Name: 雅達利和電子遊戲業務。Crash Course Games #4 (Atari and the Business of Video Games: Crash Course Games #4)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:08:48.000Z
Duration: 10 min 19 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

Hi, I’m Andre Meadows, this is Crash Course Games, and today we’re going to get down to business.

情態副詞

Specifically, the business of video games.

基礎被動語態

Until the 1970s, computer and video games were created by individuals with access to expensive,

difficult to use computers that were frequently housed in institutions like universities.

The general public wasn’t playing video games, and the number of people making games was miniscule.

But there was a community of students and academics who did play early video games on university computers,

and some of them envisioned a world where video games could reach a wide audience,

and at the same time be very, very profitable.

Now, if you’ve seen any of our Crash Course History series, you know we usually don’t

go in for so-called “great man” history.

The idea that individuals can shift the course of history is, in most cases, false.

But, in the case of Video Game history, a guy named Nolan Bushnell really did manage to change everything.

Nolan Bushnell got interested in computers in the 1960s while he was a student at the University of Utah.

The school was an important center of computer graphics research at the time,

and while Bushnell was there, he came across a PDP-1 that played Steve “Slug” Russell’s Spacewar! (exclamation point)

Bushnell loved the game, and he loved working with the computers that ran the game.

He played Spacewar! a lot so he could learn all he could about computers and programming languages.

Incidentally, Bushnell also worked as a barker on the midway at an amusement park,

where his job was to convince people to spend their money on playing games like the ring toss.

It was his amusement park experience coupled with his knowledge of technology

After college he created a prototype for his own game called Computer Space,

which shared a lot of gameplay similarities with our old favorite, Spacewar! (exclamation point)

Bushnell partnered with Nutting & Associates, a company that manufactured coin operated bar trivia games,

to produce a commercial version of Computer Space. It didn’t go that great.

Although they put the game in an amazing looking space age fiberglass cabinet,

they only only sold around 1000 copies of the game.

That’s less copies than Wii music. If you don’t know what Wii Music is, my point exactly.

Bushnell squarely blamed Computer Space’s failure on Nutting & Associated, and decided to form his own company.

He and a partner came up with the princely sum of $500, and after trying out the name

It has the distinction of being hard to pronounce AND spell.

He named the company Atari instead. Thank goodness.

They took the name from the ancient Japanese strategy game, Go.

Apparently, the word Atari refers to a situation where one player’s piece is in danger of

Some players would speak the word aloud at this point, kind of like saying “check” during a chess game.

It turns out though, actually saying Atari during a game is considered kind of rude,

and something an inexperienced player would do; something that would be frowned on by the 'real' players.

How rude. That’s kind of fitting, though.

As we’ll see here in a minute, Nolan Bushnell’s Atari was definitely a newcomer in the entertainment industry,

and he wasn’t above being rude, and disrupting the traditional players in the game.

Atari moved into a small warehouse, and hired a handful of employees.

One of these employees would turn out to be a crucial early asset to the company.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble. Al Alcorn was an early hire.

He was a computer scientist and mechanical engineer,

and Bushnell tasked him with creating Atari’s first game.

While Bushnell was enthusiastic about computers and electronics,

he needed someone with more engineering experience to design the games.

Bushnell assigned Alcorn to create a table tennis simulation, and in a week and a half,

Alcorn delivered a hand-wired version of the game that became Pong.

The game was rough and incomplete and seemingly built with stuff from around the house.

The onscreen white bars that represented players’ paddles were placeholders,

intended to be replaced with fancy graphics that looked like human players.

The cabinet was cobbled together out of spare parts, with an off the shelf TV for a monitor,

Bushnell, foreshadowing a habit of rushing products to market, thought all those half-measures were just fine,

and they installed the game in a local bar for playtesting. It was an immediate success.

According to video game historian David Ellis, the bar started attracting patrons who only wanted to play Pong.

The game was so popular that at one point the prototype machine stopped working because

there were too many quarters in the bread pan.

Atari moved Pong into mass production, and despite some manufacturing hiccups, the game was a success.

Within a year of Pong’s release other major gaming companies in the US began making knock-offs of it.

Companies that had built their businesses on carnival games and electro mechanical games like pinball machines,

and that dumb skill claw game, suddenly jumped into the video game business.

Williams had Paddle Ball, Chicago Coin had Olympic TV Hockey, Sega had Hockey TV,

Taito had Pro Hockey, and Brunswick had Astro Hockey.

All of these looked and played like Pong, and these clones cut into Atari’s business.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So how did this happen?

Well, according to video game historian Steven Kent, the company failed to apply for patents before releasing the game,

which allowed competitors to enter the market with very similar games.

In addition to stiff competition, Atari ran into trouble with distributors of coin-operated games.

At the time, the industry was controlled only a handful of game distributors in each region of the country,

and each of these distributors wanted an exclusive contract to sell Atari products in their area.

Bushnell wanted to sell games to all the distributors, but Atari had already signed a bunch of these contracts.

So, in a move that some might see unethical, he hired his neighbor to run a new company,

Kee Games, which produced clones of Atari games with different names.

This allowed Bushnell to sell Atari game machines to one distributor and Kee games to another,

increasing sales without violating his contracts.

Eventually this deception was found out, but luckily, by that time Atari’s games were so popular,

and generated so much money for distributors that they overlooked the contract violations.

This was the beginning of the end for the exclusive distribution contract,

and it paved the way for Arcade games to become national hits, rather than regional phenomena.

For much of the 1970’s, Atari continued to produce hit after hit for the coin-operated game industry.

In 1974 they created Gotcha, an early maze game like Pac-man.

And Atari struck gold in 1976 with a variant of Pong called Breakout. OK. It’s time to LEVEL UP.

So this is Breakout which is really cool to play.

Hopefully, I’m better at this than I was at Spacewar!

As you can see this is the Atari 2600 home version of Breakout not the arcade version.

And I’m playing it on a Ouya controller so if I don’t do well I’m going to blame the controller.

I would be much better if I had the Atari controller in my hand. Let’s go with that.

Alright here we go, so you have a paddle at the bottom and eventually you will start the game.

And when you start the game a little ball or block comes down. Oh, and I already missed it.

Now what’s interesting about this game is the story behind it.

You see Nolan Bushnell asked an employee to specifically make this game,

that employee that he asked, was this guy, you might have heard of him, his name is Steve Jobs.

So Steve actually asked his friend, to help him do this game.

His friend being Steve Wozniak - some good company to have.