David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Or Galaga. It's funny how many early video games were space games because of Spacewar! They were inspired by and derivatives of Spacewar! Of course, what's a really easy graphical game that you could put on a black screen, that you had green little lines that you can manipulate on? Space, there's a lot of black in space. When Nolan sees this, he's like, whoa, holy crap, nobody else who was playing Spacewar! in the entire world or using a PDP-1 has also worked at carnival arcades. Nolan's like, man, this would kill it if I could bring it back to the arcades. Of course, at the time, I think a DEC PDP-1 cost over $100,000, which is over a million dollars today. The idea that you could domesticate this animal, not even bring it into homes, but get the price point down to a point where bars, arcades, or carnivals could afford to buy these things is like no way. Totally. It just literally never pays back when you're thinking about, I don't know if it was nickels or quarters, but whatever you're putting in the arcade machines. It's just never going to pencil.…

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