Category Archives: Apple

Connecting the Dots: How Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Break Out

After he dropped out of Reed College in Oregon, in 1974 Steve Jobs joined a small tech company by the name of Atari, working at their Los Gatos facility in California. Legend has it that he showed up in their lobby, scruffy and lacking in perfect bodily hygiene, and stated to the receptionist that he wouldn’t be leaving the premises until he got a job. Instead of calling the police, she brought Al Alcorn to talk to him, and was eventually hired. In spite of being brash and over-confident (or perhaps, BECAUSE of those traits), Atari CEO Nolan Bushnell took a liking to young Steve. One day he approached Jobs with a game idea. We break into the TDE archives to continue the story:

In 1976 Nolan Bushnell offers the young Jobs $750 to put together the hardware for Breakout, a variation on PONG designed by the Atari founder, but instead of knocking the ball back and forth the player uses the paddle to send the ball at a wall of bricks across the top of the screen. The game is black and white, utilizing the old pre-1979 chestnut of overlays on the screen to simulate colour. The main mission is to reduce the amount of dedicated chips used in the construction of the game, thereby greatly reducing the cost to mass manufacture it. Bushnell promises Jobs a bonus of $100 for every chip he eliminates from the design. Even though he is not much of an engineer or ace programmer, Jobs promises to finish the game in four days, when a typical game’s development time would be several months. It is his ace-in-the-hole Wozniak who actually builds the machine, spending four consecutive nights assembling the hardware and still holding down his daytime job at Hewlett-Packard. The two meet the four day deadline, with Woz shaving the number of required chips down to 45. Jobs receives his money, and setting the tone for their business relationship, he fails to tell his friend about the now $5000 bonus. He pays Wozniak his share of $375 from the original $750 payment and furthermore takes all the credit when Breakout becomes a hit 15,000 unit seller for Atari. But Woz receives far more than simple currency with his fling with Breakout…for instance, one night as he watches technicians apply the overlays onto the Breakout screen in order to simulate coloured bricks, Woz starts thinking about how he could have a computer generate real colours on the screen. The way his later computer designs would introduce colour to the world of personal computers stems directly from his work on the arcade game, as well as his love for gaming in general. His work with Breakout also gives him a valuable education in logic design and its integration with a TV signal. And he uses his version of BASIC language to manipulate his computer version of Breakout, and is amazed how powerful a tool software is in creating games. Woz’s amazingly tight design for Breakout baffles Atari engineers, and it has to be redesigned with more chips added to actually allow it to be manufactured.

Jobs would later approach Bushnell with the idea of Atari producing a new computer he and Woz had developed, but the Atari boss passed on the offer. Atari would end up competing against that product with their 8-bit 400 and 800 computer lines. Woz and Jobs did just fine with their own computer: the venerable Apple II, by the Apple Computer Company.

For more information on Breakout!, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Connecting the Dots: How Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Break Out

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In 1976 Nolan Bushnell offers the young Jobs $750 to put together the hardware for Breakout, a variation on PONG designed by the Atari founder, but instead of knocking the ball back and forth the player uses the paddle to send the ball at a wall of bricks across the top of the screen. The game is black and white, utilizing the old pre-1979 chestnut of overlays on the screen to simulate colour. The main mission is to reduce the amount of dedicated chips used in the construction of the game, thereby greatly reducing the cost to mass manufacture it. Bushnell promises Jobs a bonus of $100 for every chip he eliminates from the design. Even though he is not much of an engineer or ace programmer, Jobs promises to finish the game in four days, when a typical game’s development time would be several months. It is his ace-in-the-hole Wozniak who actually builds the machine, spending four consecutive nights assembling the hardware and still holding down his daytime job at Hewlett-Packard. The two meet the four day deadline, with Woz shaving the number of required chips down to 45. Jobs receives his money, and setting the tone for their business relationship, he fails to tell his friend about the now $5000 bonus. He pays Wozniak his share of $375 from the original $750 payment and furthermore takes all the credit when Breakout becomes a hit 15,000 unit seller for Atari. But Woz receives far more than simple currency with his fling with Breakout…for instance, one night as he watches technicians apply the overlays onto the Breakout screen in order to simulate coloured bricks, Woz starts thinking about how he could have a computer generate real colours on the screen. The way his later computer designs would introduce colour to the world of personal computers stems directly from his work on the arcade game, as well as his love for gaming in general. His work with Breakout also gives him a valuable education in logic design and its integration with a TV signal. And he uses his version of BASIC language to manipulate his computer version of Breakout, and is amazed how powerful a tool software is in creating games. Woz’s amazingly tight design for Breakout baffles Atari engineers, and it has to be redesigned with more chips added to actually allow it to be manufactured.

