Sponsored: When Small Businesses Think Big - Atari & Red Bull (Dell Podference) | 1
Business Wars
Wondery
4.6 • 13.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is brought to you by Wondery in partnership with Dell Technologies. In honor of small businesses, we’re featuring inspiring stories of successful companies that started out small.
In 1972, pinball machines and mechanical games ruled the arcades. Then, Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney came up with a game on a television screen controlled by two players. Pong helped catapult Atari from a start-up to the leader of video games, where it would stay – almost unopposed – for the next decade.
Once Atari made Pong, the company took off like a rocket. But for Dietrich Mateschitz, success was a slog. When he returned home to Austria from a trip to Thailand in 1982, he brought an idea for an energy drink with him. His creation was expensive and tasted foul, and would be rejected over and over. But a slick marketing campaign made it the symbol of club cool and fuel for daredevils — and it took North America by storm.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, prime members, you can listen to Business Wars Add Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:04.6 | Download the app today. |
| 0:07.0 | To inspire small business owners, Business Wars is showcasing successful companies that |
| 0:16.7 | started out small. |
| 0:18.3 | Here are their inspirational and motivational stories presented by Dell. |
| 0:21.9 | And if you need tech advice, Dell Technologies Advisors can help you find the right solutions |
| 0:26.9 | for your business. |
| 0:30.2 | It's early September 1972, and in Atari's office in Santa Clara, California, Al Alcorn's |
| 0:36.9 | getting deja-fue. |
| 0:39.2 | Alcorn's a solidly built 24-year-old engineer with an unruly beard. |
| 0:43.2 | He's on the phone with the owner of Andy Capp's Tavern in nearby Sunnyvale. |
| 0:47.5 | Hey Al, ponds broken. |
| 0:49.5 | Again, can you get over here and fix it right away? |
| 0:53.9 | Pong is Atari's first product. |
| 0:55.9 | It's a coin-operated video game, an abstract take on table tennis where players use two |
| 1:00.8 | thin white lines to bat a square ball back and forth. |
| 1:04.7 | And in 1972, that's really something. |
| 1:07.4 | This is the age of pinball machines in mechanical arcade games. |
| 1:11.3 | Home computers are a pipe dream. |
| 1:13.7 | And the idea of controlling images on a TV screen? |
| 1:17.0 | That's the stuff of science fiction. |
| 1:19.1 | Still, Atari's trying to make sci-fi reality. |
... |
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