Steve Wozniak Talks Video Games - Full Interview

I started out with red laces I've come up with so many great Laser tricks and I like to be able to do it in ways that you don't get caught very quick flash what the heck was that the cherry on my sundae lit up red and then it went out what was that and one of the cute ones I came up with once was in Cancun I was at the Hard Rock Cafe and I was used to like shining a laser on after a while you show them to the waiter you say look at this and they say wow that's interesting they don't know what the lights are because in the early days they didn't know lasers that when you see a dot look for a laser and I'd show it to him well this one guy came over to the table I said watch this I had a second laser in my other hand he didn't know I shined a laser in my head and I wiggled my head up and down there's this dot on the wall going up and down and and and he thought it was going through he said Wow would that work on me I said yeah just can I go show my friends yeah so I gave him the laser he goes over this other table he puts it up to his ear and I shining my the laser on the wall which if he if it was really going through your head it was a pretty dumb thing to do and then in later years in later years I came up with a trick of shining in one color laser in my ear and a different one came out on the wall I would tell people the DNA is a stereoscopic isomer that polarizes light and changes the color ha ha ha earliest memories um you go back anyone might you go back and it's all you had was board games and card games and you know of course games like let's go out play cowboys and Indians you know and dodgeball at school for the standard little simple games it's really interesting because over time I watch the kids grow up and when they're very young in elementary school they all get into it they learn a bunch of card games that they're taught and the card games are always changing they're always different you always have to learn new rules it's like our generation is different than the generation that was one year before us and different than the generation one year after us so the games all have to change and so I yeah I and I played a lot of games some summers I would just sit there constantly playing all the games of solitaire that I could love playing games I had a very happy life very joking life and I became legal philosophy later in life that your life is all about happiness that's how you judge it it's not how successful you are how many yachts you own and that kind of stuff it's how much you'll smile and so entertainment very very important in my my way of thinking and just you know finding ways to enjoy life also when you work so hard I grew up you know oh my god working so late at night trying to solve problems think of ways to connect circuits together and get something working man you gotta you gotta take breaks you have to include work with fun with your work it was a philosophy of my life so a lot of breaks to play games even today I do email I just get so tired of hours of email I've just got a break and play a few card games online or play my Tetris on the Gameboy so yeah so I think I grew up with um you know a lot of people it was probably a normal amount of gaming but some people maybe grow up and don't consider games worthwhile at all they had a couple of PhD parents and all they do is you know read and study and that that's what life's about no I wouldn't but most people play games it's really interesting because things that you do for your your own entertainment at home I believe very much in the common Joe in the common home make our home life fun and pleasurable today it is back then I thought whoa we're so lucky to have washing machines our great-grandparents had to wash clothes by him what a horrible life they had we engineers have to create newer better things and the greatest little toy of my life was a transistor radio with six transistors I could listen to music all night long while I slept and then they made chips my dad when I was eight years old took me to an electronics show and a guy it might have been Gordon Moore you know the inventor of chips showed me a diagram he said this is going to be a chip with six transistors on one piece of silicon and I went home and I told my dad oh now we're going to have better transistor radios you know that was the closest thing to a game and he says no no no nobody can afford new technologies in their homes only the military only the military can buy the chips because they need to save every fraction of a gram on rockets that go up in space and and get launched from submarines and that kind of stuff it was the space race days I said darn you know because I wanted he said that after a few years surplus extras junk falls out and that's what people get and I was so so pissed inside I didn't say it to him but darn it I wanted the needs of the average person to be more important than those of the big the government the military and sure enough look where we've gotten to the fastest chips made the biggest chips on earth are really important games and then the military takes advantage of the the the economies of volume economies of scale the first computer games I saw we're back in Dark Ages we didn't have computers in our school I had to go to a company to sort of learn how to program and you saw some very simple games and these were early even earlier than the ARPANET or the very starting days of the ARPANET where universities could connect together and you could type in a few text commands and it would tell you hints about where a submarine was or the Star Trek ship or or I mean the Klingons where they were or the Wumpus and you would kind of make guesses to move left or right and you'd work yourself through a game this was fascinating every time a company that owned computers had an open house they let the employees come in and play they set up computers playing games that meant that if a computer to me told me if a computer can play a game it can do all the serious work that computers do as well and I had a friend that worked at Stanford artificial intelligence Center so I'd ride my bike over there and it was just open you know it's an open when smart people are always open thinkers they don't lock doors it's not closed at all walk right in they had the big tube and it was playing the early game of space