Episode description

My guest today is an American scientist, entrepreneur, and a founding father of the video game industry. Born in 1943, he grew up in Utah, in a Mormon family, before leaving to study engineering and business at Utah State University. While a student he played Spacewar!, one of the earliest digital games designed for the PDP-1 computer.

After graduation he joined an electronics company, and there met Ted Dabney, with whom he founded a start-up company with the aim of creating a commercial version of Spacewar! for the arcades. In 1972 the pair changed the company name to Atari, a term taken from my guest’s favourite board game, Go. Together with another engineer, Al Alcorn, the trio produced Pong and, in 1976, the Atari 2600 console – which together birthed the modern games industry.

Throughout the seventies my guest hired dozens of young engineers, including Steve Jobs who later co-founded Apple. Since then, he has founded more than twenty companies, received the BAFTA fellowship, and has been named one of Newsweek's “50 Men Who Changed America".

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