Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [47]
Nevertheless, during its first three years Atari managed to sell $13 million worth of video games and capitalized on the popularity of Pong by selling variants that included Dr. Pong, a wood-grained version aimed at physicians, dentists, and hospitals, and Puppy Pong, which was clad in a Formica doghouse. On the rush of its early success Atari built a large factory only to find there weren’t enough orders to keep it busy. More money disappeared when Bushnell attempted to start a manufacturing offshoot in Japan. Life wasn’t made any easier by seasonal swings, the nationwide recession, a shortage of venture capital or the popular perception that a leisure business was a frivolous enterprise.
On several occasions, especially between the spring and fall of 1974, when Atari’s future rested on the success of Gran Trak, a driving game, the company came within seven days of bankruptcy. At lunch during one savage week Bushnell broke down in tears thinking all was lost. Suppliers refused to deliver parts and creditors camped out in the hallway. The tempestuous backdrop didn’t escape Atari’s employees. Ron Wayne, a one-time employee, said, “Working at Atari was like driving with a rubber steering wheel.” Steve Jobs formed his own impressions of a company that was hardly a model for the business textbooks. “It was always chaos. It was not a well-run company.”
But for all the thrills and spills, most of the Atari employees were conservative and Jobs was considered peculiar. He poked his nose into other engineers’ business and made no secret of his disdain. Bushnell recalled that Jobs “regularly told a lot of the other guys they were dumb shits,” and Jobs himself said, “Some of their engineers were not very good and I was better than most of them. The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad. I wasn’t really an engineer at all.” Yet Jobs’s appearance, his lunches of yogurt, his strict adherence to the mucusless diet, and his belief that a fruit diet meant that he could go without showers, were considered nonconformist. By his own admission Jobs was oblivious to the animosity he stirred up. Finally, to keep peace in the lab, Alcorn arranged for Jobs to work after hours and late at night. “The engineers didn’t like him. He smelled funny.”
Despite his lack of formal electronic training, Jobs quickly bridged the gap between being a technician and being an engineer. One of his early tasks was to add refinements to a game called Touch Me, which sported bulbous rubber suckers. Working within the discipline of specified boundaries Jobs tailored the performance of the chips to what was wanted on the screen. He understood the chips’ subtleties, plotted out a new design, and made substantial improvements to the game. Wozniak admired Jobs’s work. “He did the creative stuff. He realized how he could build the same thing a lot simpler and better. It was engineering.”
When Jobs decided to accompany his college friend Dan Kottke to India and see the topography and intellectual scenery for some of Robert Friedland’s elaborate tales, he asked Alcorn to supply the air fare. Alcorn gave the request a blunt reception. “Bullshit, I’m not giving you any money to go see the guru.” The pair arrived at a convenient compromise. Some games Atari had shipped to West Germany were causing interference on television sets, and the German engineers were unable to solve the problem. Alcorn gave Jobs a crash course in ground loops and agreed to pay his air fare to Europe, ordering him to “say hi to the guru for me.”
Jobs’s arrival in Europe caused some consternation among the Germans, who cabled Alcorn wondering what he had dispatched. For his part Jobs (distressed that he couldn’t find the German word for vegetarian) adroitly applied the curative to Atari’s troublesome machines.