Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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. When Nolan graduates, he comes out to Proto Silicon Valley, and he gets a job as an engineer at one of the leading companies there at the time, a company called Ampex. Their main market was making tape recorders that were used for movies, television, music, recording industries. But all the time that Nolan's working there, he can't really get both his entrepreneurial, carnival master DNA, and this idea out of his head of, if you could domesticate video games and bring them to the consumer market, they would do really well. Finally, after a couple of years, by 1969, he thinks, thanks to Fairchild, National Semiconductor, and now Intel at this point, silicon has gotten cheap enough that maybe you could do this, basically take Spacewar!, and build a machine cheap enough that you can sell it into arcades and carnivals.…

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