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Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)
01:15:23
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Rayford Gwynne about his book titled King How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make millions, published by MIT Press in 2026. Now, obviously, we're going to be talking about a very famous game that on the face of it, literally may not look like much. But I don't think you have to be that deep into the gaming world to have come across this game because of the impact that it has had. This book helps us understand kind of how that happened, looking at it to some extent from the perspective as a game. But of course, you can be as creative as you want and come up with all sorts of cool games or poetry or whatever the thing might be. But how it gets in front of millions of people is. Is a whole nother story. Right. And those two things don't inevitably go together. So there's quite a lot of intriguing things for us to discuss. Ray, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Yeah.
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A
Hi, Miranda. I'm so happy to be here and I'm just honored to have some time to talk about this book in more detail.
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B
Well, I'm definitely pleased that we get to talk about the book and as you said, in some detail. But before we dive too deep into those details, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us what you why you decided to write this book in the first place?
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A
Certainly. I'm a professor and chair of Cinema Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. I'm also a co editor for MIT Press's Game Histories book series. I do that with a colleague who's based at Stanford University. Henry Lowood. One of the reasons we wanted to do this book series connects into the question of why write this book? A lot of the historical approaches to games have often been told from the perspective of enthusiasts, kind of amateur historians and journalists. And we wanted to bring a little more of a critical sort of engagement with this history, writing this book in particular. I will share a funny story. Well, I hope it's funny. I had a bit of an epiphany. I was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, back in March 2023. Henry, my colleague, invited me to Stanford to give a talk on my previous book called Atari Design. And when I'm out there, I often travel to the Computer History Museum. The original prototype to Pong lives there. So I like to Visit it from time to time, shall we say. And I was in the gift shop. I wanted to get a little gift for my son. And I had a bit of an epiphany. I was curious, has anybody written a book on Pong? I mean, the museum has the prototype. It would seem like there should be some type of book there. And there wasn't. And I started looking into this question. There is a graphic novel. It's kind of an interesting graphic novel that pits Nolan Bushnell, the innovator, against Ralph Baer, the inventor. And it's told in very kind of going back to 1982, Tron, like aesthetics and that narrative, that tension, that sort of battle kind of bothers me a little bit. It's often told time and time again in the history of games. And I thought, what's another way to talk about Pong? You know, what's another way to tell a story slightly differently? So on one hand, I felt Pong deserves a book. That was my first gut instinct. And then I asked myself, well, what else can be said? This is probably one of the most, I'd say, next to Tetris, the most overwritten games in the history of games. A lot of stories have already been told. So I thought, will it be a waste of time if I dare attempt such a feat? Will I bore people? Right? What else can be said? And I quickly realized what I wanted to do was to tell a different story about a well known product. I'm using that word intentionally. The story I wanted to tell, I can kind of imagine. And I don't use this word in the book, but it's very much a paraquel, if you're familiar with that term or if you've seen Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are dead. I'm trying to place an emphasis on other events or other characters, you might say that perhaps will hopefully broaden how we know this story. And in particular, the way I want to do that is to not so much focus, although it's unavoidable, on kind of a technical history, but to think more about Atari's marketing strategies, how it tried to productize its first game, its first launch product, how did it create a new category and how did it kind of position Pong onto an existing market?
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B
I mean, that gives us already a whole bunch of things to discuss in the rest of this interview. So thank you for that origin story, as it were, of the book. Taking up the goal then of telling the story, kind of not just repeating the way it's usually told. Let's talk about where you start this investigation of the origins of Pong. What. Where do you decide that starting point is and why?
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A
Yeah, I. I started with the Ampex Corporation. And I realize after. After. I guess when the book came out, I realized this. Huh? Why didn't I start with Nutting Associates? That would have been sort of a more correct chronological order to do. So. The reason I went with Ampex is I've set up Andy Cap's Tavern, which was a bar in Sunnyvale, California. It's where Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn kind of placed the prototype for Pong in August 1972. Kind of doing a field test to see if there's any interest in this. And I realized that that tavern plays a huge role in the history of this game. So I kind of treated like a running motif. Like each new chapter takes us back to the bar. It's a nice place to be. Right? We're constantly going back to the bar and trying to IM and trying to see what's significant about that space. And for me, that opens up a story about finding the right market for these types of products. So if I'm starting there, it made more sense in my mind at least, to kind of revisit the narrative around Ampex, kind of instead of starting with Nutting Associates. And as we continue to talk both Nutting Associates and Ampex, their relevance to the story will kind of become obvious. Ampex, for me, is the great crucible of the story of Pong. Ted Dabney, one of the other founders of Atari, he joined the Ampex company in the early 1960s. He was working in their military products group. Later, by the late 1960s, he transferred to what's known, or what was known as the Videophile Information System Division. That's a bit of a mouthful. We'll just say videophile from now on. And that's where he met Nolan Bushnell in 1960. They shared an office later. Al Alcorn did two internships at Ampex in the same division when he was a junior engineer pursuing his degree at Berkeley. Videophile is quite an interesting system to consider if you've ever used. I know this is probably going to date myself and all listeners. If you've ever used a microfiche system. That's kind of a nice analogy to use to try to understand what the video file system offered. It was basically a document filing and retrieving system that allowed operators access to files stored on magnetic tape. And they would display the contents of those files on modified television monitors. Now this system was, I guess one of the promises was that this system will reduce paper cuts from having to move across filing cabinets. And it was a system installed at NASA, a number of different insurance companies, and the LA County Sheriff's Department as well. So here you have these three guys, right, occupying the same workspace. And when they're there, something else is happening in Ampex that I think is really part of this story. And what's happening is that Ampex was known primarily as a company that would produce industrial grade professional products. So magnetic taped based systems for Hollywood, for instance, or for broadcast stations. Time delay would be one way within which their technology could be integrated. But by kind of the early 60s, I think it's around 1963, they start turning to the consumer market. Now this might sound a bit outrageous. They had, I guess the first consumer product coming out of Ampex was a signature five home video center that sold in 1963 for the modest price of $30,000, obviously out of the hands of many consumers. But by the end of the 1960s, something shifts. They introduce a new series called Micro, called the Micro Series, which provided a series of stereo cassette tape systems. Now these were for homes, they were portable or they could be utilized in automobiles. And they retailed for between 1 and $200. So the crucial moment there is that they're working in a company whose products, much like the rest of Silicon Valley at the time, are oriented towards industry or oriented towards research. But now there's a shift or pivot to producing consumer products. So that's one lesson I think all three of these guys are being exposed to. The second lesson is that MPEX dominated the market for professional high fidelity audio and video recording equipment. So that name, Ampex, that brand became synonymous with these products. MPEX was very much kind of a category king for the products of, for the products that they put out onto the different markets that they occupied. And lastly, Alcorn's experience at Ampex working with television technology, working with display technology, carried directly over to the work he would eventually do in the development of Pong.
