in conversation with al alcorn
Presented as part of Game On
7 March 2008
49 mins
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Special guest Al Alcorn talks with Swinburne University's Christian McCrea about the origin of Atari, the culture from which it emerged and the legacy of Pong.
Christian McCrea: So welcome, everybody, to this month's episode of "Men with Beards". Yesterday's session focused on leading up to the discovery and the design of "Pong". Today we're going to expand on that and sort of move into the future and Al's sort of place in history, which is continuing to grow, which is great. I want to begin with something which I found out a few years ago when I first became aware of you.
I was looking at the work of Japanese game designer Gunpei Yokoi who helped design the GameBoy and the NES, and most importantly designed the "Game & Watch". He cites "Pong" for its simplicity of design which affected him throughout his life. He refined it to a phrase called "lateral thinking of withered technology". He believed that if you could use what you had, rather than trying to achieve something grotesquely expensive, you could do great things.
That simplicity of design went on to affect the Japanese industry in a very important way. He cites that moment of "Pong". I'm not sure if he ever called you up and said thank you or anything like that, but he cites the design of "Pong" and simplicity of movement as being really important. So, let's begin with in the years of Atari. Yesterday you might not have talked about how you came to leave Atari. That might be interesting, because that's a story in itself.
Al Alcorn: I was a very young guy with a great woman in my life. Atari was a wonderful organization, a very rare organization to work for. I didn't really appreciate at the time how great a thing it was; how unusual and unique as a company. We were all young, we were all friends, we were all on this kind of a fun mission. So there really wasn't any corporate politics at the top level. It was just a great, wonderful place to work. Then at some point we got successful enough, we got bought by Warner Communications.
They put this money in, and as happens in these kind of corporate takeovers where this behemoth says "Gee, there's this wonderful company and they're making all this money and great ideas", it's a love affair for the first year or two. Then it turns into "These young guys don't know anything about business, they don't know what they're doing. We're going to show them how to really do business." Then they take it over and turn it into something that it isn't. And so, it ceased to be as much fun for me. Nolan and Joe Keaning, the President, had left or been asked to leave earlier on.
I said to myself "This is my baby, I'm going to stay here." I had this idea to do one last product. The product I did, I wanted to do something very hard because I figured "I want to risk a fail. I want to try something really hard. Heck, they're making a billion dollars a year, they can easily afford a mistake. Let's try it." Holography as a technology always interested me. In fact, we used the lie that we were doing holography to try to distract our enemies. So I figured "Well, why don't I try something in holography?"
To make a long story short, we actually designed a game called Cosmos that utilized holography. To make this happen we had to invent the process of embossed holograms. See, on the MasterCard and the Visa card? We actually created that technology with the first embossed holograms. It was a lot of fun to do that. We made a product and I had to fight every organization; marketing, manufacturing, you know; to get the right to do this product. Eventually they would not ship it.
We had a couple hundred thousand sold and they would not do it. I realized at that point, which is 1981, that these big corporations, these big professionals, were so afraid that they might release a product that would fail, they would not release anything. They thought VCS would just run forever. The truth is that you can gauge the creativity of a group or organization by its failures. If you're not allowed to fail, you're never going to be creative.
Christian: That's true of anybody.
Al: That's true of anything. So I figured, "I'm out of here" and they were so happy to have me go. They paid me for a couple years not to show up, and a company car not to show up in. It was great work for a while.
Christian: That was '81?
Al: That was from '81 to '83.
Christian: So end of '83, '84, the games industry kind of hits a brick wall like nothing else. We all aware of the game industry crash of 1983, 84? Some of you are not? From the historical perspective that I'm aware of, the big problem in the US and England especially, is that people started making games that are so bad, and started to flood the market with them so cheap that people stopped buying.
You go to the shop and you think "Here's a great new, expensive game." Before you could buy 30 crap ones. And of course parents are charged the money, so this totally changes the dynamics of the industry. Then there's an investment in E.T., the game of the movie. They make I think twice as many or three times as many games as consoles that had been sold up to that point.
Al: Well they had to, because what happened; I heard; was that the chairman of the board of Warner communications got off the jet plane, the Warner jet, from L.A. to New York with Steven Spielberg. He calls Steve Ross, calls Ray Cassar, and says, "Send a $20 million check to Steven Spielberg. I just bought the name 'E.T.' for you." And even Ray was like "Wait a second!" And we had too. It was easy. We knew how many cartridges we had to make to recover the expense.
Christian: It didn't matter.
Al: It didn't matter the fact that we didn't have any players out there. We had to build that many. The only other problem was, guess what? All the other programmers had left Atari. They were out at Activision and Imagic and they were making money. So we made this terrible game you couldn't play and that was the end of Atari.
Christian: I was one of the few people who played it. I must apologize.
Al: Did you get through it?
Christian: No. [laughs]
Al: Yeah, you couldn't get through it I was told. I never played it. But it managed to fill up a landfill in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with defective cartridges.
Christian: So, what happens next for Al Alcorn after this?
