About 18 miles outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, a group of young men are gathered around a tall white cabinet. Their polo shirts are tucked into their slacks, and their hair is short. The cabinet has a steering wheel attached to its front. One of the men is stomping on the accelerator pedal at its base while his friends cheer him on. The screen – tucked behind Plexiglass in the back of the cabinet – shows the same looping footage over and over: a racetrack with yellow and blue cars on it. The arcade game is practically shaking as the real motor inside it hums.
As the player turns the wheel, a red model race car moves in front of the screen. Above his head, an analogue clock counts down the time left in his game. A counter beside it ticks by with every second, adding “miles” to his score with each turn of the track. It moves with an audible click click click. He’s on track to beat his friend’s high score – until a turn in the wrong direction puts his red car directly over one of the yellow ones.
Red lights above the screen turn on. “ACCIDENT”, they say in all caps. The engine clicks and the counter stops. The player’s red race car freezes. “STAND BY”, says the light under the timer. With another click, the motor kicks in again and the green light turns back on.
“GO.”
The player locks in, leaning forward and pumping the accelerator until he finds his rhythm again. The counter starts to pick up speed – but the timer finally runs out. The screen clicks off, and the player looks up. His final score: 530 miles. He cusses and kicks the box. His friend laughs and reaches for another dime.
The games department at Lagoon Amusement Park had dozens of these electromechanical arcade games. But Speedway was always the most popular. And it was the one Nolan Bushnell would remember best.
When Nolan – an electrical engineering student at University of Utah – first started working at Lagoon, he was running the classic “Spill the Milk” carnival game at the park. Minimum wage at the time was a dollar an hour. If Nolan’s booth met quota, he made an extra 25 cents. If he exceeded quota, he got 10 percent of everything he exceeded.
Nolan started modifying every game in the park.
Over-and-Under went from six balls down to four. A baseball game went from nine runs to win down to six. He replaced the “old pudgy guy” sitting in the Guess Your Weight booth with hot girls – sometimes, up to six at a time. It became a top earner overnight.
Soon, Nolan was averaging an hourly wage of $2.25 every shift. He eventually became a manager with 150 reports – many of them high school students.
Games were a regular part of Nolan’s life. When he wasn’t working at Lagoon, he was playing games on the computers in the university’s labs at night – and imagining a world where they had coin slots on their sides. He spent his childhood playing Sorry and Monopoly and Rummy with his sisters. He was the second-best player in the University of Utah Chess Club.
It was the best player in the club who introduced Nolan to the board game Go.
“Want me to show you a better game?” he asked Nolan one day after cornering his king yet again.
“Better game?” Nolan scoffed. “Come on.”
Once they started playing, he was “mesmerized”.
Nolan checked out every book at the library on the subject. His wife bought him a Go board for Christmas that year, and he played it with anyone who was willing – and maybe a few neighbors who were a little bit less than willing. Like most things in his life, Nolan learned everything he could about the subject and became an expert overnight. He learned the names for all the moves in Japanese and started quoting from Go Proverbs – “when in doubt, Tenuki”.
Go fascinated Nolan. Its complexity captured his imagination. Here was a game with simple rules and a simple objective – move your stones and take the other guy’s. The execution, however, was far more complicated. He saw Go as an elegant game, a game of balance, where “the best win is by a half a point, not by 100 points”.
Its only flaw, a young Nolan must have thought, was that you couldn’t put a coin slot on the side of the board.
When Nolan finally graduated after seven years of balancing family life, college, and work, he moved to California to find a job in electronics. With his easy grin and shaggy hair, Nolan was a bright-eyed “back mountain carnie” who dreamed of pizza parlors full of arcade games – of a place that combined playing Speedway at the Lagoon Amusement Park with playing video games in the university computer lab. Fortunately for Nolan, one of his colleagues would end up sharing that dream – or would at least be willing to “go along” with it.
Ted Dabney was an easygoing man with glasses, a horseshoe mustache, and a receding hairline. When Nolan asked him to play chess, he agreed. When Nolan wanted someone to play Go with, Ted learned the game and turned out to be worthy competitor. When Nolan wanted to make an arcade video game, Ted kicked his daughter out of her bedroom and started experimenting with a TV set and some diodes.
The idea for Computer Space started – unsurprisingly – with Nolan.
He asked Ted to come with him one afternoon to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to see something “outrageous” – a game running on a computer that had an entire megabyte of memory.
The lab at Stanford had Spacewar!, one of the world’s first computer games. It was designed for two players who would each control a spaceship. The goal was to survive and destroy the other player’s ship, while also conserving your limited supply of weapons and fuel.
“We can get a PDP-8 or a Nova computer,” Nolan told Ted while, presumably, firing torpedoes at his rocket ship. “We could time share this and put coin slots on all these things and make lots of money.”
