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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!"
"... but Al Gore would claim he's the father of that."
I'm a little surprised he was modded as off-topic. I think he was making a humorous allusion to Steve Russell, the guy who created Space War in the 1960's. This site has the info.
He should have gotten modded up, not down. Oh well, I guess not everybody is versed in Video Game History.
It's a little duplicitous to bash patent and copyright owners on the one hand and then kiss their ass on the other.
Bushnell has done nothing but stifle innovation through his ownership of patents. He is widely recognized as a tight-fisted licensor, charging outrageous amounts to use "his" work. If you ever wonder why video games cost so much both at home and in the arcade, look at this asshole.
Happy birthday, Bushnell.
I have been pwned because my
Willy Higinbotham was the creator of the video game. he did it on a oscilloscope and a analog computer in the 50s.
http://www.pong-story.com/inventor.htm
I wrote Go for The Sierra Network, back in the early nineties, and Nolan was a regular player ("atari" is a term from Go).
He liked my version, and came by my desk on a tour of our company to talk to me. But it was 8am and of course I was nowhere near work!
Therefore, I am famous! Or not, yes, upon consideration possibly "not".
Slightly off topic...
The worst thing in that place besides the bad pizza and screaming kids, as someone else mentioned is the parody of rock music culture that goes on there.
They've got and animatronic rock band, headed by the mouse, singing cheezy remade versions of Beatles and Rolling Stones songs. There are album cover parodies on the walls. Abbey Road with 4 mice...Fleetwood Mac's Rumors with mice...The Rolling Stones Tounge coming out of a mouse's mouth.... You get the idea.
It says a lot about how cheezy Chuck E Cheeze stores really are. But I think the interesting part of the story is how these bands/songwriters allow their work to be ripped apart like that. Does Michael Jackson(who owns the beatles catalog), Mick Jagger and Mick Fleetwood need money THAT bably?
Well, at least Mick Jagger doesn't.
Huh?
Now I wasn't really supposed to be in the bar at my age, but my dad would go for an evening cocktail and I would tag along and ask the bartender nicely if I could just hang out by the Pong machine. He usually relented and that was it. I had my own video game before anyone knew what they were!
What great fun that little game was to me! I got really good at it (as kids always do) and would take great delight at setting the paddles just right so the ball would bounce back and forth endlessly. Then I would stand back and admire the way I found just the right touch to beat the alogrithm. It was also fun to see the reaction of adults when they noticed that the game with no one in front of it was in an endless loop on its own. Then I would go back, nudge a paddle, and off we went.
Thank you Nolan Bushnell. You made my summer memorable for more than just the beach and the sun. You opened my eyes to the power of electronics. A career as a programmer later followed.
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The g4 channel on my time warner digital cable has been running a lot of interviews with many old game developers. Short bios in commercial breaks and sometime ful blown shows.
I remember I saw my first Pong machine back in 1977 (I was 8). We were living in a hotel in Germany at Uncle Sam's expense, awaiting some base housing to be freed up. No way was my dad going to ante up quarters for us to play that silly thing. Fortunately, we had other resources ...
This particular Pong machine had a quirk - if you gave it a mild electrical shock to the changer it would give you a credit to play. A static charge did the job nicely.
So there we were - me and my little brother and other kids zipping up and down the carpeted halls of the hotel in our socks, zapping the Pong machine and playing for hours, with one of us always on the lookout to make sure no one from the hotel saw what we were doing. Even back then I was a larcenous little fsck, trying to Scam The System and get stuff for free.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Actually, William Higinbotham invented the videogame while working for Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York in the 1950s. The game he invented was called "Tennis for Two" and was placed on an oscilliscope.
Interestingly, he was brought into the court battle to testify back when Magnavox (Baer's employer) and the rest were fighting over who owned the patent on the videogame. The court found that Mr. Higinbotham invented the videogame, and that since he was an employee of the U.S. Government at the time and did it as part of his job (it was part of the annual "Visitor's Day" exhibit at the Laboratory), the idea of the videogame couldn't be patented and was owned by the public.
-Joe