Al: After that Nolan and I plotted another company. We weren't supposed to, but we did. It was called Kuma.
Christian: You were not allowed -- literally legally not allowed-
Al: I was legally bound not to show up, not to compete, not to do anything but take cash checks. Go ahead, arrest me, see if you can arrest me for being. So Nolan started a few companies. One of them was eTech, the first in-car navigation company. I had this Kuma company which the idea of there was to distribute video games on cartridges. In those days it was a ROM, a read-only memory chip, which took months to get programmed and produce. The idea was to put a cartridge with static RAM and a battery, so you could put it in a kiosk and download software for it, and not have to have atoms, physical things, you could lose. Just buy the bits.
Christian: Still working on that concept now.
Al: Yeah. And so before its time. It got on the market just in time for the market to explode in '83, and ended that. After that I worked at a little company called Woodcom Video Compression. I was always interested in video compression. That company didn't work, they carted away the President and put him in jail for stock manipulation or something. But it was great technology, I swear to God. Then I got called up by Apple Computer. They were looking for a VP of engineering.
Christian: Why not?
Al: I knew the politics at Apple. This was after Steve Jobs had left. The last thing I wanted to do was work as a VP of engineering there. But I was between jobs and I was getting free lunches twice a week through these interviews. It was great. All these interesting people, Jean Loius Gassee, John Sculley. Gee, this was really great. About two months into this, all these free lunches, they discovered that I wasn't going to take that job. They said "Would you like to be an Apple Fellow?" and I said "What's that?" They weren't sure. It just sounded promising. The pay was really high, and they said "Maybe you know where some of the other Apple Fellows are?" They didn't know who they all were, even! And so wow, this is really exciting. I took that job.
Christian: And the work was indeterminate, they didn't really know what they wanted you to do?
Al: Well, they put me on my first assignment in research was I built a Macintosh as a plug-in card for a PC. Would turn a PC into a Macintosh.
Christian: That'd sell really well today.
Al: Yeah. At the time, they didn't really think I could do it. I didn't know I couldn't do it. That's always been my greatest thing, my naivet. If you know something can't be done, you can't do it. But if you don't know it can't be done, sometimes you might just do it and surprise people. Anyway, that project was scrapped. Then, a very interesting thing happened. Two of the greatest scientists in the world, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull. Ivan Sutherland is famous for inventing computer graphics, won a Turning Award for that, and he's one of the greats. They had a consulting group that came around the world - I think they worked in Australia for a year - and they chose to work at Apple for nine months. I said to my boss, Larry Tester, "Wow, I get to meet Ivan and Bob!" And he says, "Oh, you'll get to meet them. I'm going to have them report to you." "You're going to have..." God, I was terrified, but it worked out very well. We became friends, the group.
In fact, we had this Cray computer. In a burst of corporate stupidity, Apple, making lots of money, they figured they'd buy the fastest computer in the world, the Cray. So we had a Cray XMP48 and, of course, nobody used it because they were busy building Macintosh computers, and it was really hard to program. But we had this beautiful computer, and so Ivan and Bob said, "Hey, this'll be fun. We'll go play with this."
And at the time -- you've got to remember, you've got to go back in time -- in those days, videotape was out there, and there was a thing called the laserdisc, which was a big ungainly thing.
Christian: I still believe in it. It's coming back.
Al: Pretty good pictures. And this other thing had just come out called the CD, the compact audio disc, and it was bits on a disc. You've seen them. I'm sure you've seen them. It had about a one megabit data rate, and we figured, "Wouldn't that be cool to put video..."
In fact, the demise of RCA, they had made a video disc using video on a CD, but it was for distribution. The idea was, like, from one producer to many. You know? We're going to produce this and sell it to everybody, and you just watch it, and that's the end of it. And we said, "Why not make video and audio a data type that you can record, you can put into a document. You can put it into the computer, you can send it via email, and you can do this neat stuff with it.
Management said, "Why would you want to do that?" In fact, Jean Louis Gassee, who was head of engineering at the time, production engineering, he fancied himself a bit of a French philosopher, and said, "Television is disgusting, and if multimedia" - that's what it was called then - "if multimedia is watching television on your computer, I don't want it." He said this in front of a multimedia conference that Apple had, and just pissed all over the whole thing.
OK, so that was a good idea, but we had seen that the real idea was to make video a data type you could manipulate. You could create it, you could share it, you could send it to many.
Christian: So you met resistance from management.
Al: No, not resistance, no. Just avoidance. Like, that's why you're an Apple fellow. You go off and have fun, which is great, and I'm working with Ivan and Bob, and everybody's happy, we're playing with the Cray - and a funny story: We got to use the Cray a lot, to do some really early research, right? So one morning I get to work, and Bob Sproull, who wrote the book on computer graphics, came to me. He says, "Al, I'm sorry, but I think I got you in trouble." "Why?" He says, "Well, last night, I used the Cray all night, you know, ten hours of the whole Cray, and you're probably going to get in big trouble for this." I said, "Bob, you're going to get two free T-shirts." He said, "What?" I said, "They got this Cray, they got this staff of guys to run it, and nobody's using it. The fact that you've actually put some time on it - they're so thrilled, you're going to get two -" he got two free T-shirts. He said, "What kind of a place is this? Who wouldn't want to run with this fabulous tool?"
