History page 6

Bushnell and Dabney decided to give the whole video game idea a second try, this time being the sole designer and manufacturer of their game. They left Nutting Associates with the two-player version of Computer Space and embarked on a new project. But in order to do so, they decided on a new name for their company. "Syzygy" (the alignment of three astronomical bodies in a gravitational field) was a nice space-age sounding name but it was hard for people to say or remember and, as it turned out, a candle maker had already incorporated that name. Bushnell turned to a Japanese term used in his favorite board game, Go. In that game, there is a polite warning that you give when you are about to take a number of your opponent’s pieces. The phrase is “Atari.”

Bushnell hired a new engineer, one of his Ampex coworkers, Al Alcorn, to start work on a new game. Bushnell tasked Alcorn with designing a brand new game from scratch and, in order to motivate Alcorn, Bushnell said he had a contract with General Electric to sell the game to. This was untrue, Bushnell was being ever the maverick, but it got Alcorn into thinking about a new game, again using discreet transistor logic. One thing was certain; the game had to be simple. Computer Space had proven that complex games would not be successful, Bushnell emphasized that the first Atari game would need to be accessible to the average person. Keep it simple.

For ideas, Bushnell turned to something he saw the previous month when Nutting Associates sent him on a trip for a special presentation. Something he saw playing on a machine from Magnavox called the Odyssey.

On May 29th, 1972 Magnavox held an exhibit at "The Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlington, CA showing the Odyssey to a collection of industry entrepreneurs and engineers. Nolan Bushnell attended (as evidenced by his signature here in the guest book) .

Bushnell left unimpressed, reporting back that the Odyssey was not very interesting and did not pose any competition to the Syzygy/Nutting creation Computer Space. This seems a valid point, since the Odyssey was aimed at home use and Computer Space was aimed at pinball arcades. One machine cost $100 to take home, the other cost a quarter to play.

However, Bushnell appears to have taken the concept of one of the Odyssey’s games back with him to the newly formed Atari because it is interesting to note that the game Al Alcorn finally created was Pong.