Spawn of Atari
Wired magazine, October 1996

The following article appeared in the October 1996 issue of Wired magazine. It reflects on some of the famous and influential people who've been touched by Atari at one time or another.

Spawn of Atari

Before it crashed and burned, Atari created a fertile incubator for some of the sharpest scientists and programmers in the business. Their ripples continue to change the face of personal computing.

By Nick Montfort

In early 1970, Nolan Bushnell envisioned the future of entertainment. He had just built Computer Space, the first videogame, at home, but the fast-talking engineer and entrepreneur had bigger plans. Bushnell wanted to put a big box of circuitry in a nightclub and then offer, for 25 cents, to transport its operators to a land of digital diversions, geometric playing fields, and distant, abstract galaxies where they could blast apart enemy spaceships. There was one problem: Bushnell couldn't persuade the makers of traditional pinball and arcade games to build and distribute his unconventional machines.

Just as IBM severely underestimated the impact of its personal computer, the major industry players couldn't imagine that the ghostly green-on-black diversions would rock society, explode into color, and create an entire new industry. So Bushnell forged ahead, thumbing his nose optimistically at nonbelievers by naming his upstart company Atari, a term from the ancient Japanese board game Go, meaning "Score!"

Within a few years, Atari rocketed to the top of the world. Arcade games like Battlezone and Asteroids gobbled up pocket change at bars and boardwalks, creating a couch-potato habit that was brought into the home as cartridge videogames poured into living rooms worldwide.

To satisfy the desires of a fickle public, Atari created a research lab charged with stretching the creative limits of the medium, hiring the best and the brightest techie minds. Its alumni include innovators in multimedia, virtual reality, interface design, voice recognition, networking, educational software, natural-language computing, digital video, and object-oriented programming. At its peak, a US$500 investment made by Bushnell and co-founder Ted Dabney had created a $452 million company.

Then Atari succumbed to the same short attention span that some said its repetitive games induced. Consumers lost interest in Atari products and sales plunged. The company laid off thousands, bulldozed mountains of cartridge games into landfills, and reshaped itself into a computer-hardware company. A former competitor bought the company and tried unsuccessfully to recreate its glory days with the 64-bit Jaguar game machine. Ultimately, however, Atari sank beneath the waves as a partner of a hard-disk maker.

In less than a decade, the company went from a small group of assembly-line hippies and curious electrical engineers to the driving force in two billion-dollar markets: arcade videogames and digital home-entertainment. Atari's glory days may be a dim memory. But as the following chart indicates, its many talented veterans guarantee that its influence will continue to ripple through the computer industry long after the company's big splash is over.

Al Alcorn
Hired in 1972 as Atari's first full-time employee, Alcorn built Pong, the first commercial videogame. He headed engineering and R&D groups at Atari throughout the 1970s. Late in the decade, he even helped develop Cosmos, a holographic game. It never reached production, but the technology spawned holographic security labels on credit cards and CDs. Left Atari after Warner took control. Worked for Digital F/X and spent many years as a fellow at Apple (along with another Atari alumnus, Alan Kay) researching advanced hardware technologies. Is now senior VP and chief technology officer for Saratoga, California-based Silicon Gaming.

Jay Miner (1932-1994)
The father of the Amiga personal computer. After heading the chip design for the Atari 2600 game system and the Atari 400 and 800 computers, Miner tried to convince Atari to build a machine based on Motorola's 68000 chip. The company wouldn't, because of the high cost of the processor and the additional R&D costs required, so Miner quit in 1982 and later founded Amiga. Two years later, Commodore acquired the company. At Amiga, Miner created the first multimedia personal computer, the Amiga 1000, released in 1985. This machine offered stereo sound, a 4,096-color display, TV/VCR output, and advanced speech capabilities. Although Commodore folded in 1994, VIScorp purchased the rights to Amiga's computers this year and is using the technology to build a set-top box.

Scott Fisher
Studied at MIT under Nicholas Negroponte before working on display technologies for the Atari lab under Alan Kay. Fisher worked on developing early virtual reality technologies there, laying the groundwork for the Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project he founded at NASA in 1985. VIEW drove VR development by helping create head-mounted displays and glove-input devices. Now heads Portola Valley, California-based Telepresence, which designs virtual environments and enables operators to view remote situations and control systems from afar.

Brenda Laurel
Came to Atari in 1979 with a background in theater. Her PhD dissertation in theater theory and criticism, finished in 1986 after she explored human-computer interaction and virtual reality technologies at Kay's lab, is titled "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System." She has written extensively about interface design, suggesting models based on drama to explore the relationship between people and computers. Since 1992 she has worked at Interval Research Corporation, a Paul Allen company in Palo Alto, California.

Alan Kay
Instrumental in developing many fundamental elements of the personal and notebook computers. As a student at the University of Utah in the late 1960s, he built the first object-oriented and graphics-capable personal computer. Most famously, he was a founder of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he headed a group that pioneered overlapping windows, client-server network computing, Ethernet, laser printing, and object-oriented programming. As head of Atari Research Center, he explored early virtual reality technology for use in videogaming. Left Atari in 1984. Now an Apple Fellow, applying high tech to education.

Skip Paul
Perhaps the only prominent figure in the videogame industry to have clerked for the US Supreme Court. Paul moved from a successful law practice in San Francisco into a position as senior vice president and general counsel for Atari in 1979. In 1983, he was appointed to head the company's coin-op division. Went on to become executive vice president of MCA Inc. in 1985. He now heads Sega GameWorks, a major interactive-entertainment joint venture between MCA, DreamWorks, and Sega. GameWorks runs several entertainment centers, including Virtualand in Las Vegas, Sega Innoventions at Walt Disney World Epcot '96, and Sega Cities in Toronto, Indianapolis, Austin, and Irvine, California.

Jack Tramiel
Survived the horrors of Auschwitz as a child. Later moved to the US and founded Commodore as a typewriter repair service in New York in 1954. In 1979, Tramiel entered the personal computer market with one of the first low-cost PCs, the PET. He drove the success of Commodore and cultivated the market for low-cost PCs with models like the VIC 20 and the Commodore 64. In 1984, he sold Commodore and purchased struggling Atari from Warner, naming his son Sam chief operating officer and giving his other two sons executive positions. With the merger of Atari and JTS, he gave up his position as chair and took a seat on the board of the merged company.

Jeff Minter
The last great Atari cartridge programmer. The gregarious Minter is called "The Yak." In 1982, he founded Llamasoft in Britain. First product for the Commodore VIC 20 computer was Andes Attack, a game like Defender but with players rescuing llamas instead of humanoids. Moved to the US in early 1990s and began developing for Atari's Jaguar. His programming credits include the funky Tempest 2000 and the Jaguar CD, the '90s answer to Atari Video Music. Quit Atari in 1995 after completing Defender 2000, but another Yak attack is in store: he is working in California with VM Labs, creating a multimedia processor called Merlin.

Nick Montfort (nm@cyborganic.net) studies at MIT's Media Lab.