So anyhow, at that point, I met a guy named Andy Lipman and Nicholas Negroponte from the media lab, and we were working with them, and they saw what we were doing with Ivan and Bob, and I got a call from Andy Lipman later. He says, "I want to work on this project, too. This sounds exciting." They were doing video compression using pyramid coding; we were using a technique called vector quantization. Let's not go into the mathematics. There are different approaches. And there was this group running around the International Standards Organization called the Motion Picture Experts Group, or MPEG for short, that was just a bunch of engineers, nerds, working on this stuff of no real importance. It's future stuff.
So we kind of merged all that stuff together, and we actually developed the beginnings of what became the MPEG standard. It was a lot of fun, and management did not get it. We actually did an affected prog development with something called QuickTime, and the real prog development engineers, a few of them got it. Then the problem was, it came out of research, and research can't release product. They just do research.
Well, this was a great product. Management thought it was a dumb idea. Product development, who wasn't research - it wasn't their stuff, so they hated what we did, and they weren't going to release it. So the Vice President of Research, who had to give a talk every year at the Worldwide Developer Conference, he hijacked his own talk and announced the release of QuickTime.
Christian: [laughing] Surprise!
Al: I was sitting in the audience next to one of the executives, and he was so furious... "We'll get him for this! He has no right to do this!" And that's how QuickTime got released.
Christian: Pirate attack. And what I like about that ear is that it actually changed the way the tech companies treat research. It's why, if you look at the way Google's organized now - they put so much time and money into research, and they say, "You guys create whatever you like, and we'll come and check and see what you guys have done, and if it works, we'll produce it at the research..." so that early stuff is completely being affected by lab work.
Al: It's very hard to do creative stuff in a big organization. It's really something. I mean, I thought the Warner people were the bad guys, but I realize it's a problem with any big organization that has a successful product. They form an immune system around that successful product, and any new, innovative idea really is an attack on the status quo. So the T-cell lymphocytes come out and attack these new ideas. So you really have to subterfuge.
Christian: And that's not even a metaphor. That's actually just the way it's organized.
Al: Yeah, that's the way it happens. Even at Apple, Sculley, God bless him, was aware this was going on, and told people, "Stop it. No bureaucracy. I'm not trying to put it in." But it just forms by itself. It's a real challenge. Google's trying very hard. In fact, one of the things they do at Google is, you're allowed five percent of your time for "other." A friend of mine, Leif Elzenstein, who's one of the early guys in the computer business, was interviewed to be Vice President of "Other." He didn't know what that meant, but it sounded good, and when they realized he didn't do software, that... well, you're not going to work at Google if you don't do software, so he didn't get the job.
Christian: [laughing] That's fantastic. So as you're at Apple, you're keeping an eye on what's happening with the video game industry, and you're keeping an eye on what's happening since "Pong" and what's happening at Atari? Or what is now the second or third version of Atari?
Al: Yeah, I mean, Jack Tramiel took over Atari, and it became kind of a dark, dark, different company. But there was a very interesting thing about the Amiga computer, because that kind of sprung out of Atari. Did you know that?
Christian: Yeah.
Al: One of the great chip designers of all time, Jay Miner, who designed the 2600 chip, he did... the Amiga was really the follow-on to the Atari 2600. Fixed all the mistakes and it was video-friendly, and so that came out, and that was right when Atari demised and Jack took it over. That wound up in the hands of Commodore, Jack's old company, and so there was a lot of politics on that.
Christian: As a young boy, I remember getting the Atari ST computer, and that seemed to be like Atari was coming back. So the narrative of the company was kind of important to me as a kid. I was like they were there when I was playing games at the beginning. Then I see them again, and maybe they're changing, but you then realize, you just kind of go back, and you're like, well, this is a very different group of people. Very different.
Al: Yeah. Actually, that was an excellent product. They were great technology, but Jack's not that kind of guy. He's a... make a buck and run pretty quick.
Christian: Does it make you sad to see Atari? I mean, Atari is like the story of a company struggling. The name Atari has now been passed on. It's been passed on again in the last couple of weeks, so does it make you sad to look at the name and see it kind of shift and morph and...
Al: No, no, I mean, isn't it great to have started something that's still alive in some form? The logo's still there, the name's still there, even if there's only a thin remembrance of what it came from. I mean, to me, I remember the original Atari and the fun we had. The fact that it's still alive - that's pretty rare. Pretty unique.
Christian: And the Atari Jaguar, when it came out - it was obviously not popular anywhere, but in England it had this really small cult following.
Al: Yeah?
Christian: And it was all people who were loyal the ideas of Atari, like the way that people are loyal to Apple. People believed in it. It's got its own story and its own philosophy.
