The next day.
Ethan Jones once again took the wheel of the Ford F-150 he'd borrowed from Thomas Johnson. In the truck bed, wrapped tightly in oilcloth, sat the Snake game console—his pride—as he sped toward Sunnyvale, twenty-three miles away.
In the future, this city would become a key part of the legendary Silicon Valley. But for now? Its most prominent businesses were massage parlors.
Ethan hadn't driven all this way for a massage. After circling the area a few times, he finally stopped to ask directions from a kind auntie tending her garden. Following her tips—and several confusing turns—he eventually found his destination: a squat industrial building surrounded by iron bars. On the spiked gate, a sign read Exidy, bold white letters against a red background.
Ethan honked the horn. A moment later, a white man in a grease-stained work uniform emerged from the building. Upon seeing the pristine Ford pickup, he trotted over and asked, "Sir, who are you looking for?"
"I'm looking for Peter Kaufman." Ethan slid off his sunglasses.
The man's steps faltered. The sight of Ethan's sharp jawline and movie-star features left him momentarily stunned.
"Sir… I'm Pete Kaufman."
Then he blinked, recognition dawning. "Wait—are you Ethan Jones? The Ethan Jones who called me yesterday?"
"Yeah, Pete. That's me."
Ethan slapped the steering wheel with a grin, gave a thumbs-up, and pointed behind him. "I brought the machine I told you about on the phone."
"Oh! Okay!" Pete's expression brightened. "Ethan—welcome to Exidy Game Company."
He rushed to unlock the gate and motioned for Ethan to drive in. "Park anywhere you like."
Ethan had come to Exidy today in hopes of striking a partnership. This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment visit—it was a carefully considered step, one based on months of quiet research into the state of the video game industry.
The birth of video games had been... peculiar. Although the world's first electronic game was developed back in 1947—just an oscilloscope-based simulation created in a lab—it wasn't until the 1960s that things truly began to stir. With the launch of the first commercial minicomputer, the PDP-1, in 1960, video games crept from the ivory towers of science labs into elite tech universities.
The next year, inventive MIT students created Spacewar!—a space combat game that would become legendary in programmer circles.
In 1971, The Oregon Trail, the world's first educational text-based game, was developed by student teachers at the University of Minnesota.
But for all this creative spark, early video games never made it beyond the academic world.
Why? Simple: computers were just too expensive.
Scientists believed video games would never reach the public so long as computers remained luxury items. Even the university crowd thought the average person wouldn't touch a game console for decades. But Ethan saw the tide turning—and fast.
But in that same year when The Oregon Trail debuted, a man named Nolan Bushnell had a revolutionary idea: Video games didn't need expensive computers at all.
He believed that the game's visual feedback could be displayed using basic physics and simple electronic circuitry. While everyone else was stuck on the idea that computers were the only platform, Bushnell saw another way.
So, using the most fundamental physical display techniques, he built an arcade version of Spacewar!—the game developed by MIT students in 1962—and called it Computer Space.
This became the first officially commercialized video game in history.
But it flopped. Computer Space was just that—a brilliant but complicated game. It made perfect sense to engineers, but not to everyday bar patrons. It was an impressive product, sure, but one only a genius could love. The average person had no idea how to play it.
But Bushnell learned from the mistake. And the very next year—1972—he had a moment of clarity.
At a press conference for the Magnavox Odyssey, he saw a simple built-in demo: a game of virtual table tennis. It was intuitive. Familiar. Anyone could understand it.
But Magnavox had priced the Odyssey console at $100 per unit—a steep price in 1972, and far out of reach for most Americans.
Bushnell, on the other hand, knew he could take that same table tennis game, put it in an arcade cabinet, and charge just 25 cents per play.
So he did, He cloned the game, renamed it Pong, and placed it in a bar.
And the rest? That was the beginning of legend. Low price + instant fun = a phenomenon.
Atari was born. Nolan Bushnell didn't just succeed—he cracked the video game industry wide open.
Yes, his game was plagiarized. That part's not in dispute.
But even so, he's still remembered as the father of the video game industry, and rightly so.
Because while other engineers sat in labs dreaming up how to let the public play games on computers, Bushnell smashed the idea that a computer was needed at all.
It was disruptive. It was genius. It was the broken-windows theory applied to tech: skip the palace, build the tent.
