In late 1975, Atari was riding high on the success of Pong, as we saw in The History of Atari.
Breakout
The concept for Breakout came out of a meeting with Steve Bristow, of Atari's subsidiary Kee Games. Together, Bushnell and Bristow thought of a game with the mechanics of Pong but, instead of two paddles, one would have to destroy a wall of blocks. The challenge would be to destroy the blocks without letting the ball go out of play. Nolan knew that, if they could develop it, the game would be a success.
Calculations made, the thing proved harder than expected. According to the design by Al Alcorn, Atari engineer and creator of Pong, the integrated circuit for Breakout had to have at least 75 chips. Games at that time averaged 50 chips. The production of each extra chip cost $100,000, making the development of the necessary hardware impossible.
Not content with this, Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn threw down a challenge to their employees: whoever could build the cheapest integrated circuit would win a bonus of $700, plus $100 for each chip eliminated from the original design. And guess who took up the gauntlet and decided to face such a task? Steve Jobs!
Jobs, Wozniak and Breakout
Since Steve Jobs had finished school and dropped out of college, his life was a search for meaning. His only ambition in life was to save enough money to backpack through India. To that end, he worked for Hewlett-Packard, where he met Steve Wozniak (whom he eventually befriended by attending the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, a group of computer enthusiasts based in Silicon Valley). He then moved to Atari, where he worked as a technician. Finally, with enough money to travel through India, Jobs teamed up with Daniel Kottke, a school friend and the first employee Apple would have, and began his journey in search of "spiritual enlightenment". Upon returning to the United States, now "enlightened", Steve returned to Atari and accepted the offer from Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn.
But Jobs was never a computing whiz, though he knew someone who was: Wozniak. Steve presented the dilemma to Woz, assuring him that if he succeeded, he would split the prize with him, half and half. Wozniak took it as a personal challenge and, in 72 hours, managed to reduce the circuit chips to 25 chips. That was $5,000 in bonus money!
But problems continued. Steve Wozniak had reduced the chips so much that no one but him could understand how it worked. Atari couldn't use Woz's design, but Jobs collected the 'reward': $700 plus the $5,000 for the eliminated chips. And here's where things turn dark. When he returned to his friend, Steve only split the $700 with him, keeping $5,350 for himself.
Shortly after, Steve Jobs would leave Atari to found, along with his friend (who still knew nothing of the deception), Apple Computers. Years later, Wozniak would learn the truth and it angered him quite a bit. "I knew he believed it was fine to buy something for $60 and then sell it for $6,000 if you can, but I never thought he could do it to his best friend," Wozniak declared, in a testimony later printed in the book The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent.
The money Steve Jobs earned went into Apple, but Woz remained hurt for a long time. Although later, on his personal site, Wozniak would write:
"I would have designed Breakout for Atari for free, just to do it. I had a job at Hewlett Packard. I considered the $350 a nice bonus, something I earned for myself. I probably treated myself to a pizza to celebrate. It hurt me when years later I heard that Steve had been paid more than he told me, and I don't think I'm a sensitive person. But that was a long time ago and I'd rather stay away from that. Steve has always been a good friend to me. It's so old that maybe it never happened, and maybe the people at Atari who said it were mistaken. I think it's possible. Also, if I, my children, or my friends did something like that in life, it's easy to forgive if the circumstances were as I describe them. It's not the same as stealing. If there was anything dishonest, I'm above that. Who hasn't done things that could be considered bad? I doubt such a person would be interesting."
The Design of the Apple II
Returning to our story, the work Wozniak put into Breakout influenced the design of the Apple II, Apple's first real success. "A lot of the Apple II add-ons were there because I had designed them for Breakout," Wozniak assured years ago.
Among the influences, we find the design of the color graphics circuit and the now-infamous sound circuit. Breakout also influenced the design of the BASIC interpreter, since the Breakout interpreter was the proof of concept that ran on the Apple II prototype. Even further, Wozniak really wanted to play Breakout on his computer, so he included the game's controls (the known paddles) and a cassette with the game's code.
Atari, as its history shows, was the seedbed of greats in the world of computing. Many personalities came out of Bushnell's company, and many owe their careers to it. In particular, a certain Steve Jobs, who was later considered a Messiah by many tech nerds (despite his merits being few, for those who know Apple's history).
