#CinemaJourney
#GameChangers
#GameChangers
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Short filmTranscript
00:00In the golden age of video games, kids scoured the land looking for quarters just to get
00:16a quick arcade fix.
00:20They begged their parents for the latest console in desperate hopes of bringing the arcade
00:25home.
00:26All while one company ruled supreme during the dawn of the multi-billion dollar video
00:31game industry.
00:32We are Atari and we invented the technology.
00:36Everybody wanted a piece of that big pie.
00:38But in order to take the throne, they'd first have to steal the electronic game of the future.
00:43They took a good idea and implemented it in a vastly superior way.
00:48Bargain.
00:49We were just totally out of cash.
00:51Battle.
00:52They had better patent attorneys than we did, I'll tell you that.
00:54And survive.
00:55We had one goal in life.
00:57Get rid of me.
00:59This is the story of how Atari took the world by storm.
01:02We're Atari!
01:03Pew pew pew!
01:04And inadvertently gave rise to one of the greatest selling arcade games of all time.
01:09Pac-Man.
01:10Yellow creature gobbles dots while being pursued through a maze.
01:13Pac-Man made a lot of money.
01:15Make your head spin.
01:16Before the whole thing?
01:17There were some real turkeys out there.
01:19It was a nightmare.
01:20Came crashing down.
01:23And the whole industry pretty much collapsed.
01:25Ready?
01:26Okay, let's go.
01:53In this bar, through the haze of smoke and liabated hubbub, history was made.
02:10And soon, so was money.
02:13Even if it was quarter by quarter.
02:16Because it was here, the world's first video game emerged, and there's a good chance you
02:22know what game it was.
02:24If you ask anybody, they're going to be like, well the first video game was Pong, and it
02:28was by Atari.
02:29Oh, you mean this Atari.
02:32The Atari started by this guy.
02:34My name's Nolan Bushnell.
02:35I'm known for starting Atari.
02:39But here's the thing.
02:40First video game was Pong, and it was by Atari.
02:44And that is not the truth.
02:46That is not the truth.
02:47Well maybe then, the first video game was Pac-Man.
02:51P-U-C-K, Pac-Man.
02:54A Japanese game brought to America by this gentleman.
02:57My name is Dan Jiraki, and I was the VP of Marketing at Bally Corporation.
03:02Oh god, no, no, no, no.
03:04Pac-Man was not the first video game.
03:06Okay, let's clear this up.
03:08Because the first video game wasn't Nolan's Pong, it was Stan's Pac-Man.
03:13Pac-Man.
03:15The PDP-1, which stands for Program Data Processor 1, meaning it was the first of its kind.
03:23And this is where the story of the first video game really begins.
03:27The first prototype of the PDP-1 was given to MIT, and these students had unlimited access
03:34to this computer.
03:36And they were able to write software for it, even modify the hardware itself.
03:41And with all that access, they were able to write all kinds of science-y computational
03:46tasks, with programs punched as holes on paper tape, which they dubbed hacks, which incidentally
03:53is where the name hackers originated.
03:56But one bright mind, who had access to the PDP-1, had far from malicious intentions.
04:03I'm Steve Russell, and the seniors decided that my name was Slug, and they never would
04:08tell me why, but it stuck.
04:11But this Slug didn't so much leave a trail of slime, but forged a path of innovation.
04:16I was interested in the PDP-1 because it had a display, which wasn't available on anything
04:24else that students could get their hands on.
04:28And it was also reasonably fast.
04:30I did a little simulation and realized that I could make spaceships fly around in real
04:35time on this computer.
04:37A realization that was about to change the world.
04:41One of the things that was very much in the public mind at the time was the space race.
04:46And it inspired Steve and his fellow hackers to dream up a game featuring two spaceships,
04:52engaged in an interstellar dogfight.
04:54And they called it Space War.
04:56When it finally got working, I decided it needed an exclamation point, so it got one.
05:01But the main exclamations came from the people who played Steve's game.
05:06People, they usually wanted to play it again.
05:09If the PDP-1 was idle, hangers-on would show up and start playing Space War.
05:15Sometimes players would tell me to go away.
05:19So I got them to add a note that developing new copies of Space War was more important
05:24than playing Space War.
05:26And these new copies made their way around other campuses who also had the PDP-1.
05:32Anywhere there was a PDP-1 with a display, there was usually a copy of Space War available.
