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Woz Talks About His Gaming Past

Posted by Zonk on from the world-of-wozcraft dept.

Gamasutra has up a rare article with founding Apple visionary Steve Wozniak about his love of games, and his history with the medium. The article discusses Woz's prototype for the title Breakout prior to his involvement with Apple, the gaming habits of Steve Jobs, and the influence that videogames have had on the personal computing industry. " The reason Atari wanted me to design [Breakout] is they were tired of their games taking 150, 200 chips, and they knew I designed things with very few chips, so we had incentives for getting it under 50 or under 40 chips. That was my forte. Now I designed it, but it was... To save parts, I'll make no part go to waste and have tricky little designs that are hard for just a simple engineer to follow. Once you understand it, it's very easy because there's so few parts, it's easier to understand. But they had trouble understanding it."

2 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. understanding by Joseph_Daniel_Zukige · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    "That's where I stopped reading."

    Yeah, and that's why you fail to understand yourself.

  2. Whining? by Joseph_Daniel_Zukige · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You talk about whining, I just had to try to help my daughter try to figure out why she didn't want to take the trash out.

    You didn't provide links. That's no sin, but the searches I did that day didn't seem to produce the tools that run under Linux. I can't say why, because when I search now I see lots of stuff that appears to run under Linux.

    But that day, I ended up at atmel's site, and the only thing I saw in about fifteen minutes of searching that site was stuff like

            http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=2725

    I didn't even see a nod to free-as-in-freedom software. Sure, I could tell from other pages that they use GCC, but that doesn't mean anything. Lots of companies use GCC under MSWindows in ways that are compatible with the letter of the GPL but don't really give back to the community. Some even deliberately make it hard to move their stuff to Linux. I've been down those roads before, I don't have time to waste doing that any more.

    Sometimes, being obscure is cool. Sometimes it gets in the way.