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Father of Video Games turning 60
Bill Kendrick writes "Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the "father of video games" will be turning 60 next week, on February 5th.
Along with Atari, which Bushnell began in 1972 (and left before the end of the decade), he
also founded over 20 other companies, including Chuck E. Cheese
Pizza Time Theater restaurants. He holds many patents relating to both
video games and other industries.
For more on The Bringer of Pong, check out some interviews from the San Jose Mercury, Metroactive and over at Good Deal Games, as well as his Wikipedia entry. Happy birthday, Nolan!"
The inventor of pong was Ralph Baer:
http://www.pong-story.com/rhbaer.htm
I know Mr Baer personally, he is a close family friend from Manchester, NH. This story turned my stomach and I am disgusted that slashdot would EVER post such trash without researching a submission like this..
It really isn't about the price you, the gamer, pay for each round of Pac Man or BeatMania. Rather, it's the price the arcades have to pay for each machine.
There is a reason most arcades go out of business within 2 years and it isn't because they don't have enough customers. The machines cost so much that they'd have to raise their prices to a point that customers won't even come in anymore if they want to make a profit.
There used to be a lot of game rooms. Now they are few and far between. OG is right, Bushnell is the prime suspect.
If Marlon Brando were dead, he'd be turning in his grave. The proper quote is, "The horror. The horror."
Was SPACEWAR (this version is via PDP-1 assembler running on a java PDP-1 emulator) written in 1962 by a group calling themselves something like "The Hingham Institute for Space Warfare" the lead programmer was Stephen "Slug" Russell. The program was developed on a PDP-1 computer (the first "minicomputer" which cost 1/10th of other computers of the day (only $100,000)) donated by Digital Equipment Corp. to the students of MIT. More of the history. Steve got to testify on his prior art when Magnavox sued Atari on some related patents.
Recursion: To curse repeatedly.
The inventor of the video game is Steve Russell,
8 .htma r-Arti cle.html
et. al., who wrote the first video game, "Spacewar" on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962.
See: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa09019
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/PDP-1-SpaceW
- Jim
Space War had a high-resolution dot display (not raster pixels, not vectors - dots). You can play it if you download a copy of MESS. It wasn't a prototype or experiment - it was a very popular game, with a tournament league and ongoing development.
Space War wasn't actually the first video game either, though - that's believed to have been a Pong-like game played on an oscilloscope display. The first actual Pong game was Baer's, playable on a TV set with the Odyssey - Bushnell just commissioned an arcade version (from you know who). I'm not particularly sure if Bushnell is the "father" of anything (what's people's obsession with identifying one originator, anyway? Plain old hero worship?), but he obviously did a lot to popularise coinop video games. Mixed blessing though that is. ;)
Nolan Bushnell is a big self-promoter. In public, he presents himself as the father of video games. However, at an informal meeting after one conference, he actually introduced Ralph Baer to a group of friends as "the father of video games." Baer responded "I wish you would have said that in public."
I know not of his endevours with patents/licenses, but I was quite impressed with his Manifesto on Atari's corporate identity.
The points about fairness, customers, and particularly on innovation are something I wish every modern CEO or company official would take to heart, but anymore there doesn't seem to be enough genuine spirit and ideals in american corps.
Nolan didn't run Atari into the ground. Warner Brothers bought Atari and THEY ran it into the ground. They hired an underware salesman to run it, and he got busted insider trading.