Atari, Inc.

Let's talk about this example.

Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, was the first to hire Steve Jobs.

And in the book, you share how after a few products that didn't do well, they created a prototype of a basic coin-operated pinball arcade video game, Pong.

And soon they had to produce 3,000 of them a day, but they could only produce 200.

And they had a lot of copycat producers disassembling a finished Atari product, photocopying the circuit boards and building their own clone games.

And It got to a point where 150,000 arcade units sold, but Atari had sold only 30,000.

So tell us what Nolan did next.

Yeah, that was a fun one.

But yeah, co-op has a long and storied history.

And I was very surprised to see that there was actually co-op back in the good old days of Atari.

Yeah, I mean, I do.

I have a history of enjoying just playing with myself.

It's been solved.

Pong's been solved.

But yeah, also, the first proper co-op game was actually also on Atari before Arcade Caverns.

That was 1978, the game Fire Truck, where two different people controlled different parts of the truck.

Pong.

[laughs] We're back in the Atari days, ladies.

As opposed to the, as opposed to the, as opposed to the ping that you might have had, not the pong.

[laughs] Okay, that was directionally accurate.

Next up from Chris Iuzzi.

Is there a particular moment you realized that you want to collect games instead of just trading up for the newer thing? I had my dad sell our Odyssey 2, old school boy, to get an Atari, sold the Atari to get an NES, sold the NES to get a Genesis.

And while I love the Genesis, I really miss the NES games.

I eventually got another NES and just kept everything ever since.