work that was developed for the pdp-1 computer was running on a PDP 11 there and wow you had the spaceship going around being pulled by gravity into the center so that was sort of an idea of what could come in Arcadia but it was like hugely expensive no person could ever afford it never ever thought about developing games I knew that I was a really incredible digital designer but I didn't think digital design was about games I thought it was about computers and that sort em logic games oh I'm sorry in sixth grade I built a machine with a hundred little rules and every rule was a logic gate that I but I pounded nails into wood and I connected transistors and resistors and diodes and power supplies and I built a hundred little rules that played tic-tac-toe a game without losing so that was very computer ish but I moved up to adders and subtractors by eighth grade even and and yeah and I love the idea that you could make games I always knew the computers could make games and play games and I was interested in that but I didn't know exactly oh yeah I knew how to program you know what I knew that I could program a game maybe some of the ones I'd seen were a little beyond my level but who knows but then I saw a real arcade game that was pong and I was stunned because before that all you had was arcade machines which were physical Adams balls rolling around and being hit by flippers now you had a little God on a screen they were charging 25 cents to play it the line was so long to get on this machine and that was back when the pinball games were ten cents the palm I said my god you a television set solve the problem of the cost of input/output the movement towards the games we have today was largely one of how do you do it at a reasonable cost that people can afford that was a big challenge you know you had to put a win to put a lot of work a lot of engineering a lot of thinking into it but I just signed up I said oh my gosh I know how tv's work I know all their signals for drawing lines and drawing frames and putting dots on the screen so I built a little device $21 chips and I built my own pong but it was hardware see nowadays you would just write a game a pong in software and oh my gosh if you kind of know what you're doing it might even take you a day or two days you know it's a beginning programming class back then it was hardware that was a different world I was good at hardware and software so pong was the start and then Steve Jobs actually took my pong game down to Atari and he didn't have anything to it the design of it but I think they thought he did they hire didn't they hired him but he couldn't ever really do the engineering design he could do a little I'm sorry could do a little he could like modify few pieces or put a sound chip in to make sounds for a game and and he worked on the night shift all alone so I could go down and visit and see the new Atari games I got to play like Grand track 10 the first car game before it was out there I got so good at it eventually in my town of Scotts Valley they had a pizza parlor free pizza free small pizza if you could get 36 points or more on on gram track 10 I can easily do that so after I won two free pizzas they took it out but so I loved playing the games as well as as designing them and I designed break out for Atari and it was all hardware yeah Steve Jobs got that order from the the owner of Atari I designed the whole thing and was really an incredible project because I designed things with very few parts it's the way my thinking is you've got to understand it so well you can simplify it and figure out ways to use parts in more than one way and and all that and Atari was getting tired of their engineers designing games with 150 chips 160 chips and 190 chips and I just did that I did all a break out in 45 chips well well Steve Jobs came to me and he said that Atari wanted me to design this and I had only four days to do it well no back then Hardware games I'm sorry it's not like software this was a half a man year project and I was like one of the greatest designers ever I was working on the iPhone 5 of its day the hottest gadget product in the world it was the hewlett-packard scientific calculator they had hired me even though I didn't have a college degree and I thought I was the greatest designer but for days I didn't think I could do it went for days with no sleep Steve and I both got mononucleosis the sleeping sickness and we delivered a working breakout game and that was you know obviously a big classic supposedly the Atari engineers couldn't understand my design it was just so beautiful in advance but they couldn't get to it I never got to talk to him I don't know if they knew that I did it they paid Steve Jobs and then he paid me half the money supposedly yeah there's some debate my thoughts about it our Steve should have been more open and honest with me he should have told me yeah I'm really getting thousands for this but I'll pay you this much you know or or he sure said I need the money to buy into a farm in Oregon and I would take it all I don't need an income I've got a job as an engineer I don't need the money though I didn't need the money you know I would have done that for him so it's a tiny thing it's only one thing in life but he did tell me that we would get paid 700 bucks then he wrote me a check for 350 and he got paid thousands so whatever you know you know it could be a distorted story over time maybe he was paid thousands for the whole project and the less you know but he sure told me differently because we were such close friends but the fun of doing the fun of doing it overrides any anything like that who cares about money you know yeah well you do care about friendship and honesty Steve Jobs said that it was nolan bushnell x' idea he wanted a one-player pong game he and Steve described how it had to have bricks and all now it could be that Steve had actually thought up the design game and sold it to Nolan Bushnell because and he was very specific the score had to be at the bottom I said I could maybe save a half a chip if I moved the score to the top no no it has to be at the bottom or wherever it was okay so I didn't have that much leeway I did choose the number of bricks I don't think that was a big issue but well I had a 256 bit ram so you might as well so it's going to be 128 bricks or it's going to be 256 bricks and it was it was