“We had no money, no factories, no market share. All we could count on was our creativity ”. Nolan Bushnell remember so the birth of Atari in 1972. A year earlier, together with Ted DabneyBushnell had created the first arcade game in history: Computer Space.
At the time their company was still called Syzygy Co. But the two soon realized that someone in California had chosen the same, unlikely name. And so they changed it to Atari exactly fifty years ago.
True, Bushnell and Dabney had no money. Or rather, all they had – the proceeds from the sales of Computer Space – had been invested in Atari and its first, legendary, arcade: Pong. It was a success. And the way it arrived is unbelievable. The young engineer who created that table tennis simulator was called Al Alcorn. And he had never seen a video game in his life. In Alcorn, which Bushnell and Dabney had just hiredhe had been asked to develop something that would test his abilities.
Innovation Almanac – November 29, 1972
Pong is born: it was like the paddle, but inside a cabinet
by Riccardo Luna
They were the seventies. The kids, at home, could count on limited forms of entertainment: a few channels on TV, comics, music and games like Lego bricks. If they wanted to play a video game, they had to fill their pockets with coins and go to the nearest bar.
Atari changed everything. The idea of a console, initially called Stella, materialized in 1977 with the name Atari VCS. But it will go down in history as Atari 2600.
“The Atari 2600 was one of the most memorable gifts I ever received as a child. I was amazed: I could play arcade games at home.” Chris McVeighthe model designer who oversaw the replica – in Lego bricks – of the popular console.
McVeigh is a nostalgic, the perfect man for the new set for sale in the Lego Stores. Until three years ago it was a simple “Lego builder”: he used bricks to create objects related to his adolescence, mostly in the eighties. Computers, portable radios, cameras: Whenever McVeigh put together a model, he jotted down the steps and posted online instructions for copying it. It turned out, of course, that Lego hired him in 2019.
Of all the sets Lego Icons – collection that includes, for example, the replica of the Transformer Optimus Prime and the DeLorean from Back to the Future – theAtari 2600 is perhaps the one that borders on perfection in terms of fidelity to the original. And for this, probably, it appears as the “Lego menus” of all.
Even i due joystick they are identical and move exactly like the originals. The soul of Lego, in this case, is hidden: raising the upper part of the model, in fact, the diorama of an eighties arcadeobviously rebuilt with bricks.
At the heart of the original Atari 2600, on the other hand, was the MOS Technology 6052 drawn by Chuck Peddlethe first 8-bit microprocessor at an affordable cost. To be clear, that’s what allowed the first computers to enter homes. It was used for theApple IIfor example, and for the Commodore 64. The Ram, on the other hand, was barely 128 byteso small as to require a good dose of creativity from those who created video games, as Wired Usa told in a brilliant article on the tricks and gimmicks adopted by the developers in those years.
By the way, in the Lego box of the 2,532-piece set that celebrates the console, and at the same time the 50th anniversary of the historic brand on June 27th, there are also the bricks that are used to assemble cartridges of unforgettable video games: Asteroids, Adventure e Centipede. There isn’t Space Invaderswhich in 1979 had caused a permanent wheelie sales of the console.