In the mid-1970s, Nolan Bushnell turned down a one-third stake in Apple for $50,000. He could afford to joke about it later because he had already built the arcade video game industry from scratch. This episode traces his story from managing midway games at Utah's Lagoon Amusement Park while studying engineering, to meeting Ted Dabney at Ampex, to the commercial failure of Computer Space that produced Bushnell's Law: easy to learn, difficult to master. It covers the candle-commune trademark dispute that forced the Syzygy name to become Atari, and the fake General Electric contract that led Al Alcorn to build Pong.

We also unpack the secret fake competitor Kee Games run by his next-door neighbor to beat distributor exclusivity rules, the $28 million sale of Atari to Warner Communications to fund the Atari 2600, the culture clash with textile ...