a real fun project but since I've already done pong so it's really just an extension of a game where you've already programmed a game that has paddles and balls that can move at different angles and speeds it just had put it in the reflection and Counting when he hit bricks there was no name when I did the project at all no name assigned so when Atari came out with it they chose the name and Steve Jobs was no longer an Atari right after we finished the game he went up to Oregon bought into that orchard or whatever it was and and so tari came up with the name on their own I was so tired in and out of sleep but you know what that makes your mind creative and I was out of a factory floor and they had one huge game that four players would play with their own little cars you know each one have their own cars a bigger game and there was this idea that they were going to use microprocessors but they weren't using them in games yet games were not yet software and that triggered my mind microprocessors can actually program games interesting I'm going to have to think about that I didn't see the formula right away because microprocessors were brand new and they were very weak so you wouldn't necessarily think of them like you do today another another example though there was a TV set on the factory floor they only use black-and-white TVs for their games and this TV set wasn't playing a game but it had a dot going from left to right and right to left and as it moved it was changing colors red blue green yellow I surmised there must be Mylar something I couldn't see it and I just went back to I went back to my lab bench over here Steve was working over there breadboard in my design he would be hooking the wires together and when whenever it got to a certain point I'd go over and test it because I understood the circuit and so I'm just sitting there thinking color it was like hypnotizing like like a psychotic light show or something at a concert and thinking back to television I understood it very well from high school electronics I had a ham radio operators license when I was in when I was 10 years old so analog electronics was also in my background I thought oh my gosh how colors get interpreted by a television and an idea popped in my head up until then color on a television was generated with perfect sine waves that represented red green blue and the way in the circuits that mixed them and put their amplitudes at certain things for brightness was such it was came from all the calculus formulas that you use when you analyze a circuit you're designing hardware circuits with feedback and resistors and capacitors and inductors and and that was $1,000 board to generate color in those days very complicated analog stuff and here popped in my idea of a little way to put out a digital signal with ones and zeroes for ones and zeroes if you repeat them I popped my hit if I repeat them 1 1 0 0 it goes up and it goes down if you think of it ones ups up and zeros is down ones are up zeros are down up and down up and down it's not like a sine wave like red but I knew how televisions work they're going to interpret the upgoing and they're going to call this signal red and if I put the ones and zeros in a slightly different point in time they're going to call it blue oh my god I have 16 different colors some little brighter some that are darker would it work there's never been a book that ever talked about creating color digitally it wasn't allowed it wasn't it wasn't done but I always just I designed every single thing in the Appleton was just so original never ever like ever before design but it made it possible a one little $1 chip could generate color instead of a thousand dollar color generation board and when I went to design the Apple 2 computer I started out thinking the frequencies of crystals that you have to have for us color television and those frequencies how do they divide up to the the rate at which microprocessors go and you want to have even divided downs and I divided by the Maya starting frequency bye-bye it was four times colored TV frequency divided it to got about seven megahertz divide that by seven got one megahertz to drive the processor them Rams by then we're up to two megahertz so I only divided it by half of that and I had the Rams going twice as fast and then every bit as you went across the screen I can put little ones and zeroes would make color you had one zero one zero it would be red you know something like one one zero zero one those little patterns I was talking about would turn out to be different colors and I just put him in the bytes and it was a little tricky because I only had the way the timing worked out I only had seven dots per byte a byte is eight bits seven dots on the screen so that means that even bytes and the odd bytes had to be off by a bit they had to be shifted from each other to keep the color consistent it was so it was a lot of trickiness and software but everything had to work out to that one crystal frequency starting out with color would it work I built the whole thing I designed it just totally from scratch clever little circuits with almost no parts at all to generate the color timing the counters for horizontal and vertical on a television to decide when to send signals telling the TV when to do another line and put in color sync signal so it knows what what red is where red starts in time every line and then I am and then I tested it out and I type in a number and a blue spot pops up on my TV and I typed in another number and a green spot popped up somewhere else right out of the computer memory to the to the display was another trick I thought if that had never been done up until then computers talked to video displays over a serial cable and they could send an A and send a B and send a C to the you know but it was uh you had to have the whole serial device save its entire screen I just put it in the computer memory so that was so that made all this all of a sudden when Steve Jobs came over and we could type a number and you see a green dot on the TV instantly you know you can program games you can program any animation all this Atari stuff could now be in color you could just simply write programs to move numbers around in memory and you would have games what I had a high res in the Apple too so which in the you candy actually even by using mass in change individual bits