This was the mid-1970s, when the Pinball Wizard was about to be struck with a bad case of Pac Man Fever and Nolan Bushnell was riding the video-game wave, figuratively and literally, on a 67-foot yacht named Pong. Nolan Bushnell was the quintessential screenager, the proto-gamer who ported table tennis to the television and launched a revolution in hand-eye coordination.

Growing up in the 1940s in the Mormon smallville of Clearfield, Utah, Bushnell had been a tinkerer since before his teens. Like the legions of Silicon Valley garage-scientists who would follow him, Bushnell enjoyed a bit of madness in his scientific method. Once, he nearly torched his family's carport with a homemade rocket engine mounted on the back of a roller skate.

While studying engineering at the University of Utah, Bushnell divided his moonlight hours between a job working at an amusement park and playing Spacewar, an early computer game popular among pointy-head types with late-night access to massive university mainframes. That's when the first light bulb popped in Bushnell's Spacewar-inspired brain: incorporate a computer component into the analog amusement park's midway. A good idea, but ...

"When you divide 25 cents into an $8 million computer, there ain't no way," he realized before graduating in 1967 and relocating to California to work for an electronics company.

All the late nights Bushnell spent in an ad hoc research facility, formerly his daughter's bedroom, led to Computer Space, a Spacewar-esque stand-alone video game produced by a small arcade-game manufacturer called Nutting Associates. The game bombed -- the learning curve was too steep and the payoff too minimal to entice partyers in the bar environments Computer Space was designed for. Still not discouraged, Bushnell hired a young engineer named Al Alcorn and, as on-the-job training, asked him to build what would become a blockbuster.

"We were going to build a driving game," Bushnell said in a 1983 Playboy interview. "But I thought it was too big a step for him to go from not knowing what a video game was to that. So I defined the simplest game I could think of, which was a tennis game, and told him how to build it. I thought it was going to be a throwaway, but when he got it up and running, it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun."

Nutting passed on the product, as did other game manufacturers, so Bushnell decided to go it alone. The name of his new company? Atari, a term from the Japanese game Go that loosely translates as "check."

In November 1972, Pong was unleashed in the belly of the high-tech beast, a bar named Andy Capp's in Silicon Valley. The boom was born and the dawn of the digital age was shining brightly on Bushnell. He built a rock-, beer- and pot-fueled corporate culture that attracted the brightest nerds in the valley, including Steve Wozniak, who would later be co-founder of Apple Computer. Atari finished fiscal 1973 with $3.2 million in sales, a sign of appreciation from a couch potato culture finally able to affect the image on a TV screen.

Other successful games followed and in 1975, the electronic entrepreneur set his sights on the American family. A $99 TV console version of Pong introduced the first joystick generation to "interactive" entertainment at home. By 1976 though, dozens of companies were fighting Atari for market share and Bushnell's company was cash-starved.

"When you're a little company, and you hear that National Semiconductor is going to build a game and that Magnavox is going to build a game, then all of a sudden you say, I'm this little tiny ... do I have the resources?" Bushnell said in a recent interview. "You don't realize at that time that big companies tend to be really screwed up, so that they're sometimes really easier to beat than a good, well-tuned entrepreneurial operation ... They just look like they can outspend you and throw millions of engineers at you, and it scares you."

Warner Communication signed a check for $28 million, and half went to Bushnell, who stayed on as chairman of Atari but became at odds with the powers that be. Quite simply, Bushnell said later, "I took my eye off the ball." Depending on who tells the story, Bushnell either left or was forced out in 1978. In the years that followed, Atari skyrocketed with the 2600 home video console, but crashed in the early 1980s with the explosion of the personal computer market. Meanwhile, Bushnell was busy making pizza and ranting about robots.

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