as a hundred machines a day was produced.

And the rest is history: Home Pong, Breakout and Atari 2600...

But its success story ended suddenly. Of course, I'm talking about the video game industry's crash in 1983. It was like a hurricane or a tsunami - retailers in the US realized the fragility of the business.

In time of disaster, we need a savior.

At this time, the hero came from the other side of the Pacific Ocean - with a hat and mustache.

The Age of Atari (2) - the failure

After getting a bachelor degree in electric engineering, Nolan Bushnell was hired by Ampex, an electronic audio-visual manufacturer.

One day, he saw an advertisement of a newly released computer and was astonished at its price, because it cost less than a tenth of a PDP-1. Although it was still too expensive to use as a coin-operated amusement machine, he thought he could make an even more affordable computer by himself.

After carrying out research and simulation of its profitability, he decided to jump on the opportunity to create his own business. But he was not too stupid to quit his job immediately to become a self-employed entrepreneur. Rather, he took advantage of that.

As an engineer in the company, he was able to buy electronic parts he needed at wholesale prices using his business connections. Moreover, the company used to provide generous benefits for its employees - they could get various kinds of electronic part for almost free when they needed one for their hobby.

But, to enjoy those benefits he had to fulfill his duty as an employee, which meant only limited free time after work was available for the development.  So, he invited one of his senior colleagues named Ted Dabney (later became a co-founder of Atari) to do the development works together.

After doing their work in the office, they would gather at their second office - Bushnell's house - to develop the machine and a Spacewar clone for it.

They had worked extremely hard for months and a working prototype of their first product was developed. To make the game named "Computer Space" a commercial product, Bushnell made a contract with Nutting Associates, a coin-operated amusement machine manufacturer.

Although the finished version of the game lacked some features of Spacewar including gravitational effects and didn't have a multi-player mode, its graphical quality was not far from its original. To make it more attractive, Bushnell designed a futuristic-looking upright cabinet. Until this point, he must have been sure of its success.

In fact, when he carried out a location test at a bar called Dutch Goose, many people gathered around the machine and enjoyed playing it. But, at most of the other bars he used as test locations, almost no one touched the machine, why?

That's because it was a too complex and difficult game for ordinary people. It inherited both good parts and bad parts from Spacewar. Among them, the most problematic one was its control system.

You had to use three buttons (thrust, rotate-right, rotate-left) to control your spaceship and another button to fire missiles. And since there was no brake button, you had to carefully control its speed.

I know it doesn't sound so difficult for you. But when the game was released in 1971, there were no commercial mobile phones and not all people used TV remotes or ATM machines in their daily lives. So, ordinary people back then wouldn't have used more complex machines than cars. Although the machine came with several pages of instruction guides, they wouldn't bother to read it since they were gathering there not to learn something new, but to enjoy some alcohol.

The test at Dutch Goose was an exception because it was located close to Stanford University. For students at Stanford, the game should have been much easier than their daily academic activities. Besides, some of them might have already played Spacewar or its ported versions.

In short, it was a fun game, but just a few people was able to enjoy it.

Eventually, the game took its place in history as the world's first arcade video game. But for its publisher, Nutting Associates, it ended up as just a commercial failure.

However, it became the springboard for Bushnell's later success. He received a handsome amount of license fee and learned that "Fun" is an important element of video games, but not everything.

It was not long before he found the second element of successful video games and became a millionaire.