Normally, I wouldn’t shine a spotlight on a webpage comment, but it is just too illustrative.
On one of Fahey’s editorials (Steve Jobs Retirement), a commentator pointed out that Steve Jobs worked for Atari. In typical Internet fashion, another commentator responded:
“Just because you work for a games company does not mean you know about games… and Atari was not a games company then, it was a hardware manufacturer with a small software games wing…. much in the same way Panasonic will have a small software wing that will make the firmware for its devices.”
Atari hired Steve Jobs in 1976.
The Atari Computer Division was made in 1978.
These are basic facts, not hidden knowledge. Thirty seconds on Google would have determined these basic facts. But the commentator did not do this? Why?
Reader, let us have a discussion of facts and contexts. Should facts be molded by contexts or should contexts be molded by facts?
“Do not be ridiculous,” the reader would say. “Facts are stubborn things, and they must be acknowledged before adopting a context. To let contexts determine facts is to play the role of Don Quixote where we slay windmills.”
But the commentator decided to let his context determine the facts. Why would someone do such a thing?
“I do not know,” says the reader. “This is why I am the reader and you the Malstrom.”
Well said! Well said!
The reason why someone would allow their context to rearrange facts is often due to some emotional investment in the context. It is best to make sure that when you build your Temple of Context, you build it on facts of rock, not facts of sand. Trying to understand this commentator’s context is a delightful adventure of fiction.
There are other contexts the commentator uses that also fly in the face of facts. I’ll let the reader argue them to me.
“Steve Jobs just worked on the hardware, Malstrom. You heard me? The hardware! Just like many companies today have separate wings of software and hardware, Jobs was just on the hardware. Yeah, you heard me.”
It has been said that ‘The Atari role with Steve Jobs has been over-emphasized.” I find that incredible because mention of Steve Jobs being an employee at Atari is practically non-existent and is not common knowledge.
There is many things incorrect in the Steve Jobs mythology, but I find it curious why the role and history of video games is whitewashed to become non-existent in the mythology. It could be as something simple as the mythology saying, “Steve Jobs is a cool guy,” and that “Video games aren’t cool,” therefore “Steve Jobs had nothing to do with video games. And if he did, he was only technician and had no involvement.”
There is a far difference between video game designer and video game developer. People are confusing the two. No one is saying Steve Jobs designed video games. But he was most definitely a video game developer. The most famous example we have is the game of Break-Out which Steve Jobs helped developed. Note I did not use the word ‘design’.
Tuning and fixing Pong machines is a technician’s job (which Jobs did when he flew to Europe before flying to India to shave his head). But designing a circuit board for an arcade game and even changing how the game is displayed, where the score is located, are all things a video game developer does. A technician does not do those things.
The stubborn fact is that Steve Jobs was one of the first video game developers.
“But still,” snorts the critic, “you shouldn’t emphasize the video game role. You just shouldn’t!”
Why not? Since it has been so de-emphasized to the extent that it isn’t common knowledge, it should be emphasized more to correct the misinformation. Steve Jobs didn’t appear out of the ether and start making Apple II computers in his garage. Steve Jobs appeared out of a video game company.
There is more reason to emphasize video games more rather than less with the origin of Apple. Steve Wozniak, who actually designed and made the Apple II, was a huge gamer. And what I mean by gamer is someone who can become consumed by playing video games. Wozniak loved Gran Trak.
The hardware of the Apple II computer was designed to play Break-Out, a video game. So yes, the tree of which Apple came from is video games. [Deviously] You could even say Video Games are the Tree of Knowledge for the computer and electronic revolution.
I am amazed how there is so much attention given to the ‘personal computer revolution’ or to the ‘Internet revolution’, but video games (which are instrumental to both) remain a dark continent. Even with the celebrity and legend status people associate with Steve Jobs, Atari and video games, which were essential to how Apple got started, is virtually unknown. It amazes me.
Let me be clear that Steve Jobs was not a gamer in the way how we mean it today. But people like Nolan Bushnell would also not be considered gamers under that same definition.
The narrative going around is that Steve Jobs does not understand video games or was never into them. Yet, he worked for years at a video game company and was an actual video game developer. And aside from a few other places, Atari was where all the video game developers in the world were located. Steve Wozniak is close enough to be considered a game developer as well.
That fact is that Steve Jobs was a video game developer during the birth of the video game industry. So why did Steve Jobs steer Apple away from video games?
But before we accept the premise of that question, let us first see if it is true. Did Steve Jobs steer Apple away from video games? What proof is this based on?
I have seen no proof presented that Steve Jobs has intentionally steered Apple away from video games. (This doesn’t mean the proof doesn’t exist. If you’ve seen some, show me.) However, there is proof that Steve Jobs has tried to steer Apple to video games but failed. (Of course, failure could not fit into the Steve Jobs mythology. Steve Jobs could never get Apple into video games.)
Here is some of the proof that Steve Jobs was emotionally invested as well as financially invested in video games:
Ed Fries, the former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, and the man central to Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare and Bungie, told Develop he had to personally broker a deal with Apple back in 2000 to appease the indomitable Macintosh boss.
“As soon as we announced we bought Bungie, Steve Jobs called,” Fries said.
“He was mad at [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer and phoned him up and was angry because we’d just bought the premier Mac game developer and made them an Xbox developer.”
Bungie, which was established in 1991, had throughout the Nineties built games for Apple’s Mac, from the Marathon trilogy to Oni. The studio, then based out in Chicago, was also building a relatively obscure FPS called Halo for Mac and PC.
Yet Apple’s deal with Bungie was flung aside when Microsoft bought the studio in 2000, for a figure Develop believes to be around $30 million.
As every PC gamer knows, you don’t buy a Mac to play PC games. Microsoft recognized that video games helped keep their operating system popular or else they wouldn’t have spent so much money on Direct X.
Lately, we have heard much talk about video games and Apple from the portable side. Where did this talk come from? It certainly didn’t come from actual numbers. When you compare the numbers for dedicated handheld consoles to gaming on Apple’s ipods and iphones, it is laughable at best. It is a joke that we’re supposed to believe that gaming has become ‘so big’ on Apple’s products that the Apple user will only buy a game for a dollar (or will only play free games). If gaming was so valued on the Apple products, then why aren’t the Apple users willing to pay for it? We all know Apple users are not adverse to spending money (since they bought the expensive Apple product in the first place).
What is far more believable is that Steve Jobs was directing Apple toward video games again. But just like how Steve Jobs failed with gaming on the Mac, he is failing with gaming on the handheld side as well. This, of course, doesn’t fit the ‘god’ mythology so we’ll never hear about it.
But Steve Jobs failing with video games is consistent with the fact that video games are the father of Apple. The integrated hardware/software model, which Apple prizes so highly, comes from video games (specifically, the arcades). Nintendo has the same exact integrated hardware/software model because Nintendo made arcade games as a competitor to the market that Atari created. Steve Jobs being unable to break into video games seems fitting with the history that video games invented personal computers, not the other way around. The child cannot usurp the father.
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And in all this, I haven’t even touched on Fahey’s editorial. But when you see a text filled with so much misinformation, so much hyperbole, and with very little data, it’s not worth the time. As the years stretch on, the ‘success’ of Apple in video games is going to be recognized as the hyperbole it is. PC gaming is to console gaming as cell-phone/tablet gaming is to handheld console gaming. This will be recognized soon as even the business models are similar. Time makes more converts than reason.
