1/31 - Brianna gets the GDC Pioneer Award for Norm Bushnell rescinded

[UnclePhil]

I can't decide who I hate more in this situation: Brianna Wu, or the cultists at her beck and call. Wu is already unlikable, arrogant, and psychopathic enough. But like minnows swarming toward fish food, these people are so ready to hop aboard a hashtag crusade they don't stop to consider what they they're protesting or what harm it might cause.

Between this and the Aziz Ansari debacle, #MeToo has been shorn of whatever credibility it had.

 

[RisingPhoenix]

I don't follow Wu at all, but I will say that Nolan is the definition of a living legend. Like, dude is going to be chapter 1 of any book on the history of video games until the heat death of the universe. In terms of impact on the industry, he is very clearly up there with guys like Miyamoto. Him going to that award ceremony would lend it prestige, not the other way around. And while the crash hurt him financially, he then proceeded to found Chuck E Cheese and make even more money than he ever did at Atari.

Nolan is filthy rich and universally recognized as a seminal figure in his field. Somehow I doubt he gives a shit.

The one critique you can give to Nolan is that he was the winner that wrote the history book. People had written games before Atari's Pong such as Space War! and they were not even first out the gate with a games console. Ralph H. Baer swore to his dying day that Nolan had basically copied the Tennis game from his Magnavox Odyssey console for his Pong arcade game (there's a level of truth as Nolan himself admits he went to a Magnavox roadshow where the Odyssey was on display, he claims innocence otherwise)

Alas it was Bushnell who came up with a way to better market the idea, while Baer struggled to get Magnavox to really properly support his original project properly.

Nolan's still a legend mind, but it's worth noting there were some foundations to Atari's success.

 

[The Giver]

The one critique you can give to Nolan is that he was the winner that wrote the history book. People had written games before Atari's Pong such as Space War! and they were not even first out the gate with a games console. Ralph H. Baer swore to his dying day that Nolan had basically copied the Tennis game from his Magnavox Odyssey console for his Pong arcade game (there's a level of truth as Nolan himself admits he went to a Magnavox roadshow where the Odyssey was on display, he claims innocence otherwise)

Alas it was Bushnell who came up with a way to better market the idea, while Baer struggled to get Magnavox to really properly support his original project properly.

Nolan's still a legend mind, but it's worth noting there were some foundations to Atari's success.

Oh yeah, there were definitely foundations. I think some museums (or something) still have some of the really early shit like Tennis For Two, aka games made out of scientific instruments pre-1960. Space War is another great example (and actually a pretty cool game), though if memory serves that game (like Tennis For Two) was more or less a hobbyist project that was never marketed or even released for consumers.

The real "theft" of the Pong concept was from the Odyssey. But Pong is WAY better. The Odyssey game didn't keep score, required the use of graphical overlays (literally you had to stick a piece of plastic on your TV screen), had no sound, and did not prevent you from moving wherever you wanted on screen. So all that was really copied was having two lines representing paddles and a ball on the screen... and at that point I really don't see how on Earth that is enough to constitute "copying" the Odyssey. So the improvements made in Pong were way beyond just better marketing: Arguably, those improvements are what make Pong recognizable even today as a video game. Seriously, if you plugged in the Odyssey without knowing what it was, you wouldn't even realize it was a game.

Of course, all that is somewhat moot since Bushnell didn't make the game himself. He basically told one of his business partners the basic idea, and that dude made the game (and added a lot of those features on his own initiative). Bushnell was always more of a big picture idea/marketing/business guy. But he was absolutely the soul of Atari, which is why it isn't too surprising that the company didn't really go to shit until he was marginalized by the corporate guys and eventually left. Hell, one of his last acts at the company was to plead with them to not release the abortion that was the 5200 because he knew it was a piece of shit