and pixels and have very high just like pixels very high-resolution shapes as well this stuff had never ever been thought of for you know a home computer that was affordable but I just determined that my computer had to be a game machine when I wrote a basic for it because a computer is nothing without a programming language if you have a bunch of switches and lights and you can push a button and some ones and zeros go into memory that's geeky computer stuff that's not usable I wanted the typewriter keyboard and it already built a terminal that talked to faraway computers anyway and I want to type on a keyboard I want to see things on my video display and I want to run programs but I needed to program them and base it this kids had to buy these machines it wasn't going to be changing the world unless it had a language so I wrote a basic and my called my basic game basic you could go back on every note I ever wrote I called it game basic and my whole idea was if you write a language that can play games it can do all the things that computers do that I don't know about financial stuff I don't know what companies use computers for I only know what I like to use them for and it's games and also I like to write programs to solve my simulations at Hewlett Packard for my own designs so it has to do work and it has to play games now games it's really interesting both those subjects were for me they weren't for a product for the world and therefore when I wrote my basic I decided I would save one month and I left out floating-point numbers numbers with decimal points because games boil down to logic and that's digital integer numbers and my simulations that on love logic were did were done better by integers and even our calculators at Hewlett Packard that calculated sines and cosines did those calculations with integers because it was more accurate and and also faster some clever algorithms so I left out flowing point I took a lot of heat for that in later years and we had to we had to have Microsoft rewrote a basic their way with floating-point numbers and we licensed it and it but I had a beautiful basic because I never never taken a course in writing a language but I really taught myself how to do it but but and games were the intent and one of the first things I did was okay I knew that I had a machine with a microprocessor that could do a million things a second move those bits around on the screen and make things move and play games and all I thought I wonder with my slow basic can I write a game in basic that's playable breakout I'd done breakout for Atari I knew breakout would it be fast enough or would it be too slow cuz basics a slow interpreted language and I wrote a little little program and plotted a bunch of bricks in color and I changed the color of them and I changed the color and I change the color 20 times so what I like and then I programmed in that little paddle that would move up and down as you turn the knob I built I built paddles paddle hardware into the Apple to deliberately for the game a breakout I wanted everything in there I put in a speaker with sound so I could have beeps like games need so a lot of the Apple 2 was designed B to be a game machine as well as a computer because I thought that is the way to get it to people to get people to start buying these machines and I programmed basic up in half an hour I had tried a hundred variations that would have taken me ten years in hardware if I could have even done it so I called Steve Jobs over in my apartment and we sat down on the floor next to the cables sneaking into my TV that had the back off of it so I could get wires inside and and and I showed him how I could change the colors of things and change the shape of the paddle and change the speed of the ball so easy in a basic command and he and I looked at each other and we were both kind of shaking cuz we knew that the world of games was never going to be the same now that they were software I mean that was up till then there weren't software games in the arcades you know so but you know that now that animated games were going to be software oh my god and that a fifth grader could program in basic and make games like breakout this was going to be a new world we saw it right then I saw I saw some other people in Apple in later times you know we were trying to move individual little bits and change bits and bytes and have have it change on the screen and try to make it look natural and smooth and human that depends on the speed of your processor our processor was a little 8 bit processor running at one megahertz very slow for that but when I watched Bill budge built a color color looking pinball game with flippers that actually flipped while the ball was moving got so many things going it's every place possible he just worked so hard in assembly language machine language to program every bit as fast as was ever possible and that was just amazing to see that a game could finally be done that was that good of quality and I also got to see I'm Bob Bishop was a guy who wrote a little starting game landing landing a rocket on the moon and he had to adjust things just right to get it down without crashing we lost so many days of work at Apple and and I bet Bob at a show and I said you got to come to work you should come to work for us you know we'll give you stock you know it'll be worth a lot in the life that you'd like to leave the independent life and he left Caltech and came and and elect JPL and came and joined Apple and he was one of the early ones who was writing this astounding stuff you know like like programs that could speak to you and you could speak into a microphone they could kind of understand you a little bit you were talking about Steve Jobs's theories on games I know he wasn't a big fan overall do you have any insight into why that would be the funny thing is um he I think he actually loved this time in Atari but I don't think I think he found that he was not a designer he was not an engineer that might be part of it because he's always tried to separate himself from the technical people he's not technical and he doesn't want anything technical to show in computers and I agree with that philosophy the masses of people are not computer geeks and they shouldn't be told how many bytes something is what model processor it is that is stuff that gets in the way of doing what you really