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B
Okay, those are a bunch of very key reasons or kind of aspects that we need to keep in mind to explain Pong going forward. So definitely a helpful starting point there. And as much as I agree with you that this obviously is a book that's not trying to be like the technical guide to. And thank goodness, because I certainly would not be able to read that sort of book, I think there are a few technical aspects we want to cover or at least maybe they're technical. Moving forward in terms of understanding the development of Pong, what is a coin op manufacturer and why is this technology relevant?
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A
Right. And I agree, I could not write that technical history, although it has to be woven in in a way that I feel I can make it relate to the story I'm trying to tell. But this, this question, this question I think opens up a history that doesn't really get in my mind, at least the attention it deserves. The coin op amusement industry has roots in the 19th century. You know, think of kiddie rides, for instance. Think of strength testers, sort of love testers. We can then eventually say, Moving into the 1950s and 60s, electromechanical games using kind of like light rifles to shoot targets. And then of course, pinball. Right. And a whole assortment of different types of public electronics aimed at amusement markets. Now what a coin op manufacturer does, I'm only talking about the amusement industry, not say vending machines, but a coin op manufacturer like Bally Chicago Coin Gottlieb. These are all Chicago based companies, they produced equipment. Now this is a very odd sounding term, but it's a term that was very active in that type of industry. So equipment that is products like pinball, electromechanical games, shuffleboard bowlers, and they sold those products to distributors. Now those distributors could be regional, they could be nationwide. So the first part is the manufacturer produces a product and then sells it to a distributor. Distributors would then sell or lease that coin operated product to an operator. The operator places, let's say a pinball machine on a route. Now the route can be have, I guess, tied to specific locations. It could be a game room, a recreational center or a bar. The typical split between an operator and the location's owner would be maybe 60, 40 or 50, 50. The reason the manufacturer plays an important role in the story of Pong is that operators and distributors are the consumers of the coin op amusement industry. Now today, when I as a user purchase a PS5 or download software for that system, I am a direct consumer to that. But for this time period, we have to clarify who the consumers are. And it's not the general public, it's distributors and operators. So all the advertising, all the marketing material that manufacturers would produce were to attract distributors kind of draw attention to those products. So why is this important for Atari? Why is it important for the history of video games? Well, a new product category in 1972, the sell sheet that promoted Pong referred to it as a video skill game. The term video game was not very common in 1972. But it was launched into an industry that had very, very deep historical roots. Now why is that important one, it's a known entity. The coin op amusement industry is known. It's been in existence for well over a hundred years. In 1972, it has recognizable product categories. Coin op games, these are something that people are familiar with. It's not like a new alien type
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of cannot wait to have you bashed.
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There's an infrastructure, there are annual industry trade conventions. The one that's probably most significant is the Music Operators of America. The acronym is the moa. Why music operators? Because we're talking about jukebox sales. So some of the earliest attention to video games appeared in a trade publication that was aimed at the sales and the kind of, the kind of financial figures associated with songs being played on jukeboxes. So industry publications. One is Cashbox, another is Vending Times national distributor networks. So these products could be sent out across the US across the world. And there was a recognizable network where these games could kind of move through to kind of reach operators, operators had routes established. So all of this is already there. What Atari simply do did with its new product category is to slot it into an existing industry while at the same time radically expanding those markets where coin operated amusement products could be found.
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B
Okay, that's really helpful to understand because so often when we're looking at kind of the emergence of something that really seems super new and kind of seems to kind of come out of nowhere, often the assumption is everything about it is new. Right. And yet what you're helping us understand is like, wait a second, like there's a bunch of things that are kind of. The new is getting plugged into existing structures and that is helpful for explaining the success. But of course, there are some things that are also kind of new the way we might assume they are at first glance. So looking at some of the kind of forerunners of Pong, for example, Computer Space, what were some of the innovative aspects of this? Whether we're talking appearance or design or gameplay or marketing, like what is new for this sort of aspect of it?