05:38In 1964 at the University of Utah, it absolutely blows one particular student's mind, which
05:45brings us back to Nolan.
05:47It's cool.
05:48Who was one such student?
05:50I was mesmerized because my happy accident was I put myself through college working at
05:57an amusement park.
06:01And I knew the economics of the coin-operated game business.
06:04And I knew the minute I saw Space War that if I had a coin slot on it, that it would
06:09make money.
06:12The only problem was you divided 25 cents for three minutes into a million-dollar computer
06:18and the math didn't work.
06:20So waiting patiently while the technology evolved and the math did work, by the end
06:25of the 1960s, Nolan teamed up with a video engineer named Ted Dabney to start a company.
06:31Dabney was the complete opposite of Bush-Nolan personality.
06:36He was a better video engineer than I was.
06:40I was a better digital engineer.
06:42Together we put together Syzygy, which was the last S in the dictionary.
06:48It meant the alignment of planets, and I thought, yeah, that's a cool name.
06:54Teaming up with manufacturer Nutting Associates, Nolan and Ted built their very own Space War
06:59game, calling their version...
07:02Computer Space.
07:05It was a television recreation of the old Space War game.
07:10Nolan Bushnell was able to take the basics of Space War and turn it into something commercial.
07:16Unfortunately, Slug would never see a single quarter.
07:19I was not flattered by Computer Space because it wasn't a very good imitation.
07:24And where Slug's Space War, thank you, could only be played on the large and expensive
07:30PDP-1, Nolan and Ted brought a little style to Computer Space.
07:36Computer Space brought a little more sex appeal to the whole thing.
07:40It had curves, you know?
07:42But to find out if the world was ready for the futuristic curves of Computer Space, Nolan
07:46and Ted would need to find a venue receptive to this unusual device, which brings us back
07:53to this bar.
07:54I did my first test at a Stanford bar, the Dutch Goose.
07:59A lot of engineering students from Stanford hung out there, and so it did really well.
08:05So well that in 1971, over 1,000 cabinets of Computer Space were in the market, and
08:13people started to notice the world's first coin-operated video game.
08:17My first introduction to electronic gaming was Computer Space.
08:22It was very clear that this was something really unique.
08:25I knew that was going to be a big deal.
08:28It was cool-looking, and it showed up in the movie Soylent Green.
08:33Good to hear you laugh.
08:35So things were looking positive for Computer Space.
08:38However...
08:39It was a false positive.
08:40And Nolan knew that shortly after its debut at the Dutch Goose.
08:45Because I found out that any drunk in a bar could not play Computer Space.
08:50It's too difficult for the average person.
08:54And so I knew that in order to be successful, I had to have a game that any drunk in a bar
09:00could play.
09:01And so Nolan had a game that drunks couldn't play, and a company that they almost certainly
09:07couldn't say.
09:08Syzygy.
09:09Syzygy.
09:10Not to worry.
09:11It turned out when we went to incorporate, a Mendocino Candle company had already taken
09:16Syzygy, so we had to do something else.
09:19And where Nolan found the idea for Computer Space elsewhere, for the renaming of his company,
09:25once again he looked to a pre-existing idea.
09:28Weki.
09:29It was embedded in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago.
09:33It made its way onto Japan, where it became known as Go.
09:37And at a certain point in the game, players would shout...
09:40Which basically meant, checkmate.
09:42But don't worry.
09:44This game is far from won.
09:49After a name change, and a modest profit from Computer Space, Atari was in business.
09:55So it was time to hire more help.
09:57There were only three or four of us in the company.
10:00And one of them was this man, Al Alcorn.
10:03He was our first engineer that we had hired.
10:06I was 24 years old.
10:08I'm right out of college.
10:09I'm kind of employee number four, because I had a receptionist, which was my old babysitter,
10:14which was actually before Al.
10:16Well, as Atari took baby steps into uncharted territory...
10:20A completely separate company was about to change the game.
10:26Or at least start marketing a new kind of one.
10:30Magnavox was a consumer electronics company.
10:32Their business was selling televisions in big wooden cabinets.
10:35But the ping-pong of progress is now in the hands of this television company, who, in
10:40an effort to sell more televisions, had a rather revolutionary thought.
10:45The brown box was the first time that somebody said, what if we could put images on the TV
10:50from this direction?
10:51Ready?
10:52Here we go.
10:53When they licensed this rather revolutionary game...
10:55Now watch me take them off.
10:57From a man named Ralph Baer in the early 70s.