want to do and so I so I admire Steve for that he thought like the rest of us have to it's hard to be both but I really think it started out with him not being technical and as far as games go the software developers that were developing games we had this guy Dana Reddington he was a actually a doctor trained doctor and had a PhD and and he's working with the Medical Center at Stanford and worked at Apple and did the first high-res game with some little spaceships going by and you point your gun at him and shoot him down you know it was a real animated a real game that could have been you know I mean it was new wasn't a copy of something out on the market and it was just cute we called the Star Wars at first but we had to change the name eventually I mean we didn't pay attention to what our copyrights we're too young to know about these things he did this great game and Steve thought it was really lousy I had watched how he had figured out schemes of exclusive warring bits and getting bits to change just at the ultimate speed of that processor to make it seem realistic so I admired his work so much and yet he just kind of got dismissed by Steve now in later times I think I don't know why but Steve didn't seem to have that light sense of humor that you should have joking along with everything else he became I think very serious businesslike because his goal was to run a company and his and he wanted to look professional in the professional business magazines and didn't want to talk about blue boxes and free calls back in college anymore and eventually when he came back to Apple Easter eggs were disallowed Easter eggs these fun little things the programmers put in that if you know that special code you pop up a picture or a little game you know maybe a game a breakout maybe other games so much fun not allowed in Apple at all you get fired if you try something like that now and I don't know why and and this this whole gaming world is you know just yeah I don't know why it was not a part of him he didn't really have that much of like the sense of humor of joking and pranking but one time I remember one time twelve years after I'd done a prank I gave it to him as a in a framed copy for his birthday he didn't know I'd done it it was when we introduced the Apple - computer - I gave it to him he saw he's broke out and laughter he didn't know it done it something so yeah you know and God when I knew him in high school yeah he was just as fun as anyone else but he was really looking for serious ways of the world - I know that I know designers later on actually had arguments with I'm liking thinking of Ron Gilbert in particular who's working at LucasArts no foul it's got potential storytelling in games we never believed that video games could tell a story it's just that philosophy of games are still a it's time to get zero well you know I I don't I I don't I don't get into that I just I just I just enjoy games for enjoyment you know a lot of things you can enjoy in life but life is about the first thing you need is the necessities of life which is food the second that's like so I call it one of the three F's food the second F is fun every kind of entertainment including games concerts movies they're just things that make you feel good you know and the other is friends because you can joke with friends that's also humor so three EPs and when i told that story to our high school when they put me in the the Hall of Fame at the high school the kids started laughing I said there might be a fourth F um but it's really funny because games involve so much creativity somebody thought of some clever things that really give enjoyment to other people so Steve should have appreciated the creative people that were doing games um in those early days I bought every single software product and hardware product that came out for the Apple 2 and I went through a lot of the games I just can't remember them very well I remember choplifter I remember a first adventure game that took like 10 10 floppy disks you know it was it was it was a huge game and I loved working through it took me a long time I remember when Ultima came out but I didn't get very far into it but I admired I was actually when I met the writer he'd written it like when he was 17 years old or something Richard Garriott I met him at a show in Chicago where Apple was I was afraid to talk to this guy I got introduced to him I couldn't tell he was like a god to me because the story of how something in his life Dungeons and Dragons that was in his head his parents lot was really negative and bad and taking him out of the world he had turned it into reality and turned it into a game that was actually popular and being sold so I just admired him so much for that you know I didn't I didn't pay an awful lot of attention to it schools were very important to me but I didn't have time to go checking out curriculum there was a lot of curriculum there it was very important yeah yeah okay okay Oregon Trail yeah I just would didn't missed out on those games it came at a point just a time in my life when other things were going on and we had Nintendo games at home but my kids were got better than me at Nintendo between fourth and fifth grade I said I'm not going to compete with these kids they're too fast and I'll never be that good again I'll stick with the simpler games but things like Oregon Trail the SimCity's yeah I wash my own kids do them more than I did that I didn't have the time by then to do them myself but those were incredible like you said learning experiences very educational and look how many schools actually use them too when we started with the Apple - we had cassette tapes and all of a sudden you had and I thought that people going to write their own programs save it on cassette tape and they're going to solve their own problems they're going to become programmers like me No all of a sudden everybody started producing programs pre-written VisiCalc lacourse was the killer app and they just bought cassette tapes of gein gein gein gein and then when floppies came out they'd have a whole shoe box you go to a club and every kid would have a shoebox full mostly of games they'd have the few serious programs you know like DB Master for databases and VisiCalc of course and but they'd have all these games and show them off and it was it became a big thing he wanted to copy them more