Al: Yeah. I frankly wasn't following that industry too much, other than the... to me, it was "What's the next thing?" In Silicon Valley, it's "What have you done lately? That's great, but, you know... what have you done lately?" You've got to keep proving yourself.
Christian: Right. So I guess a lot of your time is taken up, when you're on speaking circuits, talking to and about games. What kind of things - you mentioned, just in conversation, that yesterday you had to explain when people asked about the programming of "Pong"... and you say, actually...
Al: Hmm. Yeah, again, things have... I've been lucky enough to... I mean, 35 years ago, we did this, and today it's hard to realize what the circumstances were like. I mean, the microprocessor didn't really show up until about 1972, and it was so slow you could watch it work. There really was no microprocessor we could use at the time. So, Atari, "Pong" was a machine with Logic 7400 series TTL Logic chips that generated video. That is it. You know.
And so, there really wasn't a program. And people today have trouble conceiving of how you could build good stuff without a microprocessor. Without a computer anywhere around. And those days are kind of gone, but that is what it was like then. You had to just craft it yourself.
Christian: And do you still believe, when you speak to game designers, obviously they must say, "Well, what is it like?" Do you ever think that something they are missing, from that kind of...
Al: [sighs] Yeah. Well, today's video games are so powerful that they are to technology drivers. They always have been. They are the highest performance technology in consumer hands. I mean, these are better than the military systems. Because it evolves so fast.
I mean, how much is there spent to develop the Sony PlayStation or the Xbox. You know, hundred or billions of dollars to do this. And so the power of this is just remarkable. So, as a game designer, you really can't be worried about the Gates and stuff like that.
Which is kind of sad, in a way, because one of the things that I have learned. And I hope the young people take away, is that people want to be creative. Right? And, as you said earlier about "Pong" the way I look at it, the way I say it is you need constraints to be creative. And when you are unconstrained, it is very hard to be creative. Because there is no excuse.
Christian: The worst modern games are the ones where they try to do everything.
Al: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is like the difference between a radio show, a radio drama. You can make that image in your head, and you could make a better set and a better image than you could ever do.
When you do a movie, you have got to actually produce the whole thing. So now, so you have this hardware that can render reality and you better darn well have it look like reality. But, behind it, there has to be a game that is fun. And you can put great trappings on it.
I mean, a metaphor is when we did the first "Pong" no one said, "I want the ball round."
Christian: [laughs]
Al: That would have taken extra chips. And I said, "What the heck? I am not going to do it."
Christian: [laughs]
Al: And what is the difference? I mean, it's a square ball, so what. And you can imagine that it is a ball. You don't notice that it is not really round. Right?
Christian: That is right.
Al: But, I mean, that is the sort of thing. Now a good version is the Wii tennis game where it's the same, really, as "Pong". It's just, now it is in 3D.
Christian: Well, it is even less, you don't actually even move side to side.
Al: Right.
Christian: You just have got to swing at the right time. It is even simpler.
Al: [laughs] Yeah.
Christian: When I was a kid I probably remember first "Pong" being right there at the beginning, in the Atari 600 at the "Pong". It was a good game that stuck with me for years. And it was the one that didn't need to be explained to other kids. Everyone knew how to play "Pong". It was the universal language...
Al: That was a surprise.
Christian: ...like, most eventful of game or...
Al: Yeah. [laughs]
Christian: For me there was a poetry to it. Because there was the dit and the dat and that was the sound that my TV made. So I always wanted to beat dat, who seemed faster. But I knew that dit on the other side was...
Al: Somebody's battery is...
[whispering]
Christian: I always wanted to be on the left side. Because, I always thought, in my TV, he was the faster one.
Al: [laughs]
Christian: And I always made my friends play the other side. And so there is this huge back story to it in my brain. And there are, obviously, lots of versions of "Pong" on different systems. Did you see other versions and think you screwed that one tiny little design detail up? Are there any variations, like for the multi-player "Pongs" and the squash and the badminton?
Al: No, as long as it was fun to play, what the heck? I am honored; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Right?
Christian: Right.
Al: The one we did screw up early on was, our European distributors told us, "You American's don't understand the Europe, the football. Soccer, as we say in America, is very popular and let's make a game like that, it will sell like hotcakes in Europe!"
So, OK, for the first and last time, we created a game that the distributors, not the customers, the distributors. We gave them exactly what they wanted and they had like four paddles in the thing and it was a complex field and we couldn't sell any of them. But that shut them up.
After that, you got what you wanted. Look, we will do it...
Christian: You let us handle it.
Al: Yeah, yeah.
Christian: And, it was basically, as I recall, it was like, the one paddle controlled one person.
Al: Yeah.
Christian: I was, basically, like foosball.
Al: Yeah, kind of like a foosball thing. Eww.
Christian: Yeah, I am sorry, that was really bad.
[laughter]
Al: Yeah, it just didn't work. Hey, on top of that though, back to the thing, creativity is the ability to fail. And so we failed and nobody got fired. We put a laugh at the distributors, but went on and built, I think the next big game was the driving game, Grand Track.