11:00It was amazing that he could do it at all with the technology that he had.
11:03It was all analog stuff.
11:05Okay, one and nothing.
11:07Was the simplest game that was ever conceived of to this day.
11:12One moving object and two paddles.
11:15Magnavox took this simple brown box and this nameless simple game...
11:19He's getting tricky.
11:21And repurposed it as the Magnavox Odyssey.
11:25And it didn't take long to cross no one's path.
11:28I attended a Magnavox demonstration of Odyssey.
11:33You can increase the challenge of Odyssey tennis by increasing or decreasing the speed
11:38of the tennis ball.
11:39I was quite surprised about how bad it was.
11:46Had no sound.
11:47Had no score.
11:49The game was just barely a game, but I noticed the people were kind of having fun with it.
11:56Well, Nolan Bushnell was eager to play, but he wanted to play a different game.
12:03Since Odyssey was a consumer game, I thought maybe there's a consumer game market.
12:07And while Nolan pondered this as a possible future for Atari.
12:11It happened to coincide to Al Alcorn's first day.
12:16Which brings us back to Al.
12:18Nolan just told me, I want you to create a ping pong game with a paddle that goes up
12:23and down on each side, ball going across, net score.
12:29When somebody gains a point, I want to hear a crowd of thousands.
12:35But what he didn't say was that this was exactly what he had just seen on the Magnavox
12:40Odyssey.
12:41Never occurred to me that this was bull****.
12:45Which will most definitely come back and ping them in the pong.
12:49The electronic game of the future.
12:52But in the meantime, Al Alcorn was hard at work, struggling with complicated things.
12:57I'm building this thing with TTL chips, and I was up to like 70 chips, you know, I broke
13:02the budget.
13:03Refining.
13:04It really wasn't much fun to play.
13:06So I added the counter and speed up.
13:09Adjusting.
13:10Then I added the reflection off the paddles to give different angles.
13:14Tweaking.
13:15And don't forget.
13:16The roar of a crowd of thousands.
13:19Until finally.
13:20I was impressed.
13:21In fact, Nolan was so impressed.
13:23In my mind, this was starting to turn into a coin-op game.
13:27But it was a game without a name.
13:29And having learned from his mistakes.
13:34It was always better to go to short.
13:37Pong, simple dimple.
13:39The potential success of Pong was in the air.
13:42We made a little box that we could put it on a tabletop, and we put a coin box on the
13:47side of it.
13:48And if you remember.
13:49In order to be successful, I had to have a game that any drunk in a bar could play.
13:53So, to find out if Pong could pass Nolan's ultimate test, he tried it out at a different
13:58bar.
13:59This one.
14:00We drop it off, and my expectation was nobody would play it, because it was just a dumb
14:05game.
14:06Within about a week or two, the bartender calls a sepsis.
14:10The machine stopped working.
14:12So after work, I go over and check the machine out, see what's wrong with it.
14:17So I open up the coin box to give myself a free play.
14:21And when I open the coin box, all these coins gushed out.
14:26Wow.
14:27I found the problem.
14:28The thing's making too much money.
14:32All of a sudden, we get hit in the ass by lightning, and this thing is now, it's a runaway
14:35hit.
14:36Magical.
14:37And not just magical, but financially viable.
14:41If a coin-operated game did $10 a day, that was big money.
14:48Pong was doing $35 or $40 a day.
14:50And so Nolan upscaled.
14:51I figured we had just enough money to make about 12 units.
14:57Ted drew up a cabinet, literally in a month.
15:01We had all the pieces, put them together, and we sold them for cash.
15:06It was crazy.
15:07We were selling these things as fast as we could make them.
15:10The first Pong game was $320, and we were selling them for $950.
15:17That's some crazy number.
15:18So now we had roughly $12,000.
15:21And even though things were looking good for Atari...
15:24Ted Dabney wasn't on board with the direction the company was going.
15:28It could also have been just very, very difficult to compete with a personality like Bushnell's.
15:35And so, Ted Dabney left Atari, and Nolan really put his skates on.
15:39And they upscaled and moved into an old roller skating rink, which is now, incidentally,
15:45a bingo hall.
15:46With that, we were able to push up to 100 a week.
15:51Soon, they upscaled again.
15:53And they were doing so well, they even set up a branch in Japan, which ironically is
15:59where most people thought Atari had come from.
16:01My brother thought I worked for a Japanese company for quite a while.