than you really would a bottom you just it was more collecting the whole thing rather than you want I wanted them to play and I'm going to try to steal them but there was a lot of copying going on you know if you imagine a society without games you probably have a pretty hard life and you just are working two jobs or something and you just come home and you don't have your enough time to watch TV or something I mean what benefit does TV have what benefits does music have in our life to me it's it's a real driving force and I feel very happy because of it I think if you went all the way back in time to the cavemen they had games they played little outdoor games throwing balls around whatever humans want to make up games it's part of the natural creativity creative element it's based in us with without them without them boy I don't know I wouldn't want to be that person because I I like interesting things and I like creative things and I like challenges I love games where I know it used to be had to play against a person now you can actually play against a computer it might be the game of bridge or it might be a simpler game or it might be even playing Tetris to see how far you can get competing with yourself but something is fighting you back that's a that's a fun little challenge in life and it pushes you pushes you up trying real hard and then when it's over a little release and I don't know I think that's good for good for health so the big rumor in the gaming industry right now is everyone's scared of Apple especially Apple moves into the living room and pulleys next the you know Apple TV whatever maybe to the television set I wonder if you have any thoughts on that potential future you'd like to see it yeah I don't watch the gaming industry like you guys do and I was not really aware of that concern obviously the the iPhone kind of became the hot mobile machine of all time you know and it's the iPad and everywhere you go you see kids playing those machines now rather than you know then the Game Boy Advance or whatever whatever whatever were the ones before PS or whatever whatever the other games were yeah so I don't know what the effect is it's brought more games into our life it's also given young people who want to write games a lot of people start out and when you're young you don't need a huge income you're not after big money success you just want to do what you feel you're good at you want to write a game and get it out to people if it's for free fine if it's for one dollar might even make a little money but the whole point isn't I'm going to become rich from doing this but young people have a way to get their games written and put on to a product and sold in the Apple Store so I'm very happy for Apple making that possible if Apple moves into the into the the the living room I don't know what does that mean that games like ps3 go away or or Nintendo's the Wii goes away Xbox uh no I think Apple would just be another player and they've got to prove themselves good at games first Apple is Soak is one thing really good they do they develop in secret they can set up groups develop an entire technology for years and years and it doesn't ever come out or if it's so great it's going to take over the world not just sell but be great then it comes out and yeah Apple might be a big player in game someday because companies always want to grow and right now you're kind of limited with the sort of products we can define you know the phones the tablets and the computers and where's the growth area of course they're talking about a watch wearable computing what talking about Apple TV talking about cars so o could a game machine you know make a ton of sense well I think Apple would say the iPad is our game machine so our television might run all of the iOS software and therefore it would instantly it would run tens of thousands of games I think that would be more likely to expect from Apple and I don't really have any inside knowledge but and I don't have any negative opinions about Apple's role because everything Apple does is good and you still have a lot of choice I can't imagine them building a television that you can't run your other devices into even if it's an old DVD player that nobody used anymore or a computer or airplay or or your game machines you know your xbox I can't imagine Apple design TV that would only work with their stuff and if they did it would be way too much that Apple closeness that I hate a lot of people have spoken of games and what they say about them catch my attention and I don't memorize them because I am so short of time these days constantly just traveling traveling traveling do an email and I just don't have time to take up new things that are going to be time-consuming I am going to I am going to actually though I'm going to program some games of my own again I'm going to go back 40 years of my life and I'm going to use the Raspberry Pi and I'm going to actually teach myself Linux and programming on it that's I'm going to actually be building if they aren't games they'll be little robots at least yeah so it'll be so it'll be my yeah my own little little dinky thing that has no value compared to today's modern you know games that have hundreds of developers working on them just for fun and there's actually a game out right now that my wife and I did some voiceovers it's called woz with a cause or vengeance Danny Trejo it's based on a movie that they had made with him and and he's sort of against this game but my wife and I recorded some lines we did it voluntarily for free just for a friend and it's kind of a neat game people say I've had quite time to go through the whole thing yet but you ever give presentations at game companies do you get offers to go visit um I don't remember ever doing it a game companies I go to a lot of companies for presentations that don't remember now I was one of the founders and starters of Electronic Arts a trip Hawkins who started it was a very good friend of mine at Apple and invited me and I was on the first board and that company was that's unusual I've been involved with so many startups and so few of them actually make it and Electronic Arts that's huge to be still going here you know thirty years later I did look around when I spotted it computer shows that I would go to when I spotted somebody who had developed some really great thing I'd get him