Christian: Yeah. Taking that one step further, do you then look at following on from where you see modern games, do you look at some games and go you really don't get it? You don't get fun. Or do you think, "Oh, well these guys are probably working under the constraints of the company?"
Al: No, no. Because one of the things we learned and you learn doing it, nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie. Every game we ever made was the intention of being the greatest game in the world. But, guess what, their hits are very rare. It is like, if you are lucky it is one in three.
So for me to come out and say, "I know what a good game is." All I know now is, I don't know what a good game is and I want to learn. And that is the other thing. If you think, if you are going to design a game or any product and you really, firmly believe in it. Get as much understanding and background as you can, understand your customer. Don't do games, if you are a nerd, don't do games for nerds. Because there aren't that many nerds out there to buy the games.
Christian: Oh, that is nice of you.
Al: And go with it. Don't let people tell you it can't be done. Who am I to say it is wrong? I have learned. I didn't think "Pong" was going to be a good game, but it was. So, you know, who knows.
Christian: That is great. We will try and get a couple of questions from the audience in a bit. But, I just want to pick your brain just a couple more times. Just as we were sitting down, you talked about an experience you had working on slot machines.
Al: Mmm.
Christian: So that would be, that is a really interesting career trajectory from Berkeley, Height-Ashbury, and then...
Al: Yeah. That was great. When I got the call from an "Angel" who said, "Let's go make the next generation slot machine." Like this is out of left field and it is right up my alley. Because I had never done it before, I didn't know much about the industry. Nerds don't play slot machines, because they know the odds are against them. So why bother?
You could just mail them the money, you will save the travel expense. So, what a challenge to go build something to make somebody happy that you don't understand. To make a disruptive technology to change the industry. So, we went to a trade show and I looked around and saw the machines that were out there.
I am like, goodness! This is so archaic, the machine. This was mid '90s, '94. Antique stuff, the technology was like video games we made in the '70s. And I figured, what is wrong here? I mean, they are selling entertainment. They are not in the gambling business anymore. They are in the entertainment business and gambling is a form of entertainment.
So, why don't they do multimedia and pick it up? And I kept thinking, this has got to be, something is wrong here. I looked around and went, "Oh, let's do this!" And we tried it and I put a team together in Silicon Valley of some of the brightest people I have ever worked with. Some of the best graphics people, Tim Kay who got an academy award for computer graphics.
Anyway, we had a ball. And the best part was the adage, "If you are going to do something," I just said, "You better understand your customer." So here I have got a team of the really smart nerds and they don't gamble.
Christian: [laughs]
Al: And our job was to make a computer. And it actually used an Intel motherboard and a hard disk and a great graphics display. So it is a computer for people who don't like computers, are typically old and they are drunk. And it can't fail. I mean, if it fails you can get hurt.
Christian: [laughs]
Al: If it steals your money that is very physically dangerous. So that was a real challenge to understand it. And how do I get the nerds to understand what makes a good slot machine versus a bad slot machine.
Christian: Get them drunk and take their money.
Al: Yeah, well we went, we made several forays to Vegas. And at one point, the best, most fun was we got to work for a half a day on the floor of the casino at the Mirage hotel on the casino floor, slot floor, as a slot technician.
Dressed up and understand how you manage slots. How you collect the money. How you deal with problems. That was a lot of fun.
Christian: That is amazing. Let's have just a few short questions from the audience. And we've got a roving microphone or if you are loud. So if anyone has got any questions for Al. Anyone? Down here.
Audience Member: Before the 5200 was released, I had another replacement for the 2600, the 3200, or something, which was a 10-bit based processor. Were you involved in the design of that or anything about that?
Al: No, no. I was out doing the holography stuff. I have kind of a short attention span. So once I did that stuff, that was now, you know, a big organization doing that stuff. That was highly organized and I don't fit well in a highly organized situation. So I look at it from a distance. No, I was doing holography. Yeah.
Audience Member: I heard a rumor that one of your current projects...
Al: You better wait for the microphone. My hearing is shot with all the explosives and the airplanes and stuff. They don't know about the explosives.
Christian: They don't know about the explosives, or the machine guns.
Al: Yeah, we won't talk about that. It's bad on the hearing.
Audience Member: Sorry, Al. I heard a rumor that you're currently involved in some restaurant ventures or something, and the interfaces that are used for ordering, but also some interactive games. Is that you?
Al: I'll answer it two ways: The answer to the first one is no. What you're talking about is Nolan Bushnell, and his latest venture is called uWink. It's a new version of a restaurant, kind of an adult version of Chucky Cheese, where there are computer screens at the tables and you order your food on a computer screen. It's a new version of a restaurant and he's expanding it - look it up on the Internet, uWink.com.
But I am involved in a company that I think is kind of fun; it's another disruptive technology. It's a company called The Integrated Media Measurement, and what we've done is try to come up with a better way to measure audience media consumption of television, radio and movies.
