Al Alcorn's training exercise, a television in a wooden cabinet with one line of instructions, broke down after two days in a Sunnyvale bar because the coin box was full. From Pong the chapter runs through Space Invaders and a pizza with a slice missing, to Ray Kassar, the textiles executive who ran Atari like a pillowcase factory and buried the results in New Mexico. Shigeru Miyamoto, handed a warehouse of unsold cabinets, rebuilt the industry. John Carmack faked three dimensions on a machine with none.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Allan Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, Tomohiro Nishikado, Toru Iwatani, Ray Kassar, Howard Scott Warshaw, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Shigeru Miyamoto, John Carmack
- The idea it builds
- Raycasting: faking a three-dimensional corridor by scaling wall slices to distance, because the player's eye never changes height.