Editing Nolan Bushnell (section)

===Early career and Syzygy===
Bushnell worked at [[Lagoon Amusement Park]] for many years while attending college. He was made manager of the games department two seasons after starting.<ref name="ataridep1"/> While working there, he became familiar with arcade [[electro-mechanical games]], watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery while learning how it worked, developing his understanding of how the game business operates. He was also interested in the [[Midway Games|Midway]] [[arcade game]]s, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal and win the prize. He liked the concept of getting people curious about the game and from there getting them to pay the fee in order to play.<ref name="NGen23"/>

While in college, he worked for several employers, including [[Litton Industries|Litton Guidance and Control Systems]], Hadley Ltd, and the industrial engineering department at the U of U. For several summers, he built his own advertising company, Campus Company, which produced blotters for four universities and sold advertising space around a calendar of events. He also sold copies of ''[[Encyclopedia Americana]]''.<ref name="ataridep1"/>

After graduating, Bushnell had moved to California from Utah with the hopes of being hired by [[Disney]], but the company was not in the routine practice of hiring fresh college graduates. Instead, Bushnell got a job as an electrical engineer with [[Ampex]].<ref name="rise and fall chp2"/> At Ampex, he met fellow employee [[Ted Dabney]] and found they had common interests. Bushnell shared his ideas of creating pizza parlors filled with electronic games with Dabney, and took Dabney to the computing labs at [[Stanford University centers and institutes|Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]] to show him ''[[Spacewar!]]''.<ref name="edge">{{cite magazine | title = The Untold Atari Story | first= Leonard | last = Herman | date = April 2009 | volume =200 | magazine = [[Edge (magazine)|Edge]] | pages = 94–99 }}</ref>

In 1970, Bushnell and Dabney formed Syzygy with the intention of producing a ''Spacewar!'' clone known as ''[[Computer Space]]''. They made an agreement with [[Nutting Associates]], a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, that produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that included a coin-slot mechanism.<ref name="arcadehistory">
{{cite web
  | title = Big History of the Arcade
  | url=http://dragonsden.emuunlim.com/ddhistory.htm
  | access-date = August 31, 2007 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070609102853/http://dragonsden.emuunlim.com/ddhistory.htm <!-- Bot retrieved archive --> |archive-date = June 9, 2007}}</ref><ref name="moby">
{{cite web
  | title = Nolan Bushnell profile
  | url=http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,66816/
  | access-date = August 31, 2007 }}</ref><ref name="computerspace">
{{cite web
  | title = Computer Space History
  | url=http://www.computerspacefan.com/History.htm
  | access-date = August 31, 2007 }}</ref>

''Computer Space'' was a commercial failure, though sales exceeded $3 million.<ref>{{cite web|url= http://www.technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-of-the-arcade-video-game/3/|title=Computer Space and the Dawn of the Arcade Video Game |date=December 12, 2011 |publisher=Technologizer |access-date=February 3, 2018}}</ref> Bushnell felt that Nutting Associates had not marketed the game well,<ref name="NGen23"/> and decided that his next game would be licensed to a bigger manufacturer. Bushnell also knew that the next game they developed would need to be simpler and not require users to read instructions on the cabinet, since their target audience would likely be drunken bar patrons.<ref name="rise and fall chp2"/>