Typically, today it's done with diaries where you write down what you saw, and people lie. So we thought we would do it using the new technology of a cell phone. So we actually give our panelists a free cell phone, and that cell phone - every 30 seconds - listens to the background sound for 10 seconds, and then sends a fingerprint of that sound up via the Internet through the cell to our servers.
We monitor all the TV and radio programs in that market, about 90 channels in any market like New York, Chicago, and L.A. And then that data is sent to our servers and they're matched up using acoustic matching technology, which is really cool stuff. And we can tell what they're watching every 30 seconds, every commercial they hear, when they go to a movie etc.
Christian: So instead of Nielsen ratings, which are aggregate.
Al: Resolution is so fine, we can do cool stuff, if you saw a movie like "The Simpsons Movie". For that panelist who had that cell phone, we know he saw the movie because we record the sound. We go back in time and see which ads you were exposed to that got you to go see that movie, so we can tell if the ad worked.
And one of the findings we discovered is that "The Simpsons Movie" in America had trailer advertisements on television for the movie, but they also had a co-branding deal with the Burger King hamburger fast-food chain, really cute little ads. And it turned out that the co-branding that was meant to sell hamburgers was more effective at getting people to see the movie than the ads for the movie itself. And so sometimes people don't want to hear this information - the advertising guys - but that's disruptive technology for you.
Christian: Advertising is such a weird science. There's just so much bizarre voodoo.
Al: There's one thing about advertising that I like: In America, there's $2.5 billion spent on it every year, and I just want a little piece of that, I'm not greedy. One percent, that's all I need.
Christian: Any other questions?
Al: We're giving this guy some exercise. Can you go up there? No.
Audience Member: Al, I'm aware of a game called "Volleyball" that came very soon after "Pong", which was the vertical motion of "Pong", rather than side-to-side. Was that actually created along with "Pong", or at the same time before, say, "Space Race" came out? I'm aware of it as "Volleyball", and it later became "Rebound". Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Al: That came much later. When we did "Pong", there were three of us in the company: Nolan, Ted Dabney and me. And Ted Dabney was sitting at manufacturing, Nolan was bossing me around and I was doing all the work, so I was lucky to get "Pong" out; and "Rebound" was another idea later on. In the early days, we were very constrained in what we could do, so that was one of the attempts.
Audience Member: I guess it's not a controversy the way it was, but tell us a little bit about your word association with the name Ralph Baer. People wanted controversy out of it, but in some ways there isn't. Was there a difficult relationship with his "Tennis for Two" from 1958?
Al: Other than the fact that they sued us.
Audience Member: That's difficult, yeah.
Al: You want to hear the story about that?
Audience Member: Yes, please.
Al: I'll try not to take too much time because it's a fascinating story.
Christian: "Tennis for Two", there are lots of clips of it online. It is a game from 1958, where a ball moves, but its side on, and it's a very different experience as well.
Al: Well Ralph Baer designed this game that got sold to Magnavox, called the Magnavox Odyssey Game - and there's a prototype of it downstairs, you'll see the brown box. That was what Nolan saw and gave me the idea for "Pong". And the original idea for "Pong", as I mentioned yesterday, was an experiment, an exercise to throw it away, and do something more complex later we can sell. Well it didn't happen that way - "Pong" became a hit.
It was kind of like that movie "The Producers", if you've ever seen that play or movie, where they were going to do a bad play, intentionally, so there's no damage done if you oversell the stocks. So we winded up copying the Magnavox Odyssey and it became a hit. So what happened? So they sent us a letter saying, 'you've noticed this patent over here'; so we wound up settling with them, and we worked it out pretty well, but they certainly took a lot of money from other people.
Now the other thing about Ralph - and I like Ralph; Ralph and I are friends now - is that I feel sorry for him because Ralph came out of the end of an era, where you worked for the big company, you got the gold watch, you got a pension and you were happy. And we did this wacky thing back in 1972 to leave and start up a company and have equity in the company.
Christian: It really is a generational story.
Al: Yeah, it happened right there. And poor Ralph, I have to say, it was harder for him to do this because he truly invented the first home video game. I might argue it wasn't the best game in the world the way it played, but there was an engineering challenge.
You don't realize that in those days, you didn't hook anything up to a TV set, but an antenna. There was no cable TV, there was no VCR, there was nothing, and to actually engineer a product that hooked to that thing was unheard of. Nobody got in the back of the TV and fussed with anything. There were no video input jacks - it was absurd. And for him to do that and to make that product, in spite of the corporations, which he had to fight against - Lockheed and Sanders Associates - he deserves a lot of credit.
So if you saw my talk yesterday, 'Item 6' on my task list was to do a home game of "Pong" and create an industry. I couldn't say to Nolan that you can't hook something to the TV set because Ralph had done it; and he deserves a lot of credit for that. But one of the questions they asked him at the game developer conference was 'did you make a lot of money from the patent, and he said no, he just got a salary. And it's sad in a way; now he's gotten the awards and the recognition.
Christian: But it's not the same.
Al: It's not the money. Don't applaud; throw money.