16:05It is very, very difficult for a Western company to enter the Japanese market.
16:12But they showed up, and they're like, we're Atari!
16:15Come work with us!
16:16We're from America!
16:17Pew!
16:18Pew!
16:19Pew!
16:20And we were ramping up as fast as we could.
16:21And spending lots of money in the process.
16:23And even then, I think that we were still figuring it out as we go along.
16:28But as it happens, other companies were working it out too.
16:32We were heavily copied.
16:34Just like Nolan, who had been, shall we say, inspired by Slug.
16:38It wasn't a very good imitation.
16:40The competition also had been inspired by Atari's computer game.
16:46Everybody is releasing all kinds of Pong clones around the world.
16:50We at Atari managed to build a couple of thousand Pongs, but the competition built 10,000 or
16:57something.
16:58Ridiculous.
16:59Ping Ping Pong.
17:00Paddle Ball.
17:01Ellie Pong.
17:02TV Tennis.
17:03Paddle Battle.
17:04Pongtron.
17:05And let's not forget, Pub Pong.
17:08We did not believe in patents at that point in time, because if you sued them, they would
17:13just go away and reform somewhere else until you'd wasted your money.
17:17But someone who did believe in patents was Ralph Baer and Magnavox, who had not only
17:24made the first home video game console, but also the first patent for a video game.
17:30About that time, we got a letter from Magnavox informing us that we were in violation of
17:36this fundamental patent on video games.
17:39And so, between the copycats and the legal fees.
17:42They had better patent attorneys than we did, I'll tell you that.
17:45We were just totally out of cash.
17:49With Magnavox hot on Atari's heels.
17:51We were just totally out of cash.
17:53Nolan had an idea to bring them back from the brink, by returning to the idea of a home
17:58game console version of Pong.
17:59It was a very, very, very crude prototype, because we didn't have any real money.
18:05But we knew that Sears was a big consumer company.
18:08Get a 100% solid state color TV.
18:11So we cold called Chicago Sears.
18:14You sell ping pong tables and pool tables for rec rooms.
18:18What about Pong?
18:19It was a cold call that quickly turned hot.
18:21It was basically, how much are you going to sell it to us for?
18:24What's it going to cost?
18:25And how many can you make?
18:27And I figured we could build 75,000 of them.
18:29They came back with an order for 150,000.
18:33So now we had this contract from Sears.
18:36And now we solved all the problems except one.
18:39We didn't have enough cash to build the inventory.
18:42I talked to Sears and I said, you know, I can't afford to build that many.
18:46And so they said, I'll introduce you to Sears Bank.
18:51Simple dimple.
18:54We were profitable the minute the units dropped off the line.
18:57It's not just another video game.
18:59It's a real Atari.
19:01At the end of that year, we produced 180,000 Pong games.
19:07Knocked it out of the park.
19:08Pew, pew, pew.
19:09By 1976, Atari was once again making money.
19:13But their ugly ongoing lawsuit with Magnavox.
19:15It's Odyssey, America's favorite home video game.
19:19Was getting in the way of Nolan's future plans.
19:22We were trying to raise another level of venture capital for the Atari 2600.
19:27Ah, the system you want is the Atari 2600.
19:30That's so fast.
19:31Exactly. Not so fast.
19:33Because first, Nolan had some business to attend to.
19:37We had this sort of Damocles hanging over our head.
19:41And so they said, you've got to get rid of that Magnavox problem.
19:45And so I said, to get you off my back,
19:48we settled for half a million dollars,
19:50paid up, 100,000 years for five years.
19:54With the proviso that you have to go after everybody else.
19:57Well, they were happy about that.
19:59So it was bad news for Pug Pong and good news for Atari.
20:03We started to innovate right away.
20:06Who proceeded to develop the Atari 2600.
20:09Simultaneous, the microprocessors were getting better.
20:12Now we could do software in a cartridge.
20:16But what we didn't have is we didn't have enough money.
20:20We get the product all designed,
20:22but, you know, we needed a whole new production line, another facility.
20:26You know, it's just too much.
20:29And so we said, well, maybe we can get a corporate investor.
20:33Well, actually, they got a little bit more than that.
20:36We got introduced to Warner Communications and they were very, very interested.
20:40So interested, in fact, that they wanted to buy the whole company.
20:44Right. The whole company.
20:46Nolan had only needed five million bucks, but instead what he ended up with was
20:51this twenty eight million bucks, life changing cash.
