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.