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A
I want to dive into that. And I will say this chapter around computer Space became a bit of a wormhole for me. I'll explain why in a moment, but before I do, I want to touch upon a great point that you just made regarding this idea of new. The reason I sort of shied away from the kind of graphic novel on Nolan Bushnell versus Ralph Baer, you know, kind of the Magnavox Odyssey versus Atarius Pong is, is that I tried to handle that long standing debate differently in this book. And the way I tried to do it was to think less about a game innovation, inventors, and to think more about markets and how products were placed on markets. So Pong benefits from all that infrastructure I just described. Whereas the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home game console, is classified as a consumer electronic. But it's in a market that doesn't exist yet for electronic video games. So it didn't do as well because those markets weren't recognizable. And that infrastructure that Pong benefited from could not be had in the same way by the Magnavox Odyssey. Okay, so that's. Maybe that will come back up perhaps later. I just wanted to kind of touch upon why that infrastructure I described was so key to the success of Pong. But Pong also took that industry in places it was never capable of going. And that's really the true success of Pong as I will hopefully elaborate upon as we go. So Computer Space. Computer Space was manufactured, marketed, sold, distributed by Nutting Associates, based in Mountain View, California. The reason I went into a wormhole was that a question occurred to me. Why was there a coin opinion amusement manufacturer in Mountain View, California in the 1960s in a region that was not oriented towards, let's say, fun or you know, public amusements. That story, which I'm not going to really share the answer to that here, I'll encourage you to buy the book to find out. But that story really opened up so much because one I felt that question had never been asked before. And it opens up a much deeper vein in the history of Silicon Valley and how that vein directly connects to the success of Pong. So Nutty and Associates had a very successful product that was not a video game. It was an electromechanical quiz game called Computer Quiz. And it did very well for the company. They then were trying to figure out, well, what's the next product? All of a sudden they connect with Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. At that point in time, Dabney and Bushnell were kind of working outside of MPEX on kind of a pet project. And that pet project was really kind of pushed and propelled by Nolan Bushnell. And it was an idea that how do you translate a game that's played on many computers, mostly in research institutions, Stanford's a good example of this into a commercial product. Now what's behind that sort of more generic version of the story I just shared with you? Nolan Bushnell played Spacewar, a Game originally built on a DEC PDP one at MIT in the early 60s. He plays it on the campus of Stanford University and it blows his mind. Now here's something that is fun people are engaged with. It's dynamic. You're using computers in ways we've never used them before. It's exciting to see these visual interactive two player graphics happening, right? How do you make profit off of that? Right? So this is, this is sort of, I think Bushnell kind of rubbing his hands a little bit. Harkening back to his days at the Laguna Amusement Arcade. He worked when kind of financing his way through computer engineering at the University of Utah, saying, how can we make a commercially viable version of this computer game that only a handful of people have access to? People who have access to minicomputers at research institutions. So here's the challenge, of course, if you're to take what one can do in a research lab, that's probably going to cost, and this is one example, about $4,000 to pull off. That was the going price of one computer that Bushnell considered the Data General Nova 800, a minicomputer. So there were a lot of attempts to figure out how do we reduce cost, how do we use computers in a more viable way for retail markets? It didn't work. The commercial viability of a version of Space War using computer technology proved impossible. So the idea was to how do we do it cheaper? We do it in television technology. So we use television technology to kind of replicate what's being done by way of computer architecture. Making that discovery completely reduces the cost of Computer Space. It makes it a viable consumer product, consumer in the context of a coin op manufacturer. So Bushnell kept all the engineering rights to Computer Space he received. He and Dabney, who started a company called Syzygy, this would be the precursor to Atari, opened the account. So the royalties they got from individual unit sales of Nutting Associates Computer Space would kind of go into their kind of engineering company that they were developing. Computer Space was a single player game kind of at odds with a lot of the types of games on the market. Eventually There was a two player version. Between 1000 and 1500 units were manufactured by Nutting Associates. That does not mean that a thousand or fifteen hundred actually sold. That was the. Some of the manufacturing numbers we have access to. The game did not light the industry on fire. Bushnell refers to Computer Space as a bit of a. Providing kind of a false positive. And what he means by that is they tested Computer Space at a bar that's still in existence, called the Dutch Goose in Minlon Menlo park, which is near the campus of Stanford. And supposedly the players loved it. All the people coming across this new machine just really enjoyed the gameplay. However, when doing similar tests in kind of field locations away from the university, the response was different. People preferred pinball. It was more recognizable. Keep in mind, no one was playing games on television screens outside of a research institution. So this was very much a new type of game experience that the public had to try to make sense of. And the reason this is sort of a false positive is like, hey, they had a good field test in location a the Dutch Goose, but other locations it didn't do so well. So eventually, when it was placed and produced and put out onto the market in the fall of 1971, many, I guess critics then and maybe historians looking back now, often would sort of point to computer space as a false start for the emergent video game industry as well. Why? I think there are two categories of reasons in terms of why computer space didn't do as well as Bushel and Dabney and perhaps nutting associates, who had the biggest financial stake in all of this, thought their technological. Technological reasons are often refer. Are often kind of pointed to as perplexing controls. I mean, we have different series of buttons to push now. This is an era dominated by pinball, when button pushing takes place in the side of a pinball playfield. Lackluster gameplay. Many would argue that compared to spacewar, which was regarded as very dynamic interactive gameplay, the gameplay didn't really live up to that in terms of what computer space offered by way of using a television monitor. Confounding instructions. Many players purported finding it confusing in terms of what to do. If you've ever played computer space, typically you would do so at kind of annual arcade events or museums. I find it very difficult to distinguish the spaceships from the starfield that we find in the game itself. There were a lot of instructions for operators. And one of the things I think is really important with this game, that technical build was very uncommon to the skill set that coin op operators would have. They're used to tweaking pinball machines. They're used to dealing with electromechanical games with all these different moving parts. They're not used to going in with a screwdriver and making adjustments to a printed circuit board or a television monitor. Now those reasons I think, get told time and time again in terms of some technical shortcomings. What I wanted to do is to kind of. I don't want to kick a company when it's down by any means. But I wanted to add and kind of encourage us to also think of these problems as product positioning problems. So space, Computer Space is in this very curvaceous, almost futuristic looking fiberglass cabinet. But that packaging style did not urge other manufacturers to adopt similar styles. I mean, on one hand, well, why deviate from square boxes, from the way that Pinball's sort of laid out in kind of low cabinets. Why deviate from these models if this new science fictional looking thing is not earning any more than what we're already doing? Also, the shape of Computer Space, it wasn't accessing any new market, any new markets because of its packaging style. I think that's a key point for the way the industry operates. It's trying to figure out where else can its products be played in public. But this new form of packaging, it didn't offer any kind of new access whatsoever. And lastly, if we're thinking of product positioning, the game was often sort of dismissed as a bit of a novelty. That the idea that, hey, playing a game on a TV screen really didn't win over the industry. Okay, that's an important point. In other words, the industry didn't have to radically change to accommodate this new product. That was going to kind of promise like endless riches, but it would require the industry to constantly reshape itself in order to support this new type of product. And that didn't happen. So I think one of the takeaways for Computer Space is that it underwhelmed players, but it also underwhelmed the industry.