“Oh,” Ted replied, happy to go along with Nolan’s idea. “Okay.”
Computer Space would debut in 1971 under a partnership with Nutting Associates, an arcade game manufacturer at the time. It was single player instead of two-player, but the objective was basically the same – avoid your enemy’s torpedoes and destroy as many flying saucers as you can. It was sold in futuristic looking blue cabinets with the instructions to play the game printed next to the controls.
Computer Space was the beginning of marketable video games. Spacewar! had always been fun, but it had never been accessible before. Computers at the time were expensive and could rarely be bought “pre-built”. Instead, hobbyists at the time had to build a computer on their own if they wanted one in their garage. Even then, it was far too expensive to buy the kind of computing power you needed to play a game. Spacewar! only existed in labs. As such, it only existed for the academics who had access to those labs.
While Nolan and Ted were trying to solve this problem in Ted’s daughter’s bedroom, two university students down the street were unknowingly working on the same project.
Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck had followed a similar path as Nolan and Ted: they had played Spacewar! at the Stanford AI Lab and were interested in the idea of making a version that anyone could play. When they met Nolan, they were unimpressed with the early version of Computer Space he presented. They thought their two-player version of the game was more faithful to the original and more fun to play. They may have been right – but the two prototypes they created cost them over $60,000 to build (over $450,000 in 2025). The setup at the center of their game was a store bought PDP-11 and a Hewlett-Packard Electrostatic Display.
Nolan initially had the same idea as Bill and Hugh – buy a $4,000 Nova computer, program it to play Spacewar!, and install a coin slot. The reality was more problematic. He and Ted struggled to run the game on their system, and they realized fairly quickly that the unit price would be too expensive anyway. The solution? They designed a custom circuit that’s only function was to run their game software – and it only cost about $100. This required them to develop a simpler version of the game, but the result was much easier to mass produce.
Though the final product sold about 1,000 units, Computer Space was not the run away success Nolan and Ted had been hoping for. Nolan, especially, was disappointed by its reception. He was dissatisfied with his job at Nutting and thought the company could have done more to promote to his game.
But Nolan also had a fatal flaw with the final design. Computer Space was complex. The controls were difficult to master, and the actual gameplay had a steep learning curve. Engineers may have loved his first video arcade game, but Nolan knew it was too complicated for his target audience: tipsy patrons eating pizza at a bar.
Around the same time Computer Space was released, a 16-year-old high school student was sitting in the Stanford University student union building. He was in the area visiting his best friend, a student at the nearby UC Berkeley. The 16-year-old was a bit of a hippy – he wore his hair long, had an interest in Buddhism, and was just getting into LSD. Just a few feet from his favorite desk, two young men were setting up a wooden console against the wall. Its bright blue color and panel of buttons looked like they came from the bridge of the Enterprise.
Bill and Hugh’s Galaxy Game would be popular in the student union building. But it would never be more than a prototype.
It’s not hard to imagine that the 16-year-old and his best friend might have played it once or twice. Unlike Computer Space, Galaxy Game was designed for two people to play, and his friend was a big fan of Star Trek. Maybe it was one afternoon – after they had put in a couple dimes and started shooting each other’s spaceships – that his best friend mentioned the project he had been working on: a low-cost digital “blue box” that could manipulate the telephone network and allow for free long-distance calls. The ambitious 16-year-old would suggest they sell them – illegally – and split the profit.
“Oh,” Steve Wozniak might have replied to the young Steve Jobs’ suggestion while piloting his ship closer to the star’s gravity well. “Okay.”
While Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed about the future of personal computers, Nolan and Ted built a two-player version of Computer Space and then cut ties with Nutting. The two had been informally operating as a company they called “Syzygy”, after the term used to describe three or more celestial bodies configured in a straight line. When they tried to incorporate the firm, they found the name was already taken.
Instead, they went with one of Nolan’s ideas: “Atari.”
It was a phrase from Go, used when a player’s stones were in imminent danger of being taken – like being in “check” in a chess game. Though the name wasn’t his first choice, Nolan liked the message it sent. Dominant, aggressive – and victorious.
Years later, Nolan would learn Atari had a second meaning. It was also the word for the jackpot on a Japanese slot machine.
Nolan and Ted quickly recruited Al Alcorn as Atari’s first design engineer. Nolan was dreaming of the jackpot and wanted their first game to be a video version of his beloved Speedway.
But Al had never designed a game before, and Nolan thought a racing game would be out of his reach. He decided to make Al’s first project at Atari a bit simpler.
Nolan had played a demo for the Magnavox Odyssey gaming console at a conference earlier that year. The Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console ever released. By modern standards, it was laughably simple. Once connected to a television set, the Odyssey could only display three square dots and one line on the screen. Players had to rely on plastic overlays to add visual elements and track their scores on a pad of paper.
