Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thank God it was terrible. Nolan racks his brain and comes up with an alternative idea. He's become a big Go player, and he takes the term Atari from the game of Go, which Atari basically means the equivalent of check in chess in Go. They build a game called Computer Space that's based on Spacewar! This is the first commercialized, programmed video arcade game in history. They put it together, they contract with an arcade distribution firm called Nutting Associates to distribute it. It's okay. It's not really a profitable enterprise yet because the amount of silicon required to run the game—remember, this is coming from cutting edge scientific military use computers—is still enough that it costs too much to make these machines. It's not really economically viable yet. It has another more important problem, though, which is that consumers in America aren't really ready for space games. They haven't yet made the leap to, we're going to live in fantasy worlds, and we could pretend we're piloting a spaceship out in space and blasting enemies. That doesn't compete yet with audiences. Right, it's escapism at its finest. Now we take it for granted that whenever you play a video game, you're entering some escapist fantasy, but that was a brand new novel idea. They get this feedback, Nolan and Ted. They think, all right, we need to make this technology simpler so that it's more affordable and cost-effective. They hire one of their co-workers from Ampex, a guy named Al Alcorn, who's an amazing engineer. One of the themes that's going to come up a bunch in this episode is the mythical 10X, 100X engineer game designer, somebody who can do things that other people can't. Specifically, what was really valued in Silicon Valley and Technology Engineering at this time, was the ability to design systems with the highest amount of functionality with the fewest number of chips, because every chip that you put in there, added a whole lot of cost to the bill of materials.…

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