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Jobs’s return from India in the fall of 1974 also marked the start of an eighteen-month period during which he played hopscotch. He flitted between Atari and the crumbling edges of consumer electronics and a three-hundred acre Oregon farm that Robert Friedland was managing for a wealthy relative. But first he headed north to an old hotel in Eugene, Oregon, that a student of the California psychiatrist Arthur Janov had converted into the Oregon Feeling Center. Jobs, who had read Janov’s best seller Primal Scream, paid a thousand dollars and enrolled in a twelve-week course of therapy that was supposed to provide solutions to deeply rooted problems. Janov and his students at the Oregon Feeling Center seemed to be offering an emotional spring cleaning. “Feeling is what this therapy is all about. . . . We are after the feelings which say ‘Daddy, be nice. Mama, I need you.’” Jobs’s curiosity was piqued. “It seemed like such an interesting thing. You could gain some insight into your life and experience some new realm of feeling. This was not something to think about. This was something to actually go do: to close your eyes, hold your breath, jump in and come out the other end more insightful.”

For Jobs Janov’s writings appeared to hold the key for an immensely personal quest. As he turned twenty, the question of his adoption and the whereabouts of his natural parents came to assume more prominence. Nancy Rogers recalled: “He was sometimes in tears to see his mother.” Robert Friedland had his own interpretation: “Steve had a very profound desire to know his physical parents so he could better know himself.” Questions about his natural parents spawned hours of private speculation. His friends gently teased him that he was probably Armenian or Syrian. Jobs began an extensive search for his natural parents and learned a little about them. “Both were teaching at a university. My father was a visiting maths professor.” Jobs reckoned that his adoption had at least one effect: “It made me feel a little bit more independent.” After about three months in Eugene, Jobs’s infatuation with Janov’s work and methods dulled. “He offered a ready-made, button-down answer which turned out to be far too over-simplistic. It became obvious that it wasn’t going to yield any great insight.”

Disappointed by the ministrations of the Oregon Feeling Center, Jobs drifted back to California, rented a room in a house in Los Gatos, took to meditating for an hour at dawn, and started to work again at Atari. There he continued to ruffle feathers. Bushnell noticed the tensions Jobs created in the engineering laboratory and wound up appointing him to a casual position as a consultant. “It was a rescue of a would-be fire. I said, ‘Hey, if you guys don’t want him, I want him.’” Bushnell appreciated Jobs’s sense of urgency. “When he wanted to do something, he’d give a schedule in terms of days and weeks, not months and years.” Jobs again worked in the small hours and spent his time on a variety of different projects. Wozniak, meantime, had discovered video games and was a frequent visitor at Atari where he spent hours playing the video games that stood on the assembly line. He even spent several weeks designing and building his own version of Pong and for the first time drew up a design that displayed images on a television screen.

Wozniak also helped Jobs after Bushnell decided he wanted a game that would let players destroy a wall of bricks with a bouncing ball. Bushnell offered Jobs a bonus plan, tying payment to the number of chips that were used in the design. With fewer chips, games were not only cheaper to manufacture but also usually more reliable. Jobs recruited help from Wozniak who thought “Steve was not quite capable of designing something that complex.” The pair spent four consecutive nights working on the game with Wozniak designing and Jobs wiring the prototype.

Bushnell was impressed by the finished game and offered Wozniak a job at Atari anytime he wanted. However, Al Alcorn, who didn’t discover