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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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13 of the best things to do in Colombia Editor’s Note — CNN Travel series often carry sponsorship originating from the countries and regions we profile. However, CNN retains full editorial control over all of its reports. Read the policy. (CNN) — Tourism to Colombia has grown exponentially in recent years, with thousands more people flocking to the South American destination after decades of it being practically off limits thanks to a long, drawn-out civil war. However, the number of tourists to Colombia is still relatively small compared with its more visited neighbors Peru and Ecuador. And in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic brought international tourism to a halt around the globe. International travelers are currently allowed into Colombia with a negative Covid-19 test result. More information is available on Colombia’s tourism site. There are still plenty of under-explored natural treasures to discover, from swimming among mangroves by starlight to spotting rare birds in the remote mountains. Colombians also know how to indulge, and a trip during normal times wouldn’t be complete without heading to the best food, drink and dancing spots. Here are 13 of the best things to do in Colombia when you travel here: Coffee plantations Colombia is famed for its coffee. Although in past years the country — which is the world’s third largest producer of coffee — used to export all the good stuff, recently Colombians have started keeping the best for themselves. There’s no better way to trace the legacy of Colombian coffee than by visiting a plantation. Travelers can hitch a ride in a traditional “Willy” car, an American car used in World War II that’s now beloved by Colombians to cart things around. From Salento, a small town deep in the country’s Coffee Triangle, five kilometers of dusty tracks head up to Finca El Ocaso, where coffee experts will take visitors through the process from seed to coffee grinding, culminating in a lesson on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Don’t forget to buy a bag to take home. Horse riding at Cafetal de la Trinidad Riding is part of the allure at Cafetal de la Trinidad, a former coffee plantation. Courtesy Cafetal de la Trinidad Founded in 1906 and once a family-run coffee plantation, Cafetal de la Trinidad was abandoned for years due to occupation by the FARC guerrillas, who made it too dangerous for the family to return home. Yet in recent years, the family’s youngest son Alejandro and his partner Anna have lovingly restored the finca — or farm — to its full glory and are now opening it to visitors. Just two hours out of Bogotá but worlds apart, visitors can make the most of the remote location, fresh air and breathtaking scenery by saddling up on one of the farm’s horses and trekking across the stunning countryside. Guests can even take a picnic and toast the beautiful sunset over the mountains as their horses patiently graze in the fields. Swimming with bioluminescent plankton If the crystal clear ocean wasn’t beautiful enough already, visitors to Isla Múcura can take a nighttime dip among the coastal mangroves and watch as the pitch black water lights up with millions of blue-green plankton. The tiny organisms produce light using a chemical called luciferin, and glow when they are moved. So it’s possible to kick back and watch the stars while floating on the Caribbean Sea, or you can dip your head below the water and feel as if you’re a character in “Avatar.” The ecologically-conscious Punta Faro hotel ferries guests to the mangroves via private boat, and returns them in time for a candlelit dinner. Bandeja Paisa in Medellín There is no meal more Colombian than the Bandeja Paisa: hearty, meaty and eye-poppingly huge. And there is no better place to eat Bandeja Paisa than in Medellín, the capital of Antioquia and home of the paisa — the name for inhabitants of the Antioquia, Risaralda and Quindío regions. The dish is usually served on an oval platter and consists of red beans cooked with pork, rice, carne molida — ground meat — chicharrón, fried egg, plantain, chorizo, arepa, hogao — a thick tomato salsa — black pudding and avocado. At El Rancherito on Calle 18 in Medellín diners can gorge themselves for about $10. Scuba diving in Cartagena Although Cartagena is best known for its old, walled city, winding cobbled streets and colorful balconies, the city also has a wealth of underwater treasures. Boasting the Rosario Islands, a natural reserve comprised of 43 tropical islands, an underwater museum, coral reefs and shipwrecks, this stretch of the Caribbean Sea has plenty to discover. Visitors can learn to dive at Paraiso Dive, a diving school located on Tierra Bomba island, just a short boat ride away from Cartagena. Swim in turquoise waters among shallow reefs, deep walls and sunken art, and learn about the company’s efforts to help protect the surrounding reefs. Birdwatching in Serranía del Perijá Colombia is home to more than 1,900 bird species — the highest number in the world. The Perijá mountain range, which straddles the border of Venezuela and Colombia, is one of the best places to go birdwatching and is home to several endangered species that cannot be found anywhere else. After years of being occupied by guerillas, the area has been opening up to visitors, with keen birders heading to Chamicero del Perijá Reserve. Nestled in the mountains, among Andean forests and Colombia’s unique páramo system, an ecoystem only found in the northern Andes, the reserve is a two hour-long drive from the nearest village and has one of the best sunsets in the country. (Reservations are currently not listed online for this reserve, so be sure to inquire with [email protected] before planning your trip.) Salsa dancing in Cali Cali is the Colombian capital of salsa. Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images Cali is the capital of salsa, where dancers take to the floor as early as the afternoon. Although the dance has its origins among the Cuban population in New York City in the mid 1900s, it wasn’t long before salsa reached Colombia. Cali decided to produce its own style of salsa, and the city has never looked back. There are two types of dancers: the old school purists, who stick to the original footwork, and the younger crowd, who like to dance with flair and gymnastic-style lifts. Sondeluz Academy, one of the most renowned salsa studios in Cali, specializes in one-on-one lessons. After mastering the basics and when it’s safe to gather in crowds again, visitors can swing by Zaperoco, a famous salsa club normally packed with talented dancers and a live band on Thursday nights. Whale watching Every year between June and October, locals along the Colombian Pacific coast of Nuquí ready themselves to watch humpback whales migrate past their shores. Located in the Gulf of Tribugá in the Chocó department, Nuquí is the perfect place to catch a glimpse of the mothers and their newborn calves, thanks to its warm waters, free of strong current, and little passing boat traffic. El Cantil Ecolodge offers a whale watching package, taking its guests out to the bay in fiberglass boats, where the whales can be seen from around 200 meters away. The ecolodge is conscious about adhering to international practices and sticking to a respectful distance, although the whales often approach the boats on their own. Hunting for a glimpse of ‘pink’ dolphins Pink dolphins are often thought of as the stuff of myths, and although they’re still a scientific enigma, they can be found in the Amazon River. Guests staying at Calanoa Jungle Lodge, an eco-resort nestled in the Amazon Rainforest overlooking the great river, can go out in a private speedboat to try and catch a glimpse of the “botos,” which can be pink or gray in color. They are the subjects of numerous legends — such as that they turn into handsome men at night to seduce local women (a tale used to cover up unwanted pregnancies). An amazing restaurant The 2.76 square mile restaurant boasts five kitchens, 11 dining areas, two dance floors and normally packs in thousands of people a night. Be sure to check on Covid safety measures before booking during the pandemic. Although it’s a 45-minute drive outside of the capital, it is the place to go in Bogotá and has fed the likes of the president, Shakira and the Red Hot Chili Peppers with its 64-page menu. But the food, featuring traditional Colombian dishes such as chicharrón and patacón to steak and empanadas is just the half of it. After dinner, everyone takes to the dance floor, clutching aguardiente — a traditional Colombian anise liquor — and salsas the night away. Lost City trekking La Ciudad Perdida is Colombia’s answer to Machu Picchu. Shutterstock The Lost City is Colombia’s answer to Machu Picchu — just cheaper with fewer tourists. It’s also believed to have been founded some 650 years before Machu Picchu. An intense, two-and-a-half day trek will see you traverse waterfalls, natural pools and rivers on your way to the sacred place of the indigenous Tayrona tribes. Led by indigenous Kogui guides, Colombian travel agency Expotur offers a four-day package, taking hikers through the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta jungle, and ascending 1,200 steps on the third day to reach the Ciudad Perdida. The beautiful ruins are full of relics and ancient carvings, and visitors can be regaled with ancestral tales before heading back to start their descent. Stargazing in Tatacoa Tatacoa may look like a desert, but it’s in fact an ancient dry tropical forest. The environmental wonder sees astronomers from all over the world flock to the red Mars-esque landscapes to stargaze. Thanks to its unique position, constellations of both the northern and southern hemispheres can be viewed, making for an awe-inspiring experience. In fact, the stars are so captivating, one Colombian astronomer, Javier Fernando Rua Restrepo, camped out for two years before he found a place to live permanently. And he loved it so much he stayed and opened his own observatory, where he hosts a star party every July. Crab-swerving in Providencia For a few weeks every year, Providencia, an island closer to Nicaragua than Colombia, is occupied by the Colombian army, who fly in to protect the thousands of black crabs migrating to the sea. Roads are closed and locals adopt a practice known as “crab-swerving” to avoid hitting the crustaceans, who are protected by local laws and environmental policies. The crabs are a local delicacy, and provide many islanders with their sole income. Due to rising tourism in neighboring San Andres, crab numbers have declined, and so the army was brought in to ensure the migrating crabs had a safe passage down to the sea to lay their eggs. And if you miss migration season — when fishing, consuming and selling the crabs is banned — you’ll get a chance to taste one and see what all the fuss is about. Lucy Sherriff is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Bogotá and covers environment, travel and gender issues. Source link Orbem News #Colombia