20:55Don't watch television tonight.
20:57Play it.
20:58And all that cash helped Atari launch the 2600 in the fall of 1977.
21:04Attention shoppers, the new Atari cartridge game is in a mighty console
21:09that firmly cemented Atari as the most popular game console company in America.
21:14The Atari 2600 was the first console to actually bring that experience home
21:18and say, hey, you can go out and you can play the arcade games.
21:23If you want to play Asteroids the Arcade, Atari was like, go ahead and do that.
21:26That's our machine. We'll make money on that, too.
21:28But if you buy the cartridge, you can have that same experience at home.
21:33And that was something that video games had never offered before that.
21:36Every time you sell a new cartridge, you've got more capability.
21:39No other company offers you as many different video game cartridges as Atari.
21:44And with this promise, Atari needed game programs
21:47like David Crane, who joined Atari in 1977.
21:51It was a lot more than just programming from the original concept
21:55to every pixel of art, all the sound effects, music
21:57that was all being done by a single person.
21:59Are there single persons who came to work for Atari?
22:02Steve Jobs, he showed up at our place and said, you've got a neat company.
22:06I'm not going to leave until you hire me.
22:08He was young. He was cheap. You're hired.
22:11Atari was on top of the world.
22:13And the days of financial hardship were behind them.
22:16And there was nobody over 30 in the company.
22:19And it's a crazy front end with like a fun house,
22:22people running around the production floor with skateboards.
22:25Nolan was this crazy futurist out there pushing the company.
22:30But when push came to shove, Nolan's new boss
22:32didn't think much of his leadership style.
22:35Warner, they increasingly had more and more friction with the way we did it.
22:41So in 1978, they inserted their own player in the game.
22:45So they hired the antithesis of a Silicon Valley guy, Ray Kassar.
22:50But he knew nothing about startup companies,
22:53knew nothing about the game industry, knew nothing about Silicon Valley.
22:57But Ray did have some skin in the game.
23:00Burlington sells magnificent furs like those you see at the finest furriers.
23:04He would become a vice president at Burlington Industries.
23:08And none of us had any respect for him because, yeah, he was a
23:11fabric guy doing towels and socks.
23:15We had no understanding of why they would hire him.
23:18It was really the wrong guy.
23:21And from the get go, it was crystal clear.
23:24Player one.
23:25I thought Ray was a little too fancy for Atari.
23:29Did not like player two.
23:31Ray and Nolan did not get along well because it was just a whole different culture.
23:35The minute he came in, he had one goal in life to get rid of me.
23:41The staggering success of Atari was unlike anything the world had ever seen.
23:45Let's see what we can come up with next.
23:49But there was more to come.
23:52And lurking in a mysterious, far off land,
23:54something was coming that would swallow the video games industry whole.
24:00So leaving Nolan draped in an awkward shawl of a boss with haberdashery experience.
24:05I was not really happy with Ray.
24:08We now need to turn to the next chapter in this story of the rise of video games
24:13and no video game would climb higher.
24:16Space Invaders.
24:18It wasn't Space Invaders.
24:20And into the zeitgeist of popular culture.
24:23It wasn't Galaxian.
24:24Then this pellet hungry, ghost fearing, expressionless yellow disc named Puckman.
24:30Oh, right.
24:31Puckman.
24:32Puckman.
24:33But it wouldn't stay Puckman for long.
24:36But it wouldn't stay Puckman for long.
24:38And that brings us back to Stan.
24:41My name is Stan Jurocki and I was the VP of marketing at Bally Corporation.
24:47And Stan knew a thing or two about coin ops.
24:50Well, I'll tell you what,
24:52I've been in the coin operated amusement industry for around 50 years.
24:58When I retired 50 years, that makes me an old man.
25:03When you're sorry.
25:05Well, the story of this career starts with Stan being a musical tastemaker.
25:10Where I was selecting music for jukeboxes.
25:12I work in about every damn department in that place.
25:16And I knew the jukebox inside and out.
25:18In fact, anything with a coin slot, including vending, cigarette vending.
25:25And finally, at Bally Midway, video games.
25:29I was asked to join Bally.
25:32Who, with their extensive pinball machine experience, around 1972,
25:36tasked Stan with a rather predictable task.
25:39We were heavily copied.
25:43You guys ought to make a game like Pong.
25:46It's selling like hotcakes.
25:48So that's how I got in the video game business.
25:52But Stan's future involved far more than Pong knockoffs.