Instead of Speedway, Nolan asked Al to make an arcade version of Magnavox’s tennis game.
Less than a year after the commercial release of Computer Space, Al had created Pong.
Nolan and Ted were so impressed, they abandoned their Speedway idea all together. They reached out to their friend and business partner, Bill Gaddis, about testing the game. When Nolan and Al arrived at Bill’s bar with their prototype of Pong, he let them set it up next to the jukebox and the pinball machines he had bought through Atari. Nolan and Al carefully balanced Pong on a barrel beside Computer Space and told Bill to call if he had any issues.
That first iteration of Pong was little more than a circuit board and a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television set housed in a store-bought wooden cabinet. Compared to Galaxy Game, this was hardly a video game at all.
It only took three days for the flimsy prototype to begin exhibiting technical issues. Bill called Al and asked him to take a look at it. When Al arrived to inspect the machine, he discovered the problem was with the coin box.
It was so filled with quarters that it had jammed and started overflowing.
The trio knew they had a hit on their hands. Nolan ducked out of talks to manufacture the game with a partner company and secured a loan to invest in an assembly line. Atari would release Pong independently in November of 1972.
Pong became the first commercially successful video game. It consistently earned four times more revenue than other coin-operated machines. At its peak, Atari was manufacturing 150 units a day and had a backlog of orders 1,000 companies long. By the end of 1974, Atari had sold more than 8,000 units of Pong. The 1975 home console version of the game sold 150,000 units during the holiday season that year. It was sold through Sears and was their most successful product at the time. Atari went on to sell an additional 50,000 units of Home Pong.
In 1974, when Pong production was at its peak, that hippy teenager who used to study at Stanford showed up in Atari’s lobby in sandals and disheveled hair and told the personnel director that he wouldn’t leave until he was given a job.
Al came downstairs and invited a young Steve Jobs into his office.
He hired Steve and quickly figured out he was offloading much of his technical work to Steve Wozniak, who was able to reduce the number of chips on a circuit board design from 100 down to 45. Nolan would remember Steve Jobs as “difficult but valuable”. Steve would leave Atari later that same year to travel in India.
In another life, he might have stayed at Atari and joined Nolan in his office for a friendly game of chess.
“Want me to show you a better game?” Nolan would have asked, his hair over his ears and a joint pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Better game?” Steve would scoff. “Come on.”
For the next fifty years, Atari would try to weather the ups and downs of the video game industry it had launched. It would change parent companies multiple times until GT Interactive Software would acquire the rights to the Atari brand in 2001. Nolan and Ted would have a falling out, and Nolan would hire external leadership who had clashing ideas about how to run the company. Nolan would move on and create the video game pizza parlor he had always dreamed of: Pizza Time Theatre, which would later re-brand as Chuck E. Cheese’s.
By 1981, Nolan, Ted, and Al will have left Atari.
Pong is still considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It’s available on most major game consoles, including the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In 2012, the fates aligned for a third time when Atari released an app version of the game for the iPhone.
Nolan attributed Pong’s success to its role as a social lubricant. Unlike Computer Space, the controls for Pong were intuitive and easy to learn – even if you were carrying a slice of pizza in your other hand. The objective was simple, and the mechanics were familiar to anyone who had watched a tennis match before. Pong was accessible to everyone, which made it attractive to anyone. Someone might flirt at a bar by offering up a quarter and asking their partner to play a round or two. Strangers could turn into friends while talking over the quiet pings and beeps of the game.
But there was also room for strategy. The speed and angle of the ball depended on what part of the platform it hit. And surely leaning forward and away from the console made the platform move just that little bit faster – didn’t it?
Nolan’s wisdom would later be summed up by “Bushnell’s Law”, a common axiom cited by video game fanatics everywhere.
“All the best games,” it says. “Are easy to learn and difficult to master.”
Smack dab in the middle of New England, two young women are standing in front of a yellow cabinet. One is in skinny jeans, but the other wears a more fashionable loose t-shirt over her leggings. Each has a phone in her pocket that has more computing power than the Stanford AI Lab did in 1971 and at least a half dozen gaming apps installed. The room is dimly lit with overhead lights that are tinted red. The wall behind them is lined with antique pinball machines. This arcade houses over 600 games, and the room buzzes with overlapping video game sound effects.
Each woman has her hand on a joystick. Their eyes are glued to the black-and-white screen in front of them, and they banter back and forth as they play. A red and white sign hangs from the ceiling above them. The logo drawn on it resembles a mountain.
“No, no, no – no!” The player on the left chants as the circle in front of her bounces towards the upper left corner of the screen. She strains her neck and tightens her grip on the joystick, but her platform moves too slowly. The ball hits the side of the screen, and the other player’s points tick over to 11. The game ends.
She cusses and kicks the box. Her friend laughs and reaches for another quarter.
Rachel M. Beard 
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