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scpie · 4 years ago

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11 Ways to Overcome Fear During a Crisis

July 30, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he wasn’t just making a catchy statement to gin up support for his policies. He was speaking to a nation struggling with what was just the beginning of what we now know as the Great Depression. The statement is not completely true since there are plenty of other things to fear, including sharks, taxes and global pandemics. But this much is an absolute fact — especially for entrepreneurs — fear can lead to unwise decisions, which can bring about the very negative consequences we wish to avoid. There is indeed much to fear about fear itself. Here are 11 ways to overcome fear during the current crisis or the next one you experience.

1. Name the fear

When faced with a crisis and paralyzing fear, the most difficult obstacle in your path may be admitting you are afraid. It’s only once we recognize the reality of the situation that we can deal with it.

One way to better identify your fear is to imagine the worst that can happen. In her New York Times bestseller Insight, author Tasha Eurich shares a recommendation made by decision psychologist Gary Klein, who advocates a “pre-mortem” for major decisions. The idea is to imagine yourself one year in the future and that everything has gone wrong. Your plans are a total disaster. Then write what that would look like. You might find out the worst that can happen isn’t all that bad, or that you can identify steps to avoid the pitfalls that would lead to disaster.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl quoted Spinoza’s Ethics, which said: “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” Or to put it another way, Mr. Rogers said, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

Dr. Benjamin Hardy, an organizational psychologist and the author of Personality Isn’t Permanent, shared these quotes with me and then told me, “The key to overcoming fear is giving it form.” Hardy says this can be done through journaling and open conversation. “Daily journaling about how you’re feeling, in addition to sharing your feelings with key people in your life, make your emotions manageable.”

Hardy says, “Does this take courage? Absolutely. But it’s worth it. It’s worth not being bogged down by fear and needless suffering. When you are open and honest as a person, life becomes far more manageable. You stop needlessly suffering internally about unfulfilled dreams or former hurts. You move forward. And that’s the freaking key! Moving forward! Moving forward as powerfully and authentically as possible.”

Related: 8 Powerful Phrases Leaders Need to Say in a Time of Crisis

2. Use fear to fuel your courage

The Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa said, “We must embrace pain and consume it for fuel on our journey.” During a crisis, you may hear others say, “Nobody can get funded right now,” or “It’s time to survive, forget about growth.” Instead, entrepreneurs like Bryan Brandenburg, founder and chief scientist of visualization company Zenerchi, says, “That’s when I go into warrior mode. Don’t follow the conventional wisdom. It comes from people who are afraid to act or are acting from a place of fear. Instead, look for the opportunities caused by others’ fear.” Or, as Warren Buffet says about how to invest successfully, “Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearful.”