For more information on Breakout!, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Breakout: How Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Built a Smash for Atari

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Soon after dropping out of Reed College, in 1974 Steve Jobs became employee #40 at an up-and-coming company in California called Atari. He was a scruffy young man, who’s abrasiveness and questionable personal hygiene led management to put him on the night shift, so as to ruffle as few feathers as possible.

Even so, Jobs still managed to tick off a lot of people at Atari. Possibly seeing a lot of himself in Jobs, company co-founder Nolan Bushnell kept him around regardless. One day in 1976 he approached the young maverick and asked him to put together the hardware for a new variation of the company’s landmark game, PONG. In this new version, instead two players knocking a ball back and forth with paddles, a person could play alone, hitting the ball up against a wall of bricks at the top of the screen. Jobs was offered $750 for the job, with a $100 bonus paid for every microchip shaved off the design, therefore making the game cheaper to build.

It was Job’s friend Steve Wozniak who actually created the design for Breakout, spending four nights putting the game together with Jobs, all the while holding down his daytime job at Hewlett-Packard. The game turned out to be a big hit for Atari, and the two Steves would eventually break out on their own to create a little computer company called Apple Computer. The computer landscape would never look the same again.

For more information on the making of Breakout, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Breakout

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30 years ago, in January of 1984, Steve Jobs and Apple presented the Macintosh computer to an astounded public. Utilizing such exotic technology as a mouse and a 3.5″ floppy drive, the Mac helped transform the personal computer landscape, from arcane commands to easy-to-use point-and-click interfaces. While it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves when first introduced, the Mac design would forever influence how computers were made, sold, and perceived by the public.

10 years before unveiling the Macintosh, Jobs got his start in 1974 as the 40th employee at Atari, as a $5 an hour technician refining the design of video games developed at the company. After returning from India on an Atari service call, in 1976 Jobs was tasked by Nolan Bushnell to build a new game the Atari boss had designed, based on the company’s premiere game PONG. In it, gamers would hit the ball up against a wall of disappearing blocks, as opposed to batting it back and forth with another player. Offering an insane deadline of just four days to get the job done, Jobs enlisted the help of his friend Steve Wozniak to engineer the game. It was called Breakout, and was a major hit for Atari.

An excerpt of a screenshot from Breakout, a video arcade game by Atari.

Breaking Bad

Jobs eventually left Atari, and along with Wozniak founded Apple Computer. With the release of their Apple II computer, they helped establish the personal computer industry. With the release of the Macintosh, Jobs would further popularize and refine computers. As a bombastic carnival barker and charismatic distorter of reality, you can see more than just a bit of Bushnell in the man.

For more information on the history of Breakout, consult your local Dot Eaters article.

Google Celebrates Breakout Anniversary

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It might come as a stinging shock to people that Atari’s Breakout arcade game is 37 years old. Some of the sting might be mitigated, however, by the clever way in which Google has seen fit to pay tribute to the milestone.

Breakout was a clever one-player riff on Atari’s first (and, in fact, the world’s first) mass-produced coin-op video game PONG. Instead of two-people bouncing a little blip of a ball back and forth with paddles, one person could bat the ball with a paddle situated along the bottom of the screen, against a wall of bricks that would shrink in size with each impact. The speed of the ball would increase as the size of the brick wall would decrease, leading to a mad scramble to eliminate the bricks before inevitably missing the ball and losing a life.

The game was conceived by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but actually assembled by an early, vegetarian hippie Atari employee and his nerdly friend. Their names were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

To see Google’s own riff on the concept, just enter Atari Breakout into their image search field. For more history of Breakout, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Hard Wares: Star Wars/Pac-Man iPad Back Cover

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Hey, you got Star Wars in my Pac-Man!

Hey, you got Pac-Man in my Star Wars!

Hey, I have a cool iPad back cover!

iPad cover

You can pick them up at Redbubble. May the force be absorbed by your iPad cover.

Source: a_man_oxford via Reddit

Pinball Resurrected

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Someone who grew up during the birth and golden age of video games would also have to be at least passingly familiar with the electronic pastime it replaced… pinball. In practically every arcade there would be at least a few pinball machines vying for the attention of someone looking for something a bit more physical than Pac-Man. I remember one of the troika of video game palaces here in downtown Toronto being the Pinball Spot. After carefully traversing down the slick-tiled steep and dark stairway, one would be greeted by a huge square basement of video delights, as well as a long line of pinball machines stretched back along the left wall. It was a pinballer’s paradise to be sure.

