Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [46]
Jobs became one of Atari’s first fifty employees and had his first prolonged taste of corporate life in a company where a succession of novel ideas managed to withstand any number of managerial torpedoes. The company was started and dominated by Nolan Bushnell, son of a Utah cement contractor whose first business coup took place at the University of Utah where he sold ink blotters framed by advertisements. In 1972, at age twenty-nine, Bushnell introduced his first video game. Computer Space appealed to engineers but was too complicated for the general public.
As the game failed Bushnell decided to start his own business to make video games and operate pinball machines. He called the company, which he based in a rented garage space, Syzygy, for no better reason than it was the last word in the dictionary that began with the letter S. Within weeks Bushnell discovered that Syzygy had been used by another firm and so he changed the name to Atari (taken from the Japanese game Go and roughly equivalent in meaning to check) but early advertisements read FROM ATARI INC., SYZYGY ENGINEERED.
Bushnell viewed business as “a type of war” and employed pinches of diplomacy and charm, cunning and force to cajole his employees and bamboozle the competition. Dressed in sharp suits, flowery shirts, and polka-dot ties, he became Atari’s six-foot-four-inch juju man. “It was life in the fast lane with Nolan,” one of the founders recalled. “He always wanted everything at once.” To persuade Chief Engineer Alcorn to design Pong, Bushnell pretended it had been ordered by General Electric. “I’d never even had any negotiations with General Electric,” Bushnell recalled, “but I wanted to test out Al’s skills.” Nobody, let alone Bushnell, placed any great hopes in Pong. “I didn’t perceive it as a big marketable item.”
The first game, with a coin box bolted to the outside, was placed in Andy Capp’s Cavern, a popular Sunnyvale pool parlor. Almost immediately it became clear that the electronic game was making more than the bar’s pinball machines. A few days after it was installed, the rush of quarters backed up and jammed the coin box and within weeks people wanting to play Pong lined up outside the bar.
While Pong came to enjoy popular success, the people who mattered treated the company with suspicion. Some bankers thought it was an offshoot of the Mafia. Suppliers were leery about extending credit to a firm that looked as if it might take to the air any day. To quell complaints, Bushnell started an offshoot, Kee Games, which he furnished with designers, managers, and plans from Atari. According to Bushnell, the new company was formed to produce a parallel line of games and to sop up the money that might have flowed to potential competitors. A series of contrived press releases charted the formation of Kee Games, and Bushnell later chortled, with something bordering on contempt, “There are just so many ways you can use the press for strategic advantage.” When Kee Games began to prosper and there were rumors that it wanted to shrug off ties with Atari, Bushnell issued a bland statement that read “We are happy that the people at Kee and Atari have been able to resolve the problems that led to the original split.”
Bushnell’s control of the press was more refined than his control of the company. Many of his early employees were eager to dispense with routine corporate drudgery like memos and staff meetings. Attracted by the unconventional, Bushnell fueled brainstorming sessions with marijuana and made no secret of his belief that drugs and alcohol helped spark ideas. Recruitment was equally unpredictable. One candidate was startled when Bushnell strolled into the room, posed one question—“Are you a spy for Bally?”—and then disappeared, satisfied he wasn’t about to hire a quisling. Easily bored by daily chores, Bushnell hired his brother-in-law, a psychiatrist, to manage the company. Financial controls were so lax that a three-month supply of one game, Trak Ten, was virtually given away before an accountant discovered that