His approach immediately sparked imitators. Within just two years, electronic arcade machines had taken over the entrances of every bar, billiard room, and bowling alley in America.
It was precisely because Bushnell and Atari had already overcome the hardest part—convincing the public to care—that Ethan didn't even consider going door to door to pitch Snake himself.
He understood the market. First of all, consumers couldn't afford to buy arcade machines on their own.
These machines, especially when first purchased a year or two ago, had cost vendors $1,000 to $1,200 each. For most small business owners, that was a heavy investment. And naturally, they wanted to stretch that investment for as long as possible—not replace the whole machine after just a few months.
So even Atari didn't try to sell brand-new arcade units with every new game.
Instead, they launched a motherboard replacement service.
They'd retrieve a customer's old machine, swap in a new motherboard with the latest game, refurbish the cabinet, and return it—all for the cost of just the board. Smart. Cheap. Scalable.
Ethan had no doubt. If he wanted Snake to make waves, this was the model to follow.
When even Atari didn't dare mention the word "elimination" to its vendor partners, Ethan knew better than to act high and mighty.
He wasn't here to care anyone. To Ethan, making real money in this business—big money—meant skipping slow grassroots promotion. No door-to-door sales, no street pitching. If you wanted to scale, you had to plug into the veins of the industry right away.
That meant one thing: Partner directly with arcade machine manufacturers—companies already in touch with the market, with sales channels, contacts, and distribution reach.
It was like how Hollywood worked: Independent producers with no distribution muscle would take their finished films to the "Big Eight" studios and pay a hefty fee for release. Sure, the studios took a cut—but the producers got access to theaters, audiences, and buzz. If the movie succeeded, that exposure could turn a nobody into a legend.
No name? You bend. Famous? You print money.
So before walking out of Magnavox for good, Ethan had copied down the full list of arcade machine manufacturers that the company had gathered in its market research.
Out of all of them, Exidy was the closest to Ethan's hometown of Los Gatos.
Founded in 1973, Exidy had become a key supplier of arcade machines to bars, pool halls, and billiard clubs all over the San Francisco area.
As Ethan pulled into the lot, the noise drew several workers out of the warehouse. A handful of white men in overalls came jogging over, excited at the sight of the truck.
When they heard Ethan had brought a new video game to demo, the mood turned electric.
"Yo! Ethan! So glad you chose us!" shouted one of them—a middle-aged man with a round hat and oil-stained clothes.
He gave Ethan a high-five, then clapped sharply and barked orders:
"Young men! Hop to it! Unload Ethan's truck!"
The warm welcome surprised Ethan. He looked over at Peter Kaufman, who smiled knowingly.
"This is my partner, Samuel Hawes," Peter explained. "To be honest, Ethan—if your machine is even half as good as you said on the phone, I think we've got something here. People are tired of what's out there."
Ethan understood exactly what Peter meant. Even though Atari had kicked off the video game boom back in 1972, no one had really innovated since.
There wasn't a single widely successful game on the market that was truly original or developed in-house by manufacturers. Most companies were just copying—rehashing the same gameplay concepts again and again.
Why? Simple: many of the best early games were created by university students, with unclear ownership or licensing. And in the absence of copyright enforcement, plagiarism was the default business strategy.
At first, consumers were drawn in by the novelty. But over time, with every manufacturer serving up the same recycled experiences, the audience grew bored. The industry was heading toward a creative wall. Sooner or later, someone would need to develop something fresh and original.
That, Ethan knew, was his edge. Because unlike everyone else?
He had Snake. He had a fresh mechanic. And—well…
Who else at age twenty has forty years of design experience?
Notes:
① Exidy – Exidy's most notorious release was Death Race, a violent arcade game where players drove cars to run over humanoid figures. The game stirred national controversy and even made headlines in the New York Times. Its over-the-top violence later influenced films like Mad Max and Motorcycle.
② Although Nolan Bushnell is often criticized for copying, he is still recognized as the father of video games. His legacy doesn't lie in originality, but in breaking industry paradigms—proving that video games could exist outside of expensive computers. That disruptive thinking is what truly changed everything.
③ The game industry environment of 1975—as described in the text—is accurate. Nolan Bushnell himself once joked that he had copied Magnavox Odyssey's table tennis game, only to have Pong copied by nearly everyone else. The market at the time was a chaotic, comically unregulated free-for-all.