25:56And that brings us and Stan, for that matter, to Japan.
26:00Because of my first trip overseas with the secretary of the company,
26:05we went to Japan together and he licensed a game called Space Invaders.
26:11Even the Atari missile game, whatever it was called.
26:15Missile Command.
26:18Wasn't as good as Space Invaders.
26:20In title, Japan's Space Invaders,
26:22now licensed to Bally Midway for American video arcades,
26:27was also the first game to introduce the leaderboard.
26:31And what made that game money?
26:33If I asked you, could you give me the answer?
26:36Get your name on the board and you played it until you beat the guy on top.
26:42That to me was one of the great innovations in video games.
26:47And so with Space Invaders,
26:48Midway was on the bitmap and Stan would often return to Japan looking for their next big hit.
26:54He had a regular trip to look for new ideas.
26:59The Japan trips were special because it was a different culture.
27:03He had a good eye for that.
27:05And Jim should know, because not only was he advertising a sales promotion manager
27:10at Midway, he is also Stan's son.
27:13And in late 1979, on one of those Japan trips,
27:17Stan scored a meeting in Tokyo with a couple of bigwigs
27:20and an up and coming company called Namco.
27:22Namco was one of the companies that actually pioneered the amusement business.
27:27They were very successful making kiddie
27:29rides with Disney characters and other fun things.
27:32And of course, when video games started, they wanted in on the ground floor.
27:36And one of the ways they did was by acquiring the Japanese arm of a struggling
27:41American company who, as you might remember, had come in,
27:45guns a-blazing to the Japanese market.
27:47We're Atari. Come work with us.
27:49We're from America. Pew, pew, pew.
27:51However, as you might also remember at the time,
27:54had found themselves in a financially calamitous situation
27:58with Magnavox hot on their heels.
28:00We were just totally out of cash.
28:03And after a little while, Atari ended up selling it all to Namco.
28:07Simple dimple.
28:08Giving Namco instant ownership of a vast library of games that they could sell,
28:13but only in Japan.
28:15Namco, being a Japanese company, had a presence in Japan,
28:18but didn't have a presence outside of the country.
28:21But this was something that Namco was hoping to change.
28:24So they hired young game designer Toru Iwatani,
28:27who created Namco's very first original game title called GB,
28:31along with artist and character designer Tadashi Yamashita.
28:37For you,
28:38I was requested to design for this game.
28:42So I created the character and the art on the cabinet.
28:46For GB, I designed the bees on the cabinet side panel.
28:49And for Bambi,
28:51I designed the character on the cabinet in the plane dropping the bombs.
28:55But it was Namco's next game that Toru Iwatani and Tadashi Yamashita collaborated
28:59on that would take the idea of characters in games to the next level.
29:04You know, Toru Iwatani saw that men and women were visiting the video arcade
29:09together, but fundamentally sort of the men were playing the games.
29:13These games emphasize power, aggression, macho and manipulation.
29:18And he's like, well, these girls are in the video arcade.
29:21They're standing around like they're not actually playing.
29:24Like, wouldn't it make a bunch of money
29:25if we could get something that they would play as well?
29:27And so he was like, well, let's think about something that could be
29:30attractive that might get a girl in a Japanese arcade to say, oh, that's cute.
29:38In 1979, I was shown a game by Mr.
29:41Iwatani and I actually played the game and he requested me to design for the game.
29:46And that game was Puckman.
29:53Character designer Tadashi Yamashita
29:55was about to start working on a rather interesting project.
30:02The name Puckman comes from Paku Paku,
30:04which is an onomatopoeia for gobble gobble in Japanese.
30:08But when it came to making Puckman cute, Tadashi Yamashita had his work cut out.
30:16It's just a moving head.
30:19I mean, a character like that, it looks like a cut off head moving.
30:22It's kind of disgusting.
30:27So for the visual, adding arms and legs
30:29on Pac-Man, it gives him more human like features and he's more expressive.
30:33And most importantly, cute.
30:35And when Stan saw Puckman at that fateful
30:38meeting with Namco, well, he thought Puckman was more than cute.
30:42And why was Puckman so great?
30:45Because virtually every other video game, there was blood and thunder.
30:51Agree? You know that.
30:53There was never a game that was introduced that would invite
30:59female players to play the game of any age.
31:05Woman would never go in an arcade by herself.
31:08And that sold me on the game.
