Silicon Valley isn't exactly celebrated a lot these days. We often point fingers at problems like oligopoly, increasing inequalities in wealth, AI with little ethics, privilege and pure greed. When I original proposed King Pong to MIT, my editor said quickly, aren't people kind of sick of Silicon Valley? And I thought, yes, of course, this is a concern. However, what's important to me, and I really didn't dwell on this a lot in the book, is that there's a certain joy in what Atari was doing.

Maybe this is just nostalgia for bygone days, I don't know. When Atari was launched and the company starts to grow, Bushnell made a statement — that we're not going to make anything that kills or maims. Atari was never known as a company associated with war games across the 1970s. It was known for driving games. I think what this demonstrates is that a lot of the employees were very young — Bushnell was mid-20s. They were all representatives of the counterculture. The company touted an ethos: the idea of business being fun, and trying to make stuff that just runs contrary to where a lot of computer applications existed at the time, defense and business. I want to hold on to that narrative as much as we can. Perhaps that narrative can teach us something we're lacking today when it comes to technological development.

The Road to King Pong: From afterlife to design to markets

The first piece I published professionally on games was 2004. For over 20 years, I've been researching how games are produced for public play, how games are designed, how we experience them.

My first major work on video games, entitled Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife, published in 2014, was interested in asking an odd question — what happens to games after we've played them? I was interested in where the physical technologies of hardware and software go after the stage of consumption. I was interested in life and afterlife cycles of games, documenting games in archives, libraries, museums, in stages of wear and neglect, preservation, conservation, disposal and as waste. This interest took me to a landfill and into museums.

Museums fascinated me because I found myself in them a lot, looking at coin-operated machines displayed behind glass. I couldn't play games in exhibited in this manner.  I couldn’t know them as a game, as interactive technology, as an artifact designed for engagement. So, I started to ask myself, “what am I looking at”?

That question eluded Game After back in 2014. It then became the impetus for the next book, called Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines. That came out, sadly, during COVID in 2020, when I couldn't do any author talks. What that book wanted to do was to understand, or at least magnify and document, the design process of coin-operated video games in the 1970s up until the early 80s. Because what struck me in the museum context was what I was seeing, but also what museums weren’t telling me that I was seeing:  graphic design, interaction design, industrial design.

I set out to interview all the living industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and graphic designers who worked for Atari from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s. One of my early interviews was with Mike Querio. He was hired in '76, and he had this beautiful line that he shared during one of our interviews. He made this point that with electrical engineers, and eventually software designers, you've got the program, the circuit, and you can display it on a monitor, and you can make tweaks to a game’s play. But Mike said that his job, as an industrial designer, was to create the experience of the gameplay. And I thought, okay, wait, what are you getting at? He was talking about the whole physical engagement with the game: how we interact, where we place our hands, the screen’s orientation, the feel of controls, etc... We shape experience is how he described industrial designers at Atari. With that sentiment, I thought, wow, I want to show how they did that.

That’s Atari Design in a nutshell: a book that explains and documents design processes that have been invisible in the history of games, because we typically celebrate the “rock star” game designers. We don't celebrate somebody doing the graphics on an attraction panel at the top of a coin-op cabinet, or how controls are laid out.

Then the idea for King Pong comes along. I thought, well, I've looked at where games go across their life cycles, I’ve looked at how design shapes products and experiences. But what I haven't really written about are the means of productization, new product category creation, and the marketing of coin-op video games. I'm not a business historian whatsoever. This book helped me maybe become that a little bit. I thought, okay, I need to understand productization. I need to understand how markets were being created. That was huge for me. And how Atari did it very well. I think what's missing in this current triptych are users. I really haven't spent a great deal of time researching users in any historical context. I see future research heading into the direction of video games as lived experience across everyday life. Now, though, I am writing a series of on-going installments on Substack devoted to museums that collect and exhibit video games the world over. The Substack is called, “Museum Games.” 

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Ongoing thread. More from Raiford Guins to follow