I remember a lot of that art work really well, and I always thought that it played a role in effectively planting an imaginative seed in your mind about what the game represented, which then brought the concepts to life….

I agree, it’s hard to communicate that to people who didn’t grew up with it. The illustrations were a really important part of the gaming experience. It wasn’t like you had Youtube to show you the gameplay. Your first experience was walking into a game store and the art was what you had. It connected you to your gameplay, so you had a much more immersive world because of the art.

It did something that artwork today just does not do, just by virtue of the time and place. It transcended that gap in your imagination. And I think that’s crucial. Part of it is that this is great art which was technically done very well, but another part was that it had a very functional importance in terms of the overall gameplay experience for us.

Early innovators: (from left) Atari co-founders Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell, CFO Fred Marinic, and engineer Allan Alcorn. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

So being here in Silicon Valley, I don’t get the impression that Atari is considered a key pioneer of the tech culture, even though…I think Atari goes back as far as the late 60s?

Yes, it began in the late 60s and early 70s. Both of the co-founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, came from Ampex, which was huge in video and audio equipment. You know…it’s funny, as soon as Atari gets classified as a video game company, for some reason it seems like Silicon Valley and even the design community write it off.

At one point, Atari was the fastest growing company in U.S. history. It was a huge huge deal. And they did some amazing work. And even more so, they kind of started and definitely popularized, what we now think of as Silicon Valley culture: work hard-play hard, beer Fridays, foosball tables, arcade machines. Nolan Bushnell was really a hippy at heart and he wanted to bring this culture of easy going fun, this prototype for what we think of as the stereotypical Silicon Valley startup, with young tech people blowing off steam and doing these crazy things. They invented it.

A Cliff Spohn illustration for an early Apple Computer manual. His artwork was personally commissioned by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

Bushnell seems like this really colorful character, who draws a wide range of opinions on his legacy….

In some circles Nolan gets a bad rep, and some of that is justifiable because he likes to take credit for a lot of things that weren’t necessarily his idea, but at the same time this is a guy who was often just really far ahead of the curve. He started one of the early tech incubators after he left Atari and they were working on computerized color matching and even an early version of GPS for your car. Way way ahead of his time…And sure, he was a shameless self promoter — no doubt about it — but he hired great people, especially creative people, and he got out of their way. He was such a champion for the artists, and you’ve got to give him credit for it.

So if you go back to the earliest days of the company, they are credited with producing the first commercial arcade game…

The game that started it all: PONG. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

That was Nolan and Ted Dabney doing that with another company, Nutting Associates. They created Computer Space. But that was almost like their prototype. Like — ‘will this work?’ It wasn’t a huge success, it definitely wasn’t PONG. But it proved to them that PONG could be done.

Well…it leads to PONG, which is this game-changing moment that video game culture springs from, yet it’s a history that doesn’t often get ascribed to Silicon Valley.

No, it doesn’t, and I can’t quite figure that out. I don’t know if it’s because they weren’t the typical Silicon Valley startup. PONG was sort of the first hit for Atari, and they created some great arcade games, but then they ran into some money trouble and were purchased by Warner. Then they became big and then maybe it was seen as — now they are part of the establishment.

What about the fact that you also have a young Steve Jobs looped into this history?

Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple not long after Jobs left Atari. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

Yeah, I get asked about that a lot. And frankly, Steve Jobs didn’t do a lot. If you ask Al Alcorn, who was the head of engineering at that point, he’ll say point blank — ‘this guy was not an engineer.’ But that’s what he was hired to do. I think Nolan saw a bit of himself in Steve Jobs, and I think if you make that comparison it’s pretty obvious. They both had a visionary aspect to them and they both knew just enough about the technology to know what was a good idea and what wasn’t. But they couldn’t execute those ideas on their own.

There’s the whole story of him working on Breakout, where Jobs said “Oh I can do that,” knowing that he can get Steve Wozniak to come in by saying “Hey Steve, come play free video games.”

And it’s funny, because I think Steve Wozniak has said, “I came in and helped because he let me play the video games as much as I want.” He said he was spending half his salary at the time on quarters playing video games in the arcade. But here, he could come in and play whenever he liked, so that was a real draw.

Early Atari design concepts for arcade game cabinets. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

Well…it’s fascinating in the sense of early Silicon Valley and how the orbits intersect…

I think its most interesting for the things that didn’t happen. When Steve Jobs starts out he didn’t have a large circle of Silicon Valley friends. So he calls up Nolan and says, “Hey, I’m starting this company called Apple.” And he gave Nolan the opportunity to invest in Apple. And I mean — what kind of crazy elseworld story would that be?

What can you compare the advent of the Atari 2600 to? Is it like an iPod kind of moment?

I would compare the 2600 to the iPhone. It was moderately successful at first and people said ‘Ok, its just a phone.’ But what we realize in retrospect, ten years in now, we realize that it’s a complete game-changer and it spawned a new industry, a new way of thinking about stuff and a new way of working.

When you look at Atari, that totally happend. There was no video game industry. The idea that it wasn’t just this business to business thing, where you sold arcade machines to operators who were trying to squeeze profit out of quarters.

Today, a lot has fundamentally changed. The delivery model has changed, technical things have change, but really we’re looking at the same kind of model that Atari started with how the video game industry works: how games are marketed, gamers relationships to them. Atari started something huge, an industry that now makes more money than Hollywood. That’s crazy.

Original console packaging for the Atari Video Computer System. (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

How did the design of the console itself factor into the appeal of Atari?

I was able to track down the industrial designer who designed the console, his name is Fred Thompson. He came from Heath Electronics, who made stereo equipment.

Atari said, ‘Ok, we’re gonna put a video game system in the living room. It needs to not look like a crazy UFO object. It needs to look like something that people don’t have to be scared of, but familiar and nice.’ So you have things like the faux wood grain and these nice industrial metal switches that come from the world of high-end stereo. You have plastic that has a sort of toothy texture to it. These are all things that came from home stereo. They really wanted it to be in that world and be taken seriously and have a touch of the familiar. So it was very interesting talking with Thompson about what they did. Even the size of the cartridge. Atari did not invent the video game cartridge. But it is no accident that it is roughly the shape and size of an 8-track. They were always drawing on familiar things to sell something really nice, and in the end it became pretty iconic.

Why did Atari stand out? There were other home systems at the time.

Cover art for Atari’s “Space Invaders.” (Courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment)

The 2600 wasn’t super successful for almost 2 years. It was an interesting idea but it wasn’t the first, the Magnavox Odyssey was out there. But when Space Invaders came out and was a legitimate craze, Atari had the first killer app. And people wanted that…the game they had to have.

But also, Atari under Warner did everything really well. They were different in that they were really a creative company. They knew had to advertise and how to market. Atari understood they were marketing pop culture.

From a design point of view, how would you characterize the success of the Atari logo?

I think the logo has an interpretive quality. Even back in the early 80s, there were questions, ‘What does it mean? What does it stand for? Is it an A? It kinda looks like Mount Fuji.’ And then George Opperman said in an interview that it was meant to represent Pong, with the two paddles on the side of a centerline and they were bending because there was a ball flying back and forth.

Also they used it really consistently, they used a lot of color and they built a brand identity in a nascent industry. Atari was always at the forefront of building their brand and making. Atari stuff looked differently from everybody else.