Free The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World by Steven Kent

ourselves, we’ll get Bally to take this. We’ll complete our contract way, way, way ahead of schedule and life will be happy in the Valley.
    So I took
Pong
and offered it to Bally. I said, “Hey, you know we contracted to do a driving game but we got this game instead. Do you want this instead? Will this fill our contract for you?” They played it and said, “This is kind of fun, but it requires two players and if a guy’s there all by himself he can’t play it.” And I said, “Well, we could probably put a one player version in.” I sold them pretty hard.
    —Nolan Bushnell
     

Andy Capp’s Tavern
     
    Andy Capp’s was a peanut-shell-on-the-floor beer bar in Sunnyvale, California. It was nothing special, other than it had a game room in the back that was larger than any that you would see in a bar at that point in time.
    —Nolan Bushnell
     
    Once, when feeling particularly generous, Bushnell described Andy Capp’s Tavern, the location where Atari first tested
Pong
, as a “rustic location.” It was a shabby bar located in Sunnyvale, a much smaller town in the pre–high technology days of the early 1970s. Alcorn, who visited the bar while running the pinball route, remembers it as having four or five pinball machines, a jukebox, and a
Computer Space
machine
.
They installed the prototype in late September 1972.
    We put it [the
Pong
prototype] on a barrel. He had old wine barrels to use as tables and we just put it on top of the table. It wasn’t even a full size.
    —Nolan Bushnell
     
    Nolan and I sat there the first night and watched people play, and here’s the scene. We’re sitting there with a couple of beers, and a young man goes up and plays
Computer Space
while his friend plays
Pong.
While we’re watching, the first guy goes over and tries
Pong
with his friend.
    We went over to him afterward and asked, “Well, what did you think of that machine?” And the guy says, “Oh, it’s a great machine. You know, I know the guys who designed it.”
    “Really! What are they like?”
    So [he tells us] this whole bullshit story. I think he was practicing a line for picking up babes.
    —Al Alcorn
     
    One of the legends of video games is that two days after installing
Pong
in Andy Capp’s Tavern, Alcorn got an angry late-night call from Bill Gattis, the tavern manager. According to the story, the machine had stopped working and Gattis wanted it hauled out of his bar.
    In truth, Alcorn received the call from Gattis two weeks after installing the machine. It was a friendly call in which the bartender suggested that they fix the machine quickly, since it had developed quite a following. Alcorn frequently visited Andy Capp’s while making maintenance runs on Atari’s pinball route. He and Bushnell had selected the bar as a good test site because Gattis had always been cooperative.
    He said to me, “Al, this is the weirdest thing. When I opened the bar this morning, there were two or three people at the door waiting to get in. They walked in and played that machine. They didn’t buy anything. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
    I went to fix the machine, not knowing what to expect. I opened the coin box to give myself a free game and low and behold, this money gushed out. I grabbed handfuls of it, put it in my pockets, gave the manager my business card, and said, “Next time this happens, you call me at home right away. I can always fix this one.”
    —Al Alcorn
     
    Nolan Bushnell left for Chicago to visit a couple of pinball manufacturers a few days before Alcorn received the call from Andy Capp’s Tavern. He had brought a portable
Pong
game to demonstrate to executives at Bally and Midway. Though Bushnell already had an inkling that
Pong
was doing good business at the test site, he had no idea how well it had done. When he returned, an excited Al Alcorn told him that the machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern had stopped working because the quarters had overflowed. The news struck Bushnell