31:12Stan knew he had a hit on his hands
31:13and rushed the game back to Bally Midway headquarters.
31:16The first thing I get chewed out by the chairman of the board.
31:23Why did you buy that?
31:27And everybody said, no, we really don't want that game.
31:30We want a racing game or we want this clown on a unicycle game.
31:35But Stan said, no, this is the game.
31:38When you conquer this game, you really come away satisfied.
31:41And he basically bet his job on it with his job on the line.
31:45Pressure was on for Stan.
31:46It had to be Americanized.
31:48Puckman was one F away from being a very
31:51different name that teenagers would have had a field day spray painting.
31:56All I knew is I couldn't have been on the streets in America.
32:02And with the flip of a letter, Puckman changed to Pac-Man.
32:07And when Pac-Man was released in October
32:09of 1980, it was an instant hit.
32:14And Stan's job was well and truly secured.
32:16Briefs inside of regulation.
32:22Pac-Man, Pac-Man,
32:23Midway Manufacturing feverishly turning out three hundred fifty Pac-Man games
32:28every day. Young people, old people, men, women, grandmas.
32:32Don't forget the junks in the bar.
32:34Everybody was walking up and playing the same was in continuous use.
32:38Pac-Man made an awful lot of money.
32:40Make your head spin.
32:42Our company was making over twelve hundred video games a day.
32:48That was more than the industry on a whole was making in a week.
32:53And despite what the song implied,
33:01no one was sick of Pac-Man.
33:03This yellow, nondescript collection
33:05of pixels was able to jump out of the screen and into popular culture.
33:09And it wasn't just by chance.
33:11Pac-Man was the first game that really had story and characters.
33:16Ever heard of Miss Pac-Man and Mr.
33:19Pac-Man? Of course.
33:21Can you think of any character that Atari did?
33:24No. And that's because the characters are
33:27cute and we can thank Tadashi Yamashita for that.
33:30I heard from many sources Pac-Man was doing well.
33:38And back then, the US was leading when it came to all these games
33:42and it exceeded America's game.
33:44Now it's Japan's turn.
33:49Overnight, Pac-Man became an unstoppable
33:52merchandising juggernaut,
33:55spawning countless arcade sequels
33:58and even its own cartoon.
34:00What a time to be caught without my power pellets.
34:03I went to Hanna-Barbera and we struck a deal just like that.
34:07When you get to do your own animated TV show, you're beyond video games.
34:13Pac-Man enjoyed staggering success in 1981 and 1982.
34:17But then, by 1983, for Pac-Man and the entire video game industry,
34:23things began to change.
34:24Play them for fun, but invest in them at your own risk.
34:28Doctors are starting to see our Space
34:31Invaders elbow, Defender wrist and Pac-Man pinky.
34:34These are really coming into medical offices.
34:36And be it these chronic debilitating elements.
34:39We call them the side effects of high tech wreck.
34:42Or the saturated video game market.
34:44The industry was quite literally running out of quarters.
34:50How long will this smashing success last for video games?
34:55By 1983, the entire video game industry was in trouble.
34:59The market was getting hyper saturated.
35:03American companies very often just machine gun spray the market with products.
35:08Because if I put out 50 products and I only need 25 to hit,
35:11if I can get 50 or 60 of those hundred, then I make money.
35:15Now you can bring the arcade experience home.
35:17We're in television 2. Emerson Arcadia 2001.
35:21You have companies that have nothing to do
35:23with video games, forming video game divisions.
35:25Everybody wanted a piece of that big pie.
35:28And there were some real turkeys out there and it was a nightmare.
35:31Today it was announced that Quaker Oats is entering the video game business.
35:36No, don't talk about that.
35:38It was that bad.
35:41You had these giant releases that were hyped like E.T.
35:44E.T.?
35:46That was so bad.
35:48Stores were getting stuck with inventory they couldn't sell.
35:51And on top of all that, computers were coming.
35:54IBM Personal Computer.
35:57This is a Commodore home computer system.
35:59Macintosh.
36:00And not even Pac-Man could outrun those.
36:03The operators were not buying as much new equipment.
36:06We were saturated in Pac-Man and Ms.
36:08Pac-Man for sure. Which at Bally Midway presented Stan
36:11and his son Jim with a difficult decision.
36:14My dad brought me into his office and he said, I hate to do this,
36:19but I don't want anybody thinking
36:22that I have any favoritism at all in this company.
36:25So you're going to be the first one out the door.
