Free Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan Page B

didn’t meet our first clutch of games we were going to work on but Nolan really liked it,” said Steve Bristow, Atari’s vice-president of engineering. With Bushnell keen to see Breakout put into production, Bristow handed the job of developing the game to Steve Jobs, a young hippy who had taken a technician’s job at Atari so he could earn enough money to go backpacking in India in search of spiritual enlightenment. “Jobs always had a sense of his own self-worth that people found a little put off-ish,” said Bristow. “He was not allowed to go onto the factory floor because he wouldn’t wear shoes. He had these open-toe sandals that workplace inspectors would not allow in an area where there are forklift trucks around and heavy lifting.”
    Atari expected the game to require dozens of microchips, so to keep costs low Jobs was offered a bonus for every integrated circuit he culled from the game. Jobs asked his friend Steve Wozniak for help, offering to give him half of the bonus payment. Wozniak, a technical genius who worked for the business technology firm Hewlett Packard, agreed. “Wozniak spent his evenings working on a prototype for Breakout and he delivered a very compact design,” said Bristow. Wozniak slashed the number of integrated circuits in half and netted Jobs a bonus worth several thousand dollars. Jobs, however, told Wozniak he got $700 and gave his friend $350 for its effort. Wozniak would only learn of his friend’s deceit after the pair formed Apple Computer.
    Atari never used Wozniak’s prototype of Breakout . The design was too complex to manufacture and the company decided to make some changes to the game after he had worked on it as well. On release Breakout became the biggest arcade game of 1976 and the following year was included on the Video Pinball home games console. [1] But the rise of microprocessor-based video games, however, meant Breakout would be Atari’s last TTL game. Bushnell saw the microprocessor as the natural technology for the video game. “I made the games business happen eight years sooner than it would have happened,” said Bushnell. “I think my patents were unique and birre enough that it’s not for sure that someone else would have come up with something like it, but I’m sure that as soon as microprocessors were ubiquitous somebody would have done a video game system.”
    The move to microprocessors also required a different set of skills from video game developers, shifting the focus away from electric engineers towards computer programmers. “Initially many of the programmers, including me, were also hardware engineers,” said Delman. “But after a few years, the two disciplines became distinct.” The need for programming skills prompted Atari to embark on a recruitment drive in 1976 to find the people who could make the new generation of video games.
    One of these recruits was Dave Shepperd, the electrical engineer who had started making video games at home after playing Computer Space in the early 1970s. “By late ’75 and early ’76, it was clear to Atari the future was in microprocessors. They put an ad in the paper and I happened to see it,” said Shepperd. Prior to seeing the advert, Shepperd had begun experimenting with the Altair 8800, one of the very first microprocessor-based home computers. Available in the kit form via mail order, the Altair 8800 was nothing if not basic. Released in 1975 by MITS, it had no video output beyond a number of LED lights and just 256 bytes of memory. [2] It had no keyboard so users had to program it using a bank of switches on the front of the computer.
    Despite its user-unfriendliness, thousands of computer hobbyists bought an Altair and set about building hardware and writing software for the system, which was powered by the same microprocessor used in Gun Fight . Among them were Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair and formed Microsoft to sell it.