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Right. And this is such a key part of the way you're approaching this history, right? Is it's not just about kind of what's visible from the outside. That doesn't tell the whole story. This sort of infrastructure behind it is a really key part too. And the kind of things you mentioned are sort of like, it looks kind of weird, right? Like that might seem really petty, but that has, as you've described, implications for customers. Right? I don't know how to play this. And also for operators of like, wait, how do I have to maintain this? Right? So, so it makes sense to me that Pong kind of doesn't sort of try to push the envelope in all of the same sorts of ways that Computer Space did. Was that part of why it was successful? I mean, comparatively, it was visually and mechanically, like not try to do as many things. Was that a good thing?
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I think it was an excellent thing. I'll digress a little bit here just to tell a personal story. I first interviewed Al Alcorn and Steve Bristow when he was still alive. And April 2011, I was working on another book called Game after. And my wife was also seven months pregnant. So my son was there, I should say. So we met at the Computer History Museum in front of the prototype for Pong. I thought, wow. I will admit I was a little starstruck. Here I am with Alcorn and Steve Bristow. Steve Bristow was the VP of Coin Op for Atari. And we're talking about Pong right in front of the prototype. I remember a moment, and I talk about this moment and the acknowledgments at the end of the book for King Pong, because Alcorn said something to me that really stuck with me and kind of influenced a lot of my research. He's a big guy. He used to play football, right? American football. I should qualify that. And he's. He's very, very. He gets excited when he talks and he points. Points to the prototype and he looks at me, pointing at me. Why would anybody play this thing in 1972? And I thought, Mel, what a great question. What a great. What did we do with a television screen in 1972? We used it to watch TV. The thought of actually interacting with it, controlling something on the screen itself. Now, there are a few exceptions. You could look at the Magnavox Odyssey for those. For the handful at that time of people who owned one of those systems. But this was not a recognizable concept that I would walk up, put a coin in, and immediately start manipulating things that appear on screen. So that idea of, why would anybody play this? I really sort of used that as a way to think about all the research that I was producing, because it raises some fascinating questions for us. Why did Pong succeed where a game like Computer Space didn't really kind of catch on as intended or as hoped? Right? A couple of thoughts. The gameplay for Pong is recognizable. Maybe you've never seen a simulation of table tennis on a TV screen before, but once you observe it, once you watch it, you get a sense of what the game does. It's a. It's a game that is highly legible to many, let's say. How do you signify the gameplay action to a potential player? Well, you don't have a series of buttons to do that. You don't have a steering wheel. You don't have a light gun. You have a rotating knob. Now, it's 1972, where are you going to twist the knob? And AM, AM, FM, transistor radios, let's say you will adjust a knob on your television tuner to turn up, to turn down the volume. These types of things. Knobs are pretty legible. We know that a knob affords turning right. It allows us to control something in the context of Pong, our paddles that go up and down on the screen itself. Plus you don't really have to look at your hands when you twist the knob. Every time I've played Computer Space, I'm often having to look at my fingers to understand the movements I need to make in order to control a spaceship on, on screen. I think the name is quite significant. Computer Space doesn't really say space war accurately. I'm not really sure what I'm meant to do when I see the word computer space in terms of what am I actually playing. It doesn't say space combat. Whereas Pong. Pong is fascinating that it's such a fun word to say out loud right as my voice just cracked when doing so. You know, it's a playful word, it feels good in the mouth. Ping Pong. Most likely. There is some IP issues around using that title. I like the fact that Pong, the word is simple, it's simplistic. And this will have a huge effect in a moment. In terms of the gameplay, Pong was two player. This, this is a massive aspect of this game. Pinball had the option to two or one player, whereas this game required two sets of hands to be present. Alcorn once described Pong to me as a social mixer. I asked did he ever observe women playing the game and Andy caps? And he goes, oh, absolutely. People would kind of hang out around the machine. When you have a two player game in public, you're forced to socialize. I mean, the control panel is very narrow and that bodies have to get jostled together to play. So it's a good way to meet people, I would say as well. Um, the controls are simple. It's part of what Bushnell would later describe as his sort of law of game design. Easy to play but difficult to master. I think the packaging of the game certainly, certainly embodies that mantra as well. The packaging is minimal. It's non garish. You don't have large graphics that you would see on electromechanical machines like stencil graphics of say a submarine. If it's like a missile shooting game, you don't have the kind of obnoxious back glass that you would see on a pinball machine in that time period. So you don't have all the ornamentation, the kind of loud graphics. It's less flashy than a pinball machine. It's also quiet. Pinball is noisy. A lot of electromechanical machines because they would have so many different component parts, could be an eight track player, it could be a half silver mirror. It could have all of these different kind of moving parts that make them noisy. Pong is a very short statured cabinet, ideal for putting a drink on top of the top flat surface. It requires less floor space when you play pinball. Keep in mind if you're trying to decide where does that machine sit in the interior of an establishment, you have to also account for, for the body at play. The way people stand at a pinball machine. Pong is short and it takes up less floor space. Now what's important about this is that this particular build and this packaging would eventually, and we will talk about this later in the interview, no doubt will eventually access markets where these other types of machines could not gain access. Part of the appeal of this is that because Pong was understated, the only text one would see was the simple word Pong on the kind of marquee, the attraction panel of the game itself. It could gain access into places like hotel lobbies or restaurants or posh cocktail lounges. So the kind of simplistic gameplay made the game easily recognizable to players. It's challenging, it's fun, but it's also something one can kind of pick up easy because of these cultural references around table tennis. Couple minimal, accessible, I want to say simplistic with scare quotes around it. Couple that with a packaging that kind of matches the content, that also makes this game viable to new markets. That's the winning combination.
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B
Yeah, those are so many key aspects there. And again. Right. It goes back to what we've been saying. It's about how consumers would interact with it, but also also these concerns about, well, who's going to want one in their bar. Right. What are the things they're thinking about? That's such a key piece of this as well. So let's talk a bit more about kind of the impact that this has. Right. We've talked so far a few times about kind of creating the category in a bunch of different ways. So obviously Pong kind of creates and then dominates the category. You've just outlined a whole bunch of reasons why it was so successful. Are there any other factors we need to throw in?