Christian: Well it seems like it was bitter for a time, but now you say you're friends. But I think there was something quite telling when he got an award; it was a plaque saying, "Inventor of the First Video Game".
Al: Well that's stretching it a little bit.
Christian: It's stretching it a little bit, but also the fact that it had to be done as well is telling; he struggled in such a way and you guys struggled in such a way that these plaques have to be given out - that's something telling about the gaming industry as well.
Al: Yeah.
Christian: Overcoming engineering challenges was the birth. It's slightly different to the way that movies and other media have had to start - overcoming challenge was the thing that's worthy of accolades.
Al: Yeah, there were technical obstacles; it's a new medium. To be able to create a new medium is really cool. I didn't set about to do that, but we wound up doing it, and Ralph is really key in that. And downstairs, there's a replica of the first PDP1 that played 'The Space War', which is truly the first video game - a little pricey for its time.
Nolan was at the University at Utah, where Ivan Sutherland was and they had a PDP1, and he saw this stuff. And so he knew that it could be done, it was just a bit pricey. The trick was what would the technology allow, and that's why he went to Ampex in Redwood City.
Christian: Well I think we're well out of time. Are we?
No, no. We've actually got 10 or 15 minutes.
Al: Keep talking.
Audience Member: Yeah, we're doing really well.
Christian: Are there any other questions?
Al: We know about machine guns.
Christian: Yeah, we've got a machine gun. If you've got a machine gun question, fire it up.
Al: You've got a mike coming up at you.
Christian: Listening to you talk, you've done so many different things over the years. It struck me that you have to be equal parts creative and an entrepreneur.
Al: Yeah.
Christian: Now, do you think I am wasting my time just learning about level design and game design and not really looking at the world of business?
Al: Ah, no. That is a good question. That is a really good question. I remember when I was at Apple, in the '80s, and all of the sudden we started seeing people coming out of college. This guy got his Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, went right into MBA school and then he is going to go do a start-up.
One of the reasons we were successful, at Atari, was we came out of Ampex. We learned, I recommend people work. You come out of college, luck favors a prepared mind. Right? Get good at the technology. Work at a company. Understand the process. Understand how they are doing it wrong. Which they invariably are in a big company.
But, also, gather some friends who agree with you and that is how you start. I think it is really, really hard to say, "Let's do a startup. Figure out what it is." It is kind of backwards.
Christian: Yep.
Al: It doesn't work. I mean, you should have been in Silicon Valley in 2000, when the bubble popped. The freeways were empty and stuff. So, I think, get an education and get a passion and enjoy what you are doing. And it will become obvious where the big guys are screwing up.
Christian: And I think, and I am not an engineer. I have never engineered anything to overcome anything. I can barely cook.
[laughter]
Christian: But, I think that as an educator I couldn't, if someone said, "Oh, I want to get into games marketing." I would chase them out of the room with a broom. And MBA is a devil, they don't teach anything.
Al: [laughs]
Christian: They teach you these bad business skills, they really do. And that is what they are indoctrinating you into. It seems to be that everyone with any positive experience out of the games industry says is, "Passion first." And if you have got that, you are an entrepreneur. You have got every skill that you need.
Al: Yeah. One other way of looking at it is, it is like Gordy Moore's Law. Things are changing so fast and the business is changing so fast in what we are doing. You go to MBA School, you are going to learn how it was done five years ago. That is great if you are a fan of history.
But, as Alan Kay, the great scientist that worked with this other Apple fellow. I love that he said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself." And that is not as hard as you might think. If you are prepared.
But, I love entrepreneuring. That is fun. Actually I have been, frankly, more successful financially at investing and looking at other people for ideas. And Silicon Valley, why is Silicon Valley doing it? And I see a lot of that entrepreneurship happening here now in Melbourne, is you get people who have made a success in business in this field and somewhere.
And now they have enough money to understand the risk and understand the process, to be able to fund startups. So, in Silicon Valley, it is like an organization. There are groups.
There is one group called the "Band of Angels" and there are about 100 people. And they meet once a month. And they have these people come up, with four people and they have dinner, and you have 15 minutes to do a business plan presentation with PowerPoint projector.
And, if it is good, in two weeks you could raise a million or $2 million, in a week or two, just on the idea and the team.
Christian: And they have all done things like funded films and all kinds of things. As I understand that group.
Al: I don't know if they fund films. But the medical appliances. It is usually in fields sort of related to where the "Angels" have had a success. So they kind of understand the process. For me movies, we wont talk about the movie that Nolan and I were involved in.
Christian: Oh, no, we will, we will.
Al: No, no, no, no, no, no, no...
Christian: We have got a few minutes let's hear about the movie.
Al: No, I can't.
[laughter]
Christian: [whispers] OK. Well, someone else ask.
[laughter]
Al: A failure.
Christian: One.
Al: Oh, here we go.
Audience Member: Just wondering, because the games industry nowadays, is so different from back then. Right now it seems to be dominated by a handful of mega-corporations. As opposed to a handful of individuals who come up with ideas and are willing to pioneer technology. But, what is your view on the game industry now?