3. Remember the past

When faced with a worrying future, it often pays to think about how we overcame challenges in the past. When thinking of what could be lost, Melinda Dransfield, VP of sales performance elevation for Prudential Retirement, asks, “Have I lost this or something like it before? How did I deal with it before?” and then reminds herself, “I have been through hard things before.”

I started my business in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst. Less than two years later, the economy went into another downturn after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Then there was the 2008 real estate crisis. Now, whenever the business faces difficult circumstances, I tell myself, “You’ve been here before,” and even if I’m not sure exactly how, I know we’ll get through it.

4. Think past the crisis

Imagining a terrible future can help us avoid that future, but what if things work out great? In an April 2020 article in Harvard Business Review, Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz share perspectives from their book Lead from the Future. They say that though we must take care of the here and now, we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Whatever the future holds, they say, “You need to begin preparing for it now. And to do that right, you need to have a longer-term vision of what you aspire to become in five or even 10 years — a north star that will focus and help shape your thinking about the short- and mid-term.”

I’m reminded of how I learned to mow straight lines across a large lawn by focusing on a point in the distance, rather than the ground in front of me. Even if I ran into bumps along the way, as long as I kept my eye on that point, when I finished I could look back and see a straight path. Take care of the short term, but keep an eye on what’s to come or you’ll find it difficult to avoid getting pulled in multiple directions.

Related: You Can’t Do Everything, and If You Try to You’ll Do Even Less

5. Invest in “alive time”

Your business may not be in danger of going under, but perhaps you find yourself with a lot of spare time. Ryan Holiday, author of multiple bestselling books like The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, recalls advice he got about such times from another bestselling author, Robert Green (The 48 Laws of Power). “He told me there are two types of time: alive time and dead time,” Holiday wrote in a recent blog post. “One is when you sit around, when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing.”

Could you use the extra time your business has to retool your systems, train your team, or build new products and services?

6. Build your fear muscle

Think of fear like gravity: With the proper equipment, it can help you become stronger. Noah Kagan, “Chief Sumo” at AppSumo.com, likes “the coffee challenge,” in which you ask for 10 percent off your next purchase. Awkward? Difficult? Scary? That’s the point. Do it repeatedly and it will get easier, not because the task itself is any easier, but because you’ve become stronger.

Jia Jiang took this to the ultimate level when he decided to intentionally get rejected 100 times in 100 days. He was inspired after his first attempt at entrepreneurship ended in rejection, leaving Jia emotionally crushed. However, after he recognized his fear of rejection was harming him more than the actual rejection, he decided to embrace rejection in order to become more comfortable with it. His experiences not only helped him become almost immune to rejection but also led to a TED talk on rejection that has been viewed over 6 million times and the bestselling book Rejection Proof.

7. Reevaluate what makes you unique

In a crisis, it’s easy to lose focus on your business and why it exists and instead get trapped into concerns about next week’s payroll. Of course, short-term concerns are important, but if we focus on them too much we may miss opportunities. “Get very clear on your point of view,” advises Steve Watt, VP of marketing at Grapevine6. “Figure out why (and for whom) your approach offers a way forward in difficult times.” You may have a new customer segment that suddenly cares about your company’s offering in a way they didn’t before.

That’s what happened to Zoom, the video conferencing service, in the early months of 2020. As the Covid-19 virus sent tens of millions of students and workers home, Zoom found itself perfectly positioned to help them stay connected. Through outreach (and a healthy dose of word of mouth) Zoom grew from 10 million to daily users in December 2019 to over 300 million daily users by April 2020.

In a crisis, you can combat fear as you find your new niche and let others know how you can solve their problems.

