Create a life game license#

And it was an animation-a moving picture designed to complete the feedback loop between the eyes, the brain, and the fingers on the game controls. It was a simulation of table tennis, managing to render most of the gameвЂ™s rules, structure, and logic onto the screen. The first product of BushnellвЂ™s company, Atari, was Pong, a simple, elegant game in which two players manipulated electronic paddles and sent a blip back and forth across a black-and-white screen. вЂњThe things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games,вЂќ he later said, вЂњI put those sales pitches in my automated box.вЂќ From this unlikely marriage-the computer lab and the carnival-the video-game industry was born. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would be inside the machine.

Create a life game license#

He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. The gameвЂ™s developers, a group of graduate students who were part of the Tech Model Railroad Club, at M.I.T., an early proving ground of computer hackers, had never considered selling the game their idea was to demonstrate the appeal of interactivity, and to take a first small step toward simulating intelligent life on a computer.

As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California.