Wozniak on the creation of Breakout Video
Wozniak on the creation of Breakout Video Transcript
I'm the designer. I designed my own 28 little one-dollar chip [unk], I had Pong playing on my TV set at home. Snaked the cable and figured out how to do it and eventually Steve Jobs came back and he took my-- came down to Atari and he got a job. Atari was in Los Gatos, California where I live now. Very proud of that place, to go in and visit at night, they have Steve working at night so he wouldn't be around other people. And then he got us a job. I designed the first Breakout game for Atari so I didn't really work there. They tried to hire me but I said, "Never leave Hewlett-Packard, I love my company, I'm loyal." Yeah. -You built that in one weekend, didn't you? -Breakout, 4 days, 4 days and nights and it was a [unk] job. I didn't think I could do it and we stayed up all night, all day, all night long. We both got the sleeping sickness mononucleosis. Steve Jobs and I both got it doing that project, delivered a working Breakout game and it was one of the highlights of my life because I loved games, I loved things that young people do, that children do. It related to my interest in education and also it had a big impact in how I designed those game-like features into the early Apple computers especially the Apple II because games were gonna come into computers. Game equipment like knobs and paddles and buttons and sounds were gonna be an important part of computers and I hope I had a little part of history in accelerating that and then the computer gaming-- as games became software, they took off to what we have today.
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