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A
Yeah, I think all of those factors described particularly the packaging, they fall under kind of a bigger umbrella. What I think is sort of the marketing strategy behind Atari's early success. You know, in my book, I really wanted to write a book that was sort of late 60s, up until 74. I didn't want to go into home pong, but the press felt I had to, so, so I did. The marketing concept that Atari owned is the notion of sophistication. I. I will say that is not necessarily a concept that comes from Atari. That concept was established very, very well, very convincingly at Nutting Associates. And it's actually established earlier in terms of the history of Nutting Associates itself, because Nutty and Associates had Computer Quiz. And this was a game that required kind of knowledge, right? So the markets that Nutty and Associates were kind of envisioning for its product, Computer Quiz, were universities, student unions, these types of places. It wasn't necessarily recreational centers and arcades. It saw itself having a product that was associated with intellectual. So why not look at universities as the rightful home of this type of machine? So because, because Bushnell and Dabney worked for Nutting Associates, their game, Computer Space was marketed through those channels of sophistication. They really adopted that marketing strategy as their own. So it works in two ways for Atari. First, because you have a new type of product, a video skill game, you can then make the case that your product is much more sophisticated compared to other manufacturers, traditional equipment like pinball machines. So here's a new product category, and Atari owns this product, owns it in the sense it's sort of a. It's. It's a kind of a cutting edge company offering something that other companies cannot offer. It's spearheading a new electronics revolution, if you will, in the coin op amusement industry. Its game is of solid state design. It can extol how advanced its product is. And also because Atari is located in Silicon Valley, not Chicago, it's coming out of a region known for technological innovation. So Atari could easily sort of pin sophistication in terms of technology and how it's an innovator in this field. But in the industry of coin op amusement, that's one important way that sophistication works. The other is how we, as what we just talked about in terms of the video games, packaging, so that the physical appearance is not an afterthought. The physical appearance is, Is a way of placing this technological build into public. And I think that's a point you made very early on in our conversation as well. It's one thing to design A game, but you have to package it in order to work and be successful in markets. And I think that concept was something that I will give credit to Mike Querio, who was one of Atari's industrial designers. I think he was hired back around 1977. And in a previous book I did Atari design. I was so fortunate to be able to interview Mike for about eight hours. And one of the things Mike said In our first 10 minutes of our interview was as an industrial designer, he always felt his job was to create the experience of gameplay. Whereas the electrical engineers or later software developers, they would make a game and that game could be played kind of in a bread pan connected to a TV monitor. That game will be that game, but the experience depends on how the body relates to the packaging. Where do we place our hands? Are we fatigued when we play? Will this game be played outside of arcades? What other context can this game be in? So sophistication became also the strategy in terms of how Atari packaged its games. And I mean the cabinet, the controls, the physical appearance of its games, that was a means to place more product into more locations. And that's crucial. You know, you get profit from places. This is the key formula in this context as well. Right. The more accepted your product becomes outside of those traditional markets for coin operated amusement machines, the more profit potential you have. And on top of this notion of sophistication or this kind of winning formula, I believe for Atari, was that the company also identified a problem in terms of the existing coin operated amusement industry. And it's how that industry was perceived. So beginning in 1974, Atari completely did an interesting shift. It no longer imagined and kind of projected, promoted itself as a manufacturer of kind of amusement products or equipment. Instead, it reconceptualized itself and its product categories with a new company slogan. And that was Innovative Leisure. So it was a way of offering its products and seen itself as a leader in the industry by elevating the very status of the industry itself. I think the means to achieve this idea of innovative leisure, distancing yourself and then by default making the industry look a bit decrepit with this new kind of shiny sort of branding strategy you have. What gets Atari there is this kind of belief in this idea and the strategy of sophistication.
- [42:02]
B
Yeah, that's a really key aspect that is clearly pulling together kind of a number of threads we've talked about. And that sort of they saw as linked as well. But all those ideas only really work if the manufacturing is there to kind of back up the ideas. If, you know, all of this creates demand, what does the supply look like? So can you tell us more about the manufacturing behind this?
- [42:23]
A
Yeah, from everything I've read, it sounds like it was kind of the wild, wild west a little bit in terms of this very, very young company. So atari comes into existence June 27, 1972. In fact, when alcorn was originally hired, they were still regarded as syzygy engineering. So Bushnell, Dabney, and alcorn, they received some royalties from computer space sales. They also. And a lot of this is kind of shouldered upon bushnell. One thing that Bushnell did that benefited atari Was that he would often do sort of repair workshops on computer space because it was such a new product category in the existing coin op amusement industry. So he would travel and he would meet distributors, he would meet other manufacturers. That sort of personal knowledge becomes crucial in terms of tapping into nationwide distribution for palm. So here's this period where they've had a very successful launch of our field test of the prototype of pong. Something we've neglected to mention is how did it do? By all accounts, it was very, very popular at andicap's tavern. That's why I keep returning to it. There are reports that people were lining up at the tavern, not just barflies waiting for a drink, but to play the game. The beautiful story that gets retold time and time again Is atari receiving a call that, hey, the machine's malfunctioning, Something's not working right. Alcorn drives over, he checks out. He realizes that there are so many quarters, it's actually kind of clogging the coin deposit box. Right. So the game's not functioning properly because coins are blocking its processing, let's say. So that's a win situation. It's a good problem for a new startup company to have. Here's a successful field test, right? Okay, you've done that. You've demonstrated that this can be a really hot product. What atari was originally designed to do, it was meant to be an engineering company. And the idea was that, hey, they would engineer these new games and then sell these games to ma to others, other companies to manufacture. That plan went south really quickly. They had a contract with bally. I believe it was something like $4,000 a month to develop a pinball game and a video game. But Bushnell, realizing how much profit that the prototype was bringing in, they made like a handful, I think, 12 sort of other games that kind of tests in the field to see how well they were doing. And they realized that actually these games are quadrupling the take of pinball machines. That they realize they've got