Related: How Entrepreneurs Can Find Clarity in Uncertain Times

8. Identify what you can — and can’t — control

“Fear isn’t bad. It’s the crippling uncertainty that comes with it that eats at us,” says Zachary Zimmerman, senior account manager at marketing agency agency Number Six. To combat that uncertainty, Zimmerman sorts out which aspects of a challenge he has control over and which he doesn’t. This reduces the uncertainty and allows him to focus on what he can change without wasting time on what he can’t.

9. See fear positively

Fear isn’t all bad — sometimes fear keeps us safe from real harm. Fear can also give us motivation. “Fear can be a very positive emotion when it sparks in us the behavior required to overcome, and when we are confident in where we are going,” says Andy Cindrich, senior consultant at FranklinCovey.

10. Find the opportunity

Marcus Sheridan’s experience shows why it’s so important to see every moment, even a crisis, as an opportunity. In 2008, the real estate crisis hit, and Sheridan was in the swimming pool business. Despite occupying a market in which many people were worried about losing their homes (not buying new pools), Sheridan saw that pool builders weren’t using the internet to answer buyers’ questions. He started answering those questions online, and his company’s website became the Wikipedia of swimming pool information. Now his company is the fastest growing fiberglass swimming pool manufacturer in the world.

“When Covid-19 hit and I realized that it was going to get ugly, once again my thoughts immediately shifted,” Sheridan says. “I told myself, ‘Marcus, commit now to find the opportunity in this moment.’”

In just a few months, Sheridan’s company introduced a virtual sales methodology to its team of dealers all over the country and experienced tremendous success. Despite the pandemic-related economic downturn, in April 2020 Sheridan’s company broke every sales record it has ever had.

Related: How Three Different Tech Companies Are Tackling the Common Fight Against Coronavirus

11. Don’t give up

As a senior sales executive, Hunter Sebresos was present for a meeting in which investors were preparing to shut down the company he was working for. However, he knew their customers had a need, so rather than throwing up his hands and trying to find a new job, he came up with a new business model on the spot, pitched it to the investors right then and there, and won funding to create Bacon, a mobile app that allows companies to post details about their temporary staffing jobs straight from their phones and quickly fill positions, rather than spending days or weeks with a staffing or temp agency.

Your company may be on the brink, but is there a way to pivot that gives you a second chance?

There is always hope

No matter how bad things get, there’s always hope for a better future. Even at the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 24.9 percent — alarming, but it means that 75.1 percent were still employed. Many of the greatest companies of all time were founded during times of great economic challenges. A short list includes Procter & Gamble, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, FedEx, Hyatt, IHOP, Disney, HP, Microsoft, Burger King, CNN and Apple (twice, first during the downturn in 1975, and then when it was resurrected from near-death during the dot-com crash of 2001).

There may be a global crisis right now, and there are certainly others brewing, but even in a crisis — especially during a crisis — there are people out there who need what you have, and there may be no better time to get busy giving it to them.

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imaginepools · 6 years ago

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riichardwilson · 4 years ago

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11 Ways to Overcome Fear During a Crisis

July 30, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

1. Name the fear

Related: 8 Powerful Phrases Leaders Need to Say in a Time of Crisis

2. Use fear to fuel your courage

3. Remember the past

4. Think past the crisis

Related: You Can’t Do Everything, and If You Try to You’ll Do Even Less

5. Invest in “alive time”

Could you use the extra time your business has to retool your systems, train your team, or build new products and services?

6. Build your fear muscle

7. Reevaluate what makes you unique

In a crisis, you can combat fear as you find your new niche and let others know how you can solve their problems.

Related: How Entrepreneurs Can Find Clarity in Uncertain Times

8. Identify what you can — and can’t — control

9. See fear positively

10. Find the opportunity

Related: How Three Different Tech Companies Are Tackling the Common Fight Against Coronavirus

11. Don’t give up

Your company may be on the brink, but is there a way to pivot that gives you a second chance?

There is always hope

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samanthasroberts · 6 years ago

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The Inside Story of Pong and the Early Days of Atari

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn’s work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn’s Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. “It’s a company car,” he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the “game on a TV screen” that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company.

The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another.

Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its “spacey-looking” shape. He had designed it in modeling clay, and Dabney had found a swimming pool manufacturer willing to cast the design in brightly colored fiberglass. The cabinet housed a shoot-em-up-in-outer-space fantasy game called Computer Space. But Alcorn paid the lovely cabinet no attention, aside from noting the vague stink of the fiberglass. He thought the most interesting feature of this, the first videostygame he had ever seen, was Bushnell and Dabney’s decision to use an off-the-shelf television set as a screen. Had they asked him, he would have said that the thirteen-inch black-and-white General Electric model with balky wiring would be most useful for starting fires.

An excerpt from "Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age" by Leslie Berlin

Simon & Schuster

Watching Bushnell demonstrate the game, Alcorn grew excited. Computer Space was based on an iconic game called Spacewar!, written in 1963 by an informal group at MIT led by Steve Russell. Across the country, programmers played and constantly modified Spacewar! on time-sharing machines in fledgling computer science departments. Most technical people who saw Spacewar! were entranced by its computing implications: it demonstrated that a computer could draw on a screen, calculate trajectories, and detect when a ship was hit.

But Alcorn knew that there was no computer inside Bushnell and Dabney’s Computer Space, even if the promotional literature bragged of a “Computer (Brain Box).” Computers were far too expensive to use in a scenario like this one. Something else must be controlling the patterns and movement on the screen. Alcorn wanted to know what.

He opened the cabinet, glanced at the wiring, and fell in love. Bushnell and Dabney had tweaked the dedicated logic circuits within the wiring of the television so that they could produce the same effects as the time-sharing computer in the original Spacewar! game. “A very, very clever trick,” Alcorn called it. Without a computer, without software, without a frame buffer, a microprocessor, or even memory chips beyond a few flip-flops, Bushnell and Dabney had made a dot appear and move on the screen. Even to Alcorn, who had repaired televisions since he was a teenager and was now working on high-resolution displays at Ampex, the trick seemed “almost impossible.”

about the author

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a “Prototype” columnist for the New York Times, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Alcorn had a gush of questions. Bushnell waited for him to calm down. Then he offered Alcorn a job at $1,000 per month and 10 percent of the startup company that he and Dabney had each kicked in $350 to launch. Bushnell and Dabney called their company Syzygy (a word that refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies) but soon renamed it Atari, after discovering that another company had incorporated under the name Syzygy. In Bushnell and Dabney’s favorite game, Go, “Atari” means roughly the same thing as “Check” in chess. Or, as Bushnell later chose to define it, “Atari means you are about to be engulfed.”

Syzygy, the soon-to-be Atari, designed games for manufacturers such as the pinball giant Bally to manufacture and sell. Syzygy had designed Computer Space, Bushnell explained, but a small operation called Nutting Associates, which owned the office in which they were standing, was manufacturing it. Bushnell and Dabney’s chutzpah impressed Alcorn almost as much as the electronic trick. He had never known anyone who had left a job at a big company to start a new business, as Bushnell and Dabney had left Ampex. (Memorex had spun out of Ampex in 1961, before Alcorn’s time there.) The move felt right, though, he thought—another way in which young, bright people were writing new rules for themselves in the wake of the 1960s. Then again, the salary Bushnell was offering was a 17 percent cut from Alcorn’s Ampex paycheck. The 10 percent ownership stake, he figured, was worthless since Atari would probably fail.

Alcorn’s then girlfriend (and future wife), Katie, encouraged him to “take a chance on a flyer.” After all, they had no kids and no mortgage. And if, as Alcorn predicted, Syzygy/Atari failed, he would find another job at one of the many businesses in and around Mountain View that were hiring electrical engineers.

In the end, Alcorn, the careful adventurer, decided that he “had nothing to lose” by joining Bushnell and Dabney. “Life is short,” he thought. It was time to create his own chances.