in touch with Electronic Arts and a couple of times it led to products that they came out with I didn't make I was not a dealer maker but I certainly found them it was a fly flight game one of them I just ran into this young kid who'd written it he didn't have any deals with game companies so fit right into electronics arts pocket and I also liked their way of thinking about mains are going to be much huger than one person writing software which is all it had been till then games are going to be like movies with crews of designers for different categories things in the game there's going to be producers that have the overall authority as to who's going to be doing what jobs it's going to be programmers there's going to be script script writers essentially and modeled it on the movie industry I thought that was very intriguing at Electronic Arts made some bad mistakes - I was one of the supporters of buying this program that would kind of do everything for a secretary and a business from contact lists dialing is stuff that we live on today that is our life the category was right but the trouble is businesses and were going with one two three that did everything and so it kind of like it had no way to really sell it didn't it didn't really um sell into the buying market so yeah they lost a lot on that but I didn't get I don't like to get involved in business and I don't I'm non-conflict so that's the reason I avoid business and running companies is I don't want to be involved in arguments yelling telling somebody else they're wrong I never ever want to be that way and I've been very lucky in life I've just avoided it oh yeah okay I will I will light up the screen yes the way I got started with Tetris is I was I loved you know Nintendo and games and when the game boy came out in the United States I bought a whole bunch of them for my kids and a bunch of their friends I like to I like to treat their friends kind of like part of my family and this was the new hot game and it came with Tetris and I started trying to play I couldn't understand it so my young son taught me oh what a Tetris is how you get lines I didn't even know the rules of the game oh my gosh I started playing it and got a little skill then I found out a couple of my adult friends on a trip to Hawaii were playing it and I said one of them taught me if you start at a higher level you get more points I didn't even know that so I started a higher level wow I was getting some good scores and after a while I was getting better scores than all my friends and then I started sending my scores into a Nintendo Power magazine in those days you would take a photograph of the screen real photograph and send it in we didn't have we didn't have internet or something and it wasn't you know so it wasn't couldn't settle on a file I would send them into Nintendo Power magazine and I always had the high score in the country and then one time they didn't want to print my name anymore I'd been in so often with my high scores at Tetris that I actually spelled my name backwards if it's Kane's ow and forgot I'd done it in the next month I saw it in there and got scared that somebody else had a high score too and and it's funny but I actually now I've gotten through a friend on eBay I've actually gotten a copy of that magazine with my name backwards in it with the high score I have the whole magazine it was just given to me recently and I said I've been telling people that story for ages this proves it it's really it really was in there I might even have that Nintendo power in storage somewhere where I keep all my old stuff quite a secret today but you know I got so good at it and I love playing it and when I try it on a computer it's different keys I'd have to relearn it a bit so I just um don't ask me just what you get used to you know why do i why do I keep using an iPhone or something so I'll play again I'll start the game and I'll plop it up to level 9 to start with that's the highest there's a tricky way I learned a few tricks you can hold some keys down and when it says 9 it's actually 19 it just freaks people out they can't understand why it seems too fast to play um no I'd say it's one that I played the most as a matter of fact when I go to concerts very often for 20-some years I'd sit next to my friend Robert he and I would have a link cable between us and we would play Tetris the entire concert because our ears can hear the music if something really astounding comes on we would stop and stand up you know we'd listen to the music - we were gave it full attention but we've you know we so much into music after 20 years of seeing every concert you've seen every group but you know their stuff so I will start the game and and I don't know it's hard to describe exactly what I'm doing in words I know my head knows what I'm doing yes yes I have I haven't tried talking to him the creator of course I read the story and I was just astounded by the story in an Atari magazine of how they intend to licensed from this Russian developer and and I did a lot of Russian us um peace efforts so I would be invited to shows where Gorbachev was that for example right next to Gorbachev would be sitting the developer of Tetris and I gave Gorbachev once when he was sitting next to there I gave him a gameboy wrapped in red a u.s. gameboy with Tetris yes so I but I was I was too shy to ever talk directly to the program but um you know it's just so incredible to look onto a simple game so new that just grabs people forever how many um you know classic games that are going to be with us forever came about in our life not very many not very many at the power of Tetris and I think a few other pseudo ku you know fits into that category the major games forever sure and here comes my first Tetris EEP I should turn on the sound huh let me think oh I'm in Japan in Japan they sold well clear one called Astro Boy it's just what they called it I didn't put anything on it they also sold a beautiful red one the most beautiful one of all and I have one of those at home that I just recently bought on eBay um yes I tried quite a few when it was brand new and very easy to play but I just like Tetris I'm kit kind of fits a mathematical mind to now I've got a big a big deep hole in here that I'm going to be thinking about thinking about thinking about and starting to ditch out of it already that I always clear things