a really successful product on their hand. One of the reasons it helped that was that many coin operated games still took dimes, Pong took quarters. They've already doubled their money in terms of the popularity of how this game's being played, if not nearly triple their money in that respect. So here you have a game that your company originally imagined. They're going to just engineer games, sell them to other manufacturers, but they have something in their hands that's proven very popular, wildly popular. Well, why give this to other manufacturers where we would then receive a small amount of royalties on this? What if. What if we manufacture it ourselves? Now evidently that idea was sort of dropped like a heavy mug of beer at Handicap's Tavern by Bushnell, to which Alcorn reports. No. What do we know about manufacturing? We're three engineers. We know nothing about manufacturing, let alone distribution, advertising, marketing, all the business stuff behind the ability to actually manufacture a game. So that he moved into manufacturing. Okay, that's one of the exciting aspects of the story. That $4,000 a month coupled with royalties from computer space. Digging deeper and deeper into their pockets, this is where the Valley, Silicon Valley proved quite plentiful for their needs. They could source printed circuit board manufacturers in nearby Santa Clara. They could get different electronic components, particularly integrated circuits they would need for the Pong circuit board at different electronic companies nearby. I believe Dabney purchased Hitachi televisions that he, this was his skill set at Ampex, would then modify to connect to the circuit board of Pong in San Francisco. I think he was paying like $60 off the shelf out of his own pocket or something like that. Alcorn also hired a group of kind of young people training to be assemblers at a local technical trade school. So they were spending kind of their days then starting to troubleshoot Pong printed circuit boards in order to build the cabinet. This kind of fell on the shoulders of Ted Dabney. He sourced one of the local woodworking companies, P.S. halbert, that was utilized for Nutting Associates computer quiz. So a lot of those connections they had from working at Nutting Associates, but also just being in the right space, in the right time to kind of get all the different parts they need in order to pull off the manufacturing of, of Pong. And one story that I always find to be quite charming is that there's this image and they're very small sort of facilities that they're Using in Santa Clara to start manufacturing these kind of test cabinets of pong to go out into the market. And Bushnell's sort of watching these assemblers and Alcorn and Dabney. But then I think there's a glance shared between Alcorn and Dabney, and Bushnell's like, somebody's got to sell these. That's your job. Supposedly, Bushnell goes away into their office, makes three phone calls, and ends up selling 300 units of Palm. So this must be a complete shock to all of those involved. First, do we have the space to do this? Do we have the financing to do this? So it was a moment where a company that by the end of 1972, had around 30 employees, had one, the beginning of 1973, look for a much bigger place in order to manufacture this. They became victims of their own success in many ways. Right. Which is a good problem to have. They had to scramble to find the kind of financing to do this. They had to scramble to find all the various kind of services they needed to put this together. And they had to amass a labor force. And what's so striking is wind this story back a little bit to August 1972, that by November, Pong starts shipping locally in the state of California to distributors. I mean, that is just an absurd moment of time. And I've often asked when I've sat down and had chances to interview all three Dabney before he passed away, you know, trying to get a sense, a flavor of what that time was like. Because if you do historical research on atari, you realize there's this big kind of void for 1972, 1973. You don't find many documents. And I like Alcorn's response to that. We were too busy making Pong to document our own company, to document our own process.
- [49:35]
B
That's very funny indeed, to understand kind of how these things come together from things like a conversation of, oh, wait, what's around nearby? You know, how can we figure this out? Right. Like, it's all kind of definitely not predicting that it would be as successful as, of course, it was. Can we talk then, a little bit more about that sort of distribution and marketing and the other factors going on that kind of allows this all to then work?
- [50:00]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one, we've already touched upon how Pong benefited from an existing infrastructure associated with coin op amusements. So those connections that Bushnell was able to make with nutting then proved very viable, very lucrative for the promotion and distribution of Pong. But there's another absolutely fascinating chunk of this story in terms of the success of marketing for. For Pong, but also for some of the earlier products that followed in the wake of Pong success. And Bushnell had what many would refer to as, I guess I don't want to say an epiphany, but I think it's more like a clever strategy that's actually like a ruse. Atari created its own competitor, and that competitor goes by the name of Key Games, which in reality was actually an unknown subsidiary to Atari. So it's an interesting, sneaky way to, if I can use the pun, to kind of game the market a little bit, to game the coin op industry in that time period. Let's say a certain market, like a state or a large metropolitan area, distributors would purchase their coin op equipment, let's say a pinball machine, from a single manufacturer. So if I'm a distributor operating in this region, I'm purchasing pinball machines from Gottlieb. Maybe I'm getting electromechanical games from another manufacturer. But category type, I'm kind of. I'm beholden unto one manufacturer. So there's a certain sense of exclusivity. It was kind of very much the norm at that time period. So it would be uncommon for a distributor to have to work with agreements for multiple pinball manufacturers. So the reason Atari developed this really clever subsidiary was very much on account of this structure. What they were able to do then was to create two different product lines to give the impression of competing manufacturers. This allowed Atari to achieve greater penetration into all the major markets. And this story is quite comical when you talk to Alcorn and Bushnell about it. Alcorn reflects that they would kind of lay it on thick. They would go to, say, industry trade events, and, you know, they would point out, did you see what Key Games has they just knocked off? They ripped off another one of our driving games. Or look, they've knocked off a version of Pong. Those bastards, right? Bush Alcorn would say, we're going to sue them. We're going to sue them. And all of this was just a bit of wink, wink, joke. Because who benefits from having to product lines Atari? The employees at Key Games were Atari employees with different titles. Bushnell referred to as, like the B players, the B side. He doesn't mean that a derogatory way. But Alcorn is the head of coin op engineering for Atari. Steve Bristow is the VP for Key. Joe Keenan, Bushnell's neighbor, is the president, hence the name Key. Games, Right. So they're kind of all in on this. But the idea of having this dual system and kind of, you know, gaming the industry allows Atari to just get a deeper penetration into all the major markets nationwide where. And of course, accessing non US Markets at the same time. Atari really worked this in that you would have the same games repackaged as key game products. So they kind of kept the ruse going for a long period of time. I think by 1975, the two companies kind of molded into one.