36:29It was tough for me, but it was the right thing to do.
36:32But it wasn't just Jim who lost his job.
36:34The whole industry pretty much collapsed.
36:37For the fabric man who presided over Atari,
36:39it was curtains for him as well.
36:42Atari never got the message.
36:43What happened virtually overnight, more than 6,000 people lost their jobs.
36:47The company collapsed.
36:48Leaving Nolan, Al and the guys scrambling to hold on to their jobs.
36:53Well, actually.
36:54Well, actually,
36:56Nolan decided to jump ship when he saw that the writing was on the wall.
37:01I said, I don't want to be presiding
37:05over the corpse of Atari because of you bozos.
37:08And you don't say that to the executives of Warner.
37:13But they said, you know, I think
37:16I think you need to leave, Nolan.
37:17And I said, I think I do.
37:19So Nolan left Atari and took with him a small fragment of the company
37:24that he then transformed into every kid's coin operated paradise.
37:28Arcade favorites like skeeball and kiddie rides.
37:31Chuck E. Cheese.
37:32Can't say it without smiling.
37:35Done.
37:37And as for these guys, they also saw the writing on the wall
37:40and fled the sinking ship long before Atari went under.
37:43The four of us had a meeting with Ray Kassar in 1979 and pointed out
37:48that we had been responsible for 60 percent of Atari's sales in the previous
37:52year by creating games that people wanted to play and buy.
37:56And to him, it was a corporate product, not a creative product.
38:02Ray Kassar told us that we were not important.
38:04You're just a bunch of high strung
38:06freebie diners, you know, a dime a dozen.
38:08That was obviously a strange position to take.
38:11I realized how ridiculous Ray Kassar was
38:14and I realized I couldn't work for him anymore.
38:16And we walked out of that meeting knowing that our future was not at Atari.
38:21Well, their future was creating Activision,
38:23bringing you the most creative and original home video games.
38:27But that's another story.
38:29The Atari 5200 Super System.
38:31After the early exit of Atari's best people, followed by the crash of 83,
38:37the company did limp on with failure after failure.
38:41Jaguar by Atari until finally closing its doors for good in 1992.
38:48And as for the great Stan Jaraki, I'll tell you what, I did my duty.
38:53We made money very successful.
38:55I had a great family backing me up
38:58and my lovely wife and she could show her face.
39:01He's a pretty humble guy.
39:03He doesn't need people fawning over him.
39:05He knew what he did.
39:06I was there. I did my part.
39:08But Stan is the guy.
39:10But sadly for the man who brought Pac-Man to the world,
39:14Stan passed away in May of 2024, just weeks before his 95th birthday
39:20and mere weeks after this interview was shot.
39:22He's probably the coolest guy I ever met.
39:24You know, nobody ever handed him anything.
39:27He worked hard for everything he got.
39:29And probably that's one of the lessons
39:32that I love the most about him, because he taught that to me.
39:35And I'm very proud of him.
39:38I'm very proud of our family.
39:40And I wouldn't have I wouldn't have another dad.
39:43He's the best ever.
39:45Are you kidding me?
39:46I'm the biggest pain in the butt you've ever seen.
39:51But the story of video games,
39:53as sprawling as it is, all started in a lab, which means
39:58we finally wormed our way back to slug.
40:02And here at the Computer History Museum near Silicon Valley,
40:06the great creator is reunited with the video game that started it all.
40:13Space War.
40:19We still play the 60 year old release,
40:22it's because it still works, and I'm sure there are bugs lurking in it.
40:28But they are easily discoverable.
40:31Slug's bugless masterpiece was not only
40:34the first computer game, it was the first computer game people enjoyed.
40:40My timing is off.
40:41Well, when it came to making money
40:43from Space War, Slug's timing was definitely off.
40:47And I knew the minute I saw Space War that it would make money.
40:51But Space War couldn't have been protected in any way.
40:55You couldn't patent software.
40:56You couldn't copyright software.
40:59Yeah, got me again.
41:01It was try something and see if you can improve it.
41:04Don't attempt to exclude people.
41:06In other words, the open source idea, the results are frequently interesting.
41:12Nothing more so than the incredible story Space War began all those years ago.
41:18Oh, this is a very bad sport.
41:20But the game of home console isn't over.
41:23And if you thought the liberal reuse
41:25of other people's ideas in this story was morally dubious.
41:29Isn't that a fun story?
41:32Then just wait when we start playing with power.