Evolution of Video Games Documentary [Part 1 of 6]

Gaming for better or worse is a lifestyle a lot of gamers are deeply invested and becomes a part of their identity [Music] [Music] we've always played games before agriculture before the wheel perhaps even before we were human we played we wrestled we raced we pretended to hunt games taught us how to be with other people they showed us how to think differently and how to think the same as humans evolved so did our games before we could write we made dice out of animal bones 5000 years ago the Egyptians carved board games out of wood

1500 years ago we were playing chess in India we have invented tens of thousands of games and over the millennia virtually all humans have played at something but now suddenly the game has changed more than a part of growing up more than a way to be social gaming video gaming is now a way of life 60% of Americans play a video game every day some play all day and some of the best are getting rich very rich by playing for the planet the industry is less than 50 years old but video games bring in nearly

twice as much money as the movie industry the NFL the NBA and baseball combined the real revolution may be still to come and it started here in the Bay Area because of a big white line the little white ball the very first video games weren't created to be played they were meant to show what computers could do in 1952 AAS Douglass developed knots and crosses at the University of Cambridge it simulated tic-tac-toe in 1958 American physicist William Higinbotham developed tennis for two at a government lab in New York both were built on early computers that

were so big and complex no one but an engineer could play then came space war historian Chris Garcia space war had been written at MIT in the early 60s but Digital Equipment Corporation had sent around the paper tape of the game all over the country as a part of the users society yes they called it and what happened was all sorts people played in all people tried to put it onto their new machine one of the first versions of space war made it to the Bay Area in 1971 Stanford graduate bill Pitts and the friend

Hugh tuck loaded the game into one of the new smaller computers called the pdp-11 mini computer because of the anti-war sentiment on campus they changed the name from space war to Galaxy game they added a coin box and it was an instant hit so it was only deployed as far as I've ever heard in actually in the Tresidder Union at Stanford and for years it was played and it was arguably one of the first coin-operated video games we would sort of see them today they proved a coin-operated video game could work but it was still

too expensive for mass production that problem could be solved by someone else no one bush now in particular was everywhere he knew everything that was going on and here's a guy whose superpower really is taking every input and realizing what the great idea is at the heart of it in the 1960s Nolan Bushnell came to the Bay Area after graduating from the University of Utah he worked at Ampex one of the first big electronic companies in Silicon Valley Bushnell had seen space war as a student and it gave him an idea at Ampex he and

a co-worker Ted Dabney created computer space computer space was also an implementation of space war and it was the game that sort of started the idea of the sort of the classic arcade games standing video screen button controls was pretty hard to play actually but that was sort of the beginning Bushnell made a deal with a small company to build and distribute the game computer space failed a lalcorn met Bushnell and Dabney at Hendrix no one in 10th Avenue created this game over at a little company down the street called Nutting associates and showed it

to us and but then no one got upset with them about how to run the company and so I'm going to do my own that's when the car got started in 1972 Atari had two employees Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney the first person they hired was al Alcorn a Berkeley graduate and engineer I was 24 years old so I wasn't thinking about anything beyond where my next meal was coming from Nolan and Ted came by and took me to lunch one day and offered me this job on his first day of work Alcorn arrived at

a small office in Sunnyvale we were in one of those you know it down in Silicon Valley down the Santa Clara kind of a garage space maybe a couple thousand square feet is this the three of us there was Ted's brother and no one had hired his babysitter Cynthia to answer the phones after she came back from high school and if someone was calling for Nolan she was instructed to make him wait to make it seem like we had a bigger place and there were more people that year Atari still didn't have a game where

schnell went to a trade show and found his inspiration there's the famous story of him going to a trade show and seeing a demonstration of a machine called the Magnavox Odyssey and seeing a version of ping pong played on that and then going back and telling al al we need a version of ping pong to motivate Alcorn Bushnell told him a little lie about a deal to make a ping pong game they wanted to challenge me so he told me he had this contract from General Electric for a home game which made it be really

cheap like $15 in parts so I put this thing together as simply as I could but I had way too many parts for a home game but no one didn't seem to mind and and I made the game playable with some of the speed up and the angles of the ball and stuff like that it took three months for Alcorn to design the prototype the game he created was pawned as soon as they had a working game Bushnell put it into Andy Capps tavern in Sunnyvale we just watched people play it to see because I

just think I hear God it's the only coin op game ever made that required two people there was no one player version that had to have two people and there were no instructions just the word pong two knobs in a coin box I mean like what are the chances that would well it did it really took off and once that happened the world changed in a matter of days the bar manager called to say the machine was broken Alcorn wasn't surprised he built the game so quickly he figured there was a wiring problem in fact

the game was too popular so I opened up the coin box to flip the little micro switch because I didn't want to waste my own quarter the door opens up and all this money falls out of the thing Wow so I split the take with the bartender and put the rest of my pockets and next day came to work and I said I found out the problem what was it too much money I'm guessing it might have been a hundred bucks 150 bucks something like that it's a big pile of quarters in its first year

Atari made $1,000,000 on pong the company moved to Los Gatos and Alcorn was now the vice president of engineering in 1973 the Atari team traveled to Japan to meet with a distribution company on a side trip Alcorn took a boat tour of Hakone Lake it was there he realized what Atari had done a cone a lake is a beautiful high mountain lake in Japan with and this was 1973 all the culture and there were not many Americans up there at that point I remember people looking at us I had a beard and that's unusual anyway

on that boat we were on a tour boat going across the lake there was a pong machine and I'm thinking oh my god what have I done here's this beautiful land with this ancient culture and I said pong machine pomade Atari the first global video game company college students wanted to work there including the very young Steve Jobs in walks this 18 year old I think he was 18 about that 17 or 18 old enough to hire I guess and he's dropped out of Reed College I said his read a engineering school even no no

it's a literary kind of a thing okay what's my motivation here well I got this friend over hewlett-packard Steve Wozniak there well good does that do me you know and but he was enthused in 1976 Bushnell had another idea for a game he asked Steve Jobs to build it Jobs had to keep the number of chips to a minimum to keep costs down jobs couldn't do it but he gets woz to come in and woz does it in like a week three days non-stop and I walk in and Steve says hey look at this and

there's a finished game wasn't even on the schedule how they helped us get here it was like unbelievable now I could schematic and I said you did not do it Steve Jobs I can't understand what happened this had to be woz that game was breakout and it was a hit it helped cement the business relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 Wozniak built the Apple one computer he and Jobs started that same year Bushnell sold Atari in 1977 Atari released a home video game console called the Atari 2600 it had interchangeable cartridges and

that is super key with almost all of the other gaming systems prior what Atari did and did beautifully was they got third-party folk to make games for the 2600 and that was game-changing and that has defined success for a console ever since when I created pong there was no video game industry we revolutionized it by really creating the video game industry making a profitable desirable business and because that industry started here the Bay Area has become a magnet for the greatest minds in gaming a teenager who proved you could make a living by playing video

games the beauty queen who managed professional players and changed how American gamers compete one of America's first shoutcasters who pioneered play-by-play and started a new profession in gaming and the game designer who found the secret that keeps people playing for hours al Alcorn shares more stories about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak including what happened when Jobs came back from India and how he and woz opened their first Apple business account