In 1969, Bushnell and Ted Dabney, now 75, set up a company, at the time called Syzygy, named for the phenomenon in which the earth, sun, and moon fall in line during an eclipse, to create Computer Space, with $500 placed in Dabney’s bank account. They had met one year earlier, thrown together in a small shared office at Ampex, one of the biggest engineering firms at the time, based in Redwood City, California.

Space in the office was tight, especially when Bushnell, who had reached 6 feet 4 inches by the seventh grade, stretched out his legs. In 1969, Ampex created and maintained the Videofile system, which recorded files and photos to a magnetic videotape system long before the advent of commercial computer hard drives (to this day, Britain’s New Scotland Yard still uses the Videofile system to store perpetrators’ fingerprints).

Bushnell made $12,000 a year as a research design engineer and enjoyed the job, but had long nurtured the idea of a video game arcade — a dream first fostered working summers at the Lagoon, an amusement park north of Salt Lake City. The park, according to a mention in the Beach Boys’ 1965 album filler, “Salt Lake City,” was “full of all kinds of girls/and rides, and we'll be flyin’ there soon, now.” (The lyrics were more likely Mike Love’s doing than Brian Wilson’s). But full of arcade machines it was not — at least yet. “There was pinball, knocking down bottles to win a stuffed animal, things like that,” Bushnell says dismissively. “I knew at the age of 22 that if there was a video game there, it’d earn a lot of money.”

There were such things as video games, but in a form totally unrecognizable today. Bored computer engineers and military polymaths used spare computer time and processing power to code rudimentary games, but they were purely for their own entertainment. To get near them you needed privileged access to a computer lab at a high-ranking university — or the gumption to worm your way into one.

Bushnell spent most of 1964 and 1965 in the lab at the University of Utah, playing a program called Spacewar!, an intergalactic battle game written by MIT student Steve Russell in 1962. I ask Bushnell if he encountered the game through a school computer club. “Not at all,” he says. “It was a fraternity brother and myself sneaking into the lab late at night.” Spacewar! stuck with Bushnell: With a few tweaks, and placed inside a coin-operated arcade cabinet, it became Computer Space.

In spite of the cramped Ampex office, Bushnell and Dabney became close when Bushnell asked Dabney to learn the Japanese board game Go so he would have a playing partner. “We’d only play at lunch,” Bushnell says — the idea of goofing off during the day was anathema to him. The duo graduated from a cheap and flimsy board to one handcrafted from a $6 offcut.

"I carved it out of an inch-and-a-half-thick board and put a Videofile logo on the other side so it could hang on the wall," Dabney recalls. When the two played, the board sat on top of a trash can, a coincidental foreshadowing of the future: The original Pong prototype in Andy Capp’s would sit squat on top of a barrel, people huddled around it.

Go was useful in another way as the two young men left Ampex to eventually launch their video game venture: When the local authorities told Bushnell and Dabney that a roofing contractor had already claimed the nerd-friendly sobriquet Sygyzy, they used a term from Go that was equivalent to chess’s “check” for their newly incorporated company: アタリ. Anglicized, that spells Atari.

After Bushnell and Dabney left Ampex, many of their colleagues thought they were crazy. “I felt kind of sorry for Nolan and Ted,” says engineer Al Alcorn, who would shortly join them. “They were quitting a good career at Ampex to go off and do this strange thing. That was the conventional wisdom: Where did these guys go wrong?”