quicker rather than waiting till later and I can get into quite a bit of trouble that people think there's no way you get out of that and I pride myself on on being able to recover very well now I've met people that can play better than I do young kids in high school for example but in my timeframe when they kept track in intento power magazine I always had the high score and I'm very proud of that that keeps me that's another thing keeps me playing I think although although sometimes I start running out of time and okay I give it up for a while usually the sound on you like music I almost never played with the sound Ron but I do like the music yeah I like the fact that it's you could also kind of almost joke about it too when people say the that Russian marching tune that's in Tetris you know it leads to a lot of good jokes I'm in very serious trouble at the moment to find out if I can escape this one Tetris piece helps huh yes I gave him one rep red white and blue at a special meeting I had with him and and about a week later he was in the hospital with a heart some kind of heart ailment and they showed him on our Channel 11 News in San Francisco and they showed him in one magazine that I saw him play in the game way in his hospital bed and so it had to be mine I mean unless he had wake it's possible a kid of his gave him one too so it didn't have to be mine no no no no I just thought of it two times in my life once for Gorbachev and once for Bush but you know for Gorbachev it made a lot of sense because it was a Russian game when I when I brought it to him I had no idea he was going to actually be sitting next to the developer and the reason he was sitting next to the developer was Russia was starting to realize that resources oil wasn't going to be there economic you know lifeblood forever and they better look into finding you know some way to get into the information technology age and this was their one real success of marketing to the consumer product to the West I sure did I sure did and that was the one really where I was teaching my kid I had so much fun I bought them for the house I loved that game I loved William and then when my son got better than me I got near to finishing it - yeah he got better than me and you know well maybe I'm due for other games now yes but my son's tended to move into the more normal games that you'd be much more familiar with and they so they got to the games and they just got the two player or you know one person shooter or whatever those games are called we had one on the Macintosh we didn't have very many and it was called marathon I think and I loved playing it oh my god I would sit in there playing it with my classes of kids but they were all better than me so I was really weak but I wanted to get on a good team to get on a good team with a good shooter you can still do okay well had this one this one older kid like the kids in my class were fifth graders and I had this sixth grader guy that was the game expert of them all Kenny and he was at my house I had my houses linked on the same network as my office where I had my classroom and so I told all the kids will my son Gary who's only in fourth grade younger he's going to play Kenny logged in as Gary they couldn't see him they didn't know was the super game player and Gary was just wiping them away you know and and then it's really funny because later on Gary came into a class one day and we broke to play marathon and and they were saying how come you're not doing so well this time Gary and he was saying he has to have the right right the joy stickers yes and I play it on airplanes I fly so much you kind of need something to break the time a little bit you know and just just to pass the time while you're on the plane so I I do two things I three things I bring a gameboy I bring my music on an iPod Nano and I hook up my um earphones to it and I get pencil games it's like pseudo coup it SAN umber game called cross suns you now crosswords have words that intersect well I'm mathematical I prefer these ones where numbers intersect you have to make the numbers out of a bunch of different digits that add up to totals it's a very very cool game for a mathematician so I carry those on airplanes because when you taking off and landing you're not allowed to use have electronics on I I'm not because basically my experiences are that mmm you know I I don't like being very very good at one one format and then I really can't carry over to the others I I mean it's kind of shallow to say it but it's that's how it is there's a lot of good games with numbers that I would probably enjoy but I have so little time now that I tend to stick with the one huh okay I'm still alive at least but no I okay alrighty he said we'll only takes about ten minutes a game no it's it's I wouldn't say it's my favorite I would say Anna my whole life I have played Tetris so much it might be called my favorite but I would say probably my playing bridge was my favorite and @p knuckle and hearts also Oh Magic the Gathering oh my god I love I love that game I bought I actually have in my in my garage alpha sets complete sets that were sold to collectors only yeah so rare unopened still sealed yeah then yeah my son my son and I would play that and it was very successful because um if if we had to learn some some difficult subject in school that he was having trouble with maybe we have to start with the book go from page one to page zero do every single problem in the book write the programs that his class didn't even have to do to learn it really well studies we both studied together we'd read the chapters together work on the work and then take a break halfway through a chapter do a little test on ourselves see how our answer is compared then we'd play Magic the Gathering and then we go back and do more of the chapter which is over Christmas vacation for two weeks straight he wound up you know basically getting back in the math where he was going to kind of fail and he wound up getting the math Awards in both his middle school in his high school

Channel: Game Informer

Views: 100,066

Keywords: Oregon Trail, Steve jobs, woz, Apple 2, Gameinformer, Apple Computer, breakout, Steve Wozniak, Wozniak, apple, youtube, Game Informer, long interview, video games, atari, YT

Id: n6gzcjyNkHs

Length: 48min 7sec (2887 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2013