Hoping to recapture that sultry allure is FarSight Studio’s Pinball Arcade for iOS devices. There is no shortage of pinball game simulations for game devices these days, so how does Pinball Arcade shape up against the competition? PA’s main hook is the painstaking detail that has gone into the recreation of the featured tables. Tales of the Arabian Nights is unlocked when the game is installed, with The Black Hole, Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Theatre of Magic available for paid download in-game. These games range from between $1.99 to $3.99, and you can pick up all three in a pack for $8.99. The app itself is 99 cents. Other classic tables are promised in future updates.

Pinball Arcade, a virtual pinball app for Apple iOS

I thought I was the body table king….

The tables are great to play, lovingly constructed with no detail overlooked. Each table also features a tutorial to take you through the scoring system, as well as an interesting text screen outlining the history of the machine. Problems arise, however, with the game’s physics. Pinball games are the epitome of ‘feel’ in coin-op amusement. How the ball interacts with the flippers, the speed it travels around the board, and the player’s ability to influence these events are all critical elements to a pinball game’s success. There is a tangible connection between player and pinball. I believe it is possible to recreate this connection and ‘feel’ in a computer simulation, but Pinball Arcade doesn’t quite feel like it. For all the love and care that the creators obviously poured into the tables, they skimped a bit on ball physics. It moves wonkily quite often, changing speed or direction for no good reason. The ball’s movement off the flippers feels a bit strange too, all of which equals a bit of frustration on the player’s part and failure to close that gap between the physicality of pinball and the cold calculations of computer simulation.

Wacky ball movement notwithstanding, I would still heartily recommend this app to all you Pinball Wizards out there. Pinball Arcade sure plays a mean pinball.

Paperboy Delivers to the iPhone

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If you hung around video game arcades in 1984, you most likely gave Atari Game’s Paperboy a spin. In it, you are the titular newsie, given a route on a street with certain houses that are your customers. Then you pedal madly down the street throwing newspapers as close to people’s stoops as possible, all the while avoiding speeding cars, angry dogs and bullies fighting in the streets.

Well, Paperboy has hit the iPhone in a very faithful adaptation. While it may lack the astonishing handle-bar controller that made the game in the arcade so unique and enjoyable, developer Glu Games tries its best to recreate the feel with tilt controls that take advantage of the iPhone’s positional sensors.

It’s 99 cents on the app store. Spread the news.

Have You Played Atari On iOS Today?

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Atari and Vancouver developer Code Mystics have dropped a metric tonne of retro joy onto the Apple App Store with Atari’s Greatest Hits, for iOS devices. The app allows you to play up to 100 classic Atari games; a few of their most famous arcade entries, but the majority of games come from the catalog of games released for the VCS/2600 home console. Only a small sampling of games are available for free, with 4-pack game downloads available for .99 cents, or you can get the whole 100 game enchilada for 15 bucks.

The app is universal, and I’d recommend playing it on the iPad, as the arcade games feature a representation of the original screen bezel, which shrinks down the playfield a bit too much on the iPhone. The games offer both landscape and profile mode, but not every one has that option to switch. The control methods on offer vary as well, and some work decidedly better than others. On the whole, however, I find the sliding controls that invariably represent dials or trackballs to be too sluggish, and their speed is not configurable. This definitely needs to be addressed by a patch to make these games workable. As for joysticks, the small virtual button that stands in for the stick is small, and I find my thumb constantly sliding off of it, or worse: pressing a different direction or multiple directions as once, deadly for games like Asteroids that put different, drastic actions like thrust or hyperspace on the up and down joystick positions. Classic video game emulation is often slagged for missing that intrinsic satisfaction that comes from holding a joystick in your hand while playing. Since precise control is sometimes the only thing going for these games, in particular those for the VCS/2600, the sluggishness on offer here is pretty close to a deal-breaker.

Sometimes the controls work, however, as evidenced by the sliders that control the paddles in PONG. But if you really want to capture that arcade feeling, the iCADE, set for release in June, will scratch that itch. Originally a clever 2010 April Fool’s joke perpetrated by Think Geek, intense user demand has actually made the crazy idea reality. Greatest Hits has support for the iCADE built right in, and makers ION will be releasing an API that will allow other games to support the mini-cabinet.

Even without the iCADE, however, Greatest Hits is a wonderful app for classic video game aficionados. They will also be jazzed about the extras that come with some games, such as game artwork, scanned colour manuals, and more. Some, however, are concerned that the package is infringing on iTune rules about apps downloading and running external code, represented by the ROM code downloaded in the game packs in order to play these classic gems. A double-standard does seem to have been set with the acceptance of Atari’s Greatest Hits into the app store. So perhaps games looking for a little nostalgia had better grab this baby fast.