- [53:48]
B
Officially, that might be the most wild thing of all of this. Maybe that's just my own opinion, but like, wow, Wow. I mean, that's the sort of thing a technical history would miss. So thank you for revealing that ruse to us here.
- [54:04]
A
Let me throw in one thing. I tried to create an analogy for this because it's actually really difficult to explain, I found. And I thought in the US if you go to say like a chain restaurant and you want Pepsi products, but if they only offer Coke products, you can't get Pepsi products. So imagine in terms of the coin op market, you're able to get both Pepsi and Coke, but those profits then aren't kind of flooded back to either Pepsi or Coke. They both go to one company. I think this is what Atari sort of pulled off, if that analogy holds any water, or soda water, for that matter.
- [54:43]
B
No, it's definitely fun to sort of think about and like, kind of make sense of. Are there any other aspects we want to talk about kind of beyond what Atari is doing, that create. Creates the environment for the success?
- [54:55]
A
Yeah, I think there are. And it's interesting because it's beyond Atari, but it definitely connects to Atari. You know, this time period, I find the 1970s I find absolutely fascinating in terms of my interest in kind of contemporary history. You know, this is an era known for its stagflation in terms of slow economic growth mixed with high inflation. We have industrial decline, manufacturing relocation outside of the continental U.S. we have the oil embargo beginning early 70s, 1973, where the kind of decade ends in an oil crisis. I know from. I was born in 1970. So I remember those days of the kind of odd, even license plate numbers determine when you could actually put gas in your car. When. One thing that I don't talk about in King Pong, that was very much the subject of Atari design was that after the kind of moment of Pong, you know, after that sort of, I guess, game type sort of fizzled out, and other products, other game styles are being introduced. Tauri Was known as the leading car driving game manufacturer. It had so many products engaged with kind of racing or driving, and that's it kind of owned that category as well. And I often reflect that. Here's a game company, or I should say innovative leisure, that's manufacturing, driving and racing games. When to do so in the 1970s, because of all of these kind of issues around oil embargoes, wasn't exactly enjoyable. So perhaps atari allowed, you know, automobile operators to kind of have a little bit of fantasy playing their games when driving sort of sucked in the 1970s. Eventually, that driving theme was replaced with the inevitable kind of turn to. To kind of space battle games in the wake of the success of star wars. So the reason I said there are significant events that do have a very unusual relationship to pong and atari. And this has to do with the success of pong, but also the response from other companies, many of which were new, attempting to knock off or clone atari's pong. So in other words, you have a new moment of copycat manufacturers starting to emerge. The cash in on the success of pong. Now, this is. I think this story is really fascinating to tell. By 1973, so late 73, early 1974, you have major news publications. Businessweek, Time magazine, the Wall street journal. They're running feature pieces on how in such a short period of time, Pong and Pong, like games, have become commonplace. So in other words, this new product category that atari generates became ubiquitous within less than two years of Pong's launch. So the question that I was quite fascinated with in relationship to this news coverage, because the impression it gives is that video games, a new medium, is everywhere. They're everywhere. Right at this point in time, you can't have a slice of pizza without hearing a pong game echoing in the background, you know, to. And atari capitalized on this ubiquity eventually, where you would introduce, like, a cocktail, a cocktail table version of pong, you know, outfitted for bars where people could sit down and play and put a drink on top of the playfield. Or they had these very niche designs like puppy pong for pediatrician offices. But in terms of the coin op version of pong, not all those other variations that Atari itself released. These kind of sequels like pong doubles, super pong pin Pong or quadrupong. But the total number of units manufactured of pong are between 7,000 and 8,000. Now, those numbers get skewed depending on who tells the story. I went to atari's business plan from 1975. I think those are probably the most reliable. The reason I'm pointing this out was I don't think Time magazine, BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal would have considered Pong or Pong like games commonplace. With only 8,000 units, a total number of knockoffs, Pong clones is higher to 45,000. At least that was what was kind of estimated to be on the market. By late 1974, there was only one officially licensed version of Pong and that was Bally's winner. But the point I'm trying to make is that this kind of deluge of unlicensed or knocked off pirated games alongside Pong normalize the presence of video gameplay everywhere. Now, I will admit, I will admit I was a little nervous to share this kind of observation with Alcorn and with Bushnell because I'm basically saying, hey, all those jackals, as Bushnell liked to describe people knocking off Pong, they were actually good for your business, right? I mean, I'm saying this to people who kind of lost profits because of this. But I don't think on that production run alone, 7,000, 8,000 video games would become so commonplace in the ways that those trade, those news periodicals celebrated. So Atari lost profits, no doubt. But all these imitators made the medium and made this new product category kind of acceptable and significant for us in terms of what's happening economically is that the bulk of them, and Eric, these are companies like Ramtech, Exady, Gremlin Industries and many more, they were based in California. So this shifts sort of the. Where different manufacturers are located based upon the new product category of coin operated video games within the existing and traditional and historical Coin op. Coin op amusement industry. So technological innovation in regards to the coin op amusement industry is seen as a West coast phenomenon, whereas Chicago is now positioned as home to more traditional fare. So this shifts, I think, the kind of dynamic in terms of the older established coin op industry to the West Coast. Another factor that I think is tied into sort of the economic success, but also kind of other events circulating around this is atari's decision by 1975, even starting earlier in 1974, to pivot into consumer markets. And Atari had a very, very definite reason for why it wanted to do this. And you know, on one hand, I think when I mentioned this, it's easy to default back to those moments of, you know, Bushnell and Pong and Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey. Bushnell saw when Magnavox Odyssey had one of its new product caravans in Burlingame. In 1972, he witnessed the Magnavox Odyssey, which produced for Holmes a table tennis light game. It wasn't called Pong, but it was a table tennis ping pong type of game. He saw it. He wasn't really a fan of it. He didn't really kind of approve it. Approve of it. You can read some of his exact quotes about it in the book. I don't want to go through those right now. They're quite derogatory in certain cases, but that's often the reason. Oh. So Bushnell