Al: Well, that is a good question. I would be totally useless in today's game industry. I am really good at creating something new, where I am the only guy. For one point, I was the smartest guy in the games industry. Because I was the only guy, you know.
[laughter]
Al: Today, the games industry is, the top titles cost 20 million dollars to make. They take over a year and there is very little engineering. It is artists. It is animators. And the bar is so high that it is hard to take a risk. You know, you can't spend 20 million dollars and you can't have a flop.
How can you be creative if you can't have a failure, right? I think there is a career. I don't think everybody should be creative. Please! I mean there are people that need to work for the big companies and create those titles and work on that. And my daughter does, in that area. And it is fun and it is a job. And somebody, I think you go do that and then see what you don't like about it and create something new.
I personally, the way I look at it is I think, the Nintendo Wii is a very interesting example. Here you have got these big financial powerhouses, Sony and Microsoft, charging down this road for millions of instructions per second. How many billions of pixels are they creating and rendering and stuff like that?
And meanwhile, Nintendo says, "Hey, let's just make it fun." Let's make it simple. Let's make it easy. And now they can't make the games fast enough. Well, guess what guys, I know there are other things that are going to happen. It is just beginning.
And there is going to be technologies that come out that change the whole perspective of this thing. And the trick is that you want to be the guy, there is that book out "Who Moved the Cheese".
Christian: [laughs]
Al: You want to be the guy moving the cheese. [laughs]
Christian: And, just to kind of bring home the point. Go downstairs to the exhibition. And it is a history of video games. And it begins with "Pong". And, right at the end, it ends with independent games.
Al: Yeah.
Christian: Like, the independent games movement is now a place where people can have a career. And they don't need the people holding them in the same way. There are now so many people playing games. There is a scope for people to have their own livelihood on their own terms. So.
Al: Yeah.
Christian: OK, last question.
Audience Member: I was interested to know, I hope this hasn't been asked before, because I only just came in, about the pop culture iconness of "Pong". Where is the weirdest place you have seen "Pong" or Atari, the logos, the symbols, the things represented? Earlier in the day, you mentioned to me, a mechanical version of "Pong". I don't know if you have, and I remember you also mentioned something about it being on a t-shirt in a record store.
Al: Yeah. The logo has become part of the culture. So, I was fascinated to see, on the Internet, somebody made, I believe in Germany, an electromechanical "Pong" game. That clinked and clanked and everything. Oh, that is fabulous! To take that and to move that into the medium of the whole. And he said, "Well, I don't know how to do transistors, so I did relays."
We tried to get him to come out and bring it to the hacker's conference that we go to every year. And then, to see, and remember it is hard. I mean, I think of myself as the young punk doing all this stuff. And I look in the mirror and I have got gray hair, I don't know how that happened.
[laughter]
Al: But...
Christian: Throw away the mirror.
Al: Yeah, yeah. So, I was in, about 15 years ago, I went to the record store to buy a disc and the young man behind the counter was wearing a brand new Atari t-shirt.
[laughter]
Al: And I go, "Whoa! What is that about?" And I asked the guy, "What is the deal with the Atari t-shirt?" And he says, "Oh, it is retro man." And, oh, I felt so old.
[laughter]
Al: You know, all of the sudden.
Christian: Nowadays, just down the road, it calls itself "Game On". You can buy an Atari t-shirt that is pre-faded.
Al: [laughs]
Christian: So it looks like the ones you would have been throwing away.
Al: I still got them in the drawer. Yeah. I mean, it is...
Christian: I have seen the Atari logo stamped on drugs. So...
[laughter]
Al: Oh, wow! No talk about that either. The far wrecked division of Atari. Yeah, that was another story.
[laughter]
Christian: That is real R & D.
Al: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we had a lot of fun. I mean, one of the things. Oh! Go ahead. Great.
Audience Member: Hi. Sorry, I thought you were finishing up. So, I was going to ask you another question. So if you want to keep going.
Al: No, go ahead.
Audience Member: I had a question, before you were mentioning about the big powers and stuff like that. Do you think that the games industry, at the moment, mainly the bigger companies and things like that, are just playing it too safe at the moment? And not taking enough creative risks?
Al: Oh, absolutely. As I said, when you have got $20 million in a title, you don't want to risk it. You have got to go build the next generation of "Halo". You have got to build the next generation of "Madden Football". I mean those companies...
But, as I said, there are other vehicles. You can develop your own game now and distribute it through the Internet for PCs. Right? So don't let that stop you. There are many, many ways to distribute games now. On cell phones, on other things. So, if you have got a good idea for a game and you can protect it. Go for it!
But, that is not the only vehicle. But those companies, I don't think they would be as much fun to work for as a small one. Because you have got to, you know, crack the whip and get the thing out on time. Yeah, it is tough.
Christian: Well, thank you. I would like to thank Al. Join me in thanking him for coming down to the "Game On" Show.
[applause]
Al: Thank you. Thank you for having me. |
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