saw this game and eventually he had in mind, even in the early days, to make a consumer product, okay. But what I find more fascinating is to think about that consumer product after the success of Pong, because the best that Atari could achieve, even with key games, okay, in the coin op market, was to sell all of its products to every distributor worldwide. In other words, the public locations for Atari's products offered a finite possibility, okay? Whereas if Atari could produce a consumer market, the market for video games would explode. I mean, I like to think that, you know, I can imagine profits raining down upon all of those cocktail tables where coin op video games are in bars, but also coffee tables. I mean, they're trying to access what they estimated to be about 150 million televisions across Western Europe, the US and Japan by 1975. So how. How do they pull this off? Well, well, for one thing, unlike the Magnavox Odyssey, you know, a home video game console, the Atari brand was already established. In other words, there was consumer value for pawn, the. The switch, or redirecting consumers. Redirecting players was a very simple formula. You can enjoy what you do in public at home, you know, play the game you love, Pong that you play in a bar or an arcade from your sofa. Importantly, in this idea of thinking of pivoting to consumer, Atari wasn't creating, you know, from the ground up in the way that the Magnavox Odyssey did, an entirely new product. But they were positioning a known entity into a different market. And this is what allowed Atari to eventually operate and dominate across two markets, the coin op amusement market, and consumer electronics. So Atari wisely partnered with Sears. Atari produced its own sort of brand of games under the Sears moniker, Telegames. Those were all produced, manufactured by Atari, but sold through the branding of Telegames. And for the Christmas season, the holiday season, 1975, Sears wanted 75,000 units. That number would eventually double, but 75,000 units gave Atari $4 million in sales. In terms of this new product category, that it was introducing through the infrastructure of Sears. That's the point. I really want to stress where Pong was placed, as we've already talked about, into an existing infrastructure. The home version of Pong was placed into a successful department store chain that also had a highly successful, successful, I would say, culturally iconic mail order catalog that would come out every fall. And that was often the US in that time period. Kind of the, I guess the hallmark of the holiday season.
- [66:06]
B
I mean, that's such a massive piece of success for them. And as you've outlined so many different factors coming together with some pretty clear legacies to kind of the video game industry more broadly since then. So lots to think about from this investigation you've done of the sort of marketing and kind of business history, I suppose, of Atari. And as you've mentioned, this is not your first book on Atari. So is this a subject you're continuing with now that this book is done? Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [66:38]
A
Yeah, I feel like I always circle back to Atari, which I've never planned to do this, but. But one of the reasons, even the other book, Atari Design and Kingpong, you know, one reason is I can write these books, is I have materials I can access. When I did a previous book, Game after that book was asking questions like, where is the historical of gear? Where is the historical study of games occurring? And it was a way to think about museums, archives, collectors who have massive collections of documents from companies, and of course, landfills. I mean, that took me to Alamogordo to excavate Atari's games that were dumped in 1983. So the reason I've kind of gravitated towards this is I have lots of materials in archives at Stanford, at the strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, that I can work on. Excuse me. Also I can talk to people directly who are involved in Atari. So I felt I had rich materials and also a rich sort of network of people willing to talk about their previous careers. So I could say I could make statements, I could ask questions because I had so much to work with. Where I'm sort of branching out now is before I say that. So I have developed a really strong, strong interest in that period when a lot of. A lot of Atari employees, but also a lot of historians sort of dismiss all those Pong derivatives as knockoffs and clones. I want to think about the ways that these games have traveled globally. So one way that I'm doing that is I have a substack called Museum games. And I was the recipient of an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship that gave me travel funds to, you know, pack my bag and go to Finland, Estonia, Spain, Germany, Greece, you know, all of these different. Sorry, even going to. I went to Shanghai. I went to Kyoto to go to the Nintendo Museum, so. And Jeju, South Korea, for the Naksan Museum. So I've been trying to visit every single museum identified as a video game museum. And to write about these. I want to reflect. I just did a new piece that I uploaded yesterday called how to look at Pong. I thought I would kind of connect to the book by talking about how prevalent Pong is in museums. And part of that leap into new areas of research is that I find I'm still following Pong, so to speak. I'm still following the bouncing ball, if you will, because Pong, in all the museums, Pong is the one game I see everywhere. And I realized Atari, not the same iteration from the period that I'm writing about, that era that I'm covering, sort of ends when Warner Communications absorbs Pong, when Bushnell sells Atari to Warner's in 1977. I'm now thinking about how Pong is a leader in terms of cultural heritage and how Pong is sort of leading in the museum world, where museums sprouting up all over the world now devoted to games are trying to tell these stories. They're involved in the preservation of game history. They're also trying to contextualize how we can understand games in a variety of different national contexts. You know, Poland's a great example where many of the games that we take for granted in the US Were not available in Poland. So in Estonia, I. I came across the gamebrick, which was a clone knockoff of the Nintendo Game Boy. But for many people in Estonia, Estonia, that is their game history. And I want to understand and value that. I don't want to see it as just a derivative from that. It kind of sets up the West a little too much in that respect, or at least I should say the US in that respect. So I've become very interested in kind of the travel, the movement of games in former Soviet bloc countries. So I think I've tried. I'm still in that mindset of thinking a little bit about Pong, but I'm sort of also moving a little bit beyond just Atari to think more about the role that games now play in museums and kind of institutions of cultural heritage. So museum games on Substack, that is my current project. I'm uploading these. I'm doing. I'm writing them as short stories. I kind of upload these maybe once or twice a month.
- [71:06]
B
Well, that sounds absolutely fascinating. So I'm sure lots of people will want to go investigate that. And of course, they can investigate as well. The book we have been discussing titled King How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make millions, published by MIT Press in 2026. Ray, thank you so much for speaking with me on the podcast.
- [71:25]
A
Oh, I enjoyed it. Miranda, thank you for having. Sa.