A Few Misdirections

When Alcorn reported to work at Atari’s newly rented offices on Scott Boulevard in Sunnyvale, he learned that Bushnell’s entrepreneurial risk taking that had so impressed him was a sham. Though it was true that Bushnell had launched the startup company with Dabney, he had done so with a safety net that Alcorn did not have: he was a full-time salaried employee at Nutting Associates, the company that licensed and built Computer Space. Bushnell’s salary was higher than what he had earned at Ampex—and on top of it, he had negotiated licensing fees from Nutting as an independent contractor.

Bushnell had told his wife that he would be running his own company within two years of coming to California. He decided to consider the Nutting job “kind of a rounding error” that he could “edit out of conversations” when he talked about his new videogame business. “Entrepreneur” sounded “more glamorous,” he later explained when asked why he had not told Alcorn about his job with Nutting. Appearances mattered to Bushnell; his first hire at Atari was a receptionist, his children’s seventeen-year-old babysitter, whom he told to place all callers on hold with a promise to “see if Mr. Bushnell or Mr. Dabney was available,” even if the men were right in front of her. Years later, he would call his early success in business “a matter of being enthusiastic and glib.”

Alcorn soon learned about a second misdirection. Bushnell and Dabney had built Computer Space using spare Ampex parts. Before Alcorn had joined Atari, he had asked if the cofounders had offered the game to Ampex, which likely had rights to it. Bushnell had assured him that Ampex had turned down the offer. Now Alcorn learned that Bushnell had never offered Computer Space to Ampex. (“I may have told Al that I did [approach Ampex],” Bushnell told me. Bushnell’s boss, Kurt Wallace, who would have been the one to receive the licensing offer at Ampex, told me that no such offer was made.)

Soon Bushnell misled Alcorn a third time, though Alcorn would not know it for weeks. Bushnell told his new engineer to build a Ping-Pong game for a contract with General Electric. He described how he wanted the game to look, specifying details down to the line dividing the screen and the rectangular paddles on either side. The game needed to be cheap, he said, and ideally, it would contain no more than 20 chips. It needed to use the clever video-positioning technique that Alcorn so admired.

Alcorn, determined to impress General Electric, drove to a department store on El Camino Real and bought its best black-and-white television. Back at the office, he designed segmented paddles, with each segment sending the ball careening back at a different angle. The sync generator inside the television, he discovered, already contained certain tones, and with a bit of manipulation, he came up with a satisfying pong sound when the ball hit the paddle. He configured the game so that play would speed up after a few rallies. He decided not to try to fix a bug that kept the paddles from reaching the top of the screen, since it meant that a ball could slip above or below even the most skilled player’s reach, making for a more challenging game. When Alcorn went to the founders for additional ideas, Bushnell pushed for sounds of crowds cheering for good shots. Dabney suggested boos and jeers for misses. It was a perfect encapsulation of the differences in the two men: Bushnell all enthusiasm, Dabney more guarded.

After only three months, Alcorn had a working prototype of the game, which either he or Bushnell named Pong. (When asked in 2016 who had come up with the name, Alcorn and Bushnell each pointed at the other.) Alcorn thought the game played well, but he worried that he had failed in his assignment. With more than 70 chips, rather than the 20 Bushnell had requested, there was no way the game would meet General Electric’s specifications.

Telling Bushnell that Pong was finished but too complex, Alcorn offered to redesign it. Bushnell suggested that they play. He had played the game while Alcorn was developing it, but this time, he grew increasingly excited with each rally. Pong was a “great game,” he declared. The phrase had a specific meaning for Bushnell: easy to learn but hard to master. When Alcorn again worried aloud that General Electric might reject the game due to its high chip count, Bushnell seemed to smile to himself.

Then he let Alcorn in on a secret: there was no General Electric contract. Bushnell had lied. Pong was an in-house exercise that Bushnell had thought would help Alcorn master the video-positioning trick.

Alcorn was surprised but not angry. He would feel the same way three years later when he learned that Bushnell had been able to describe the Ping-Pong game he wanted in such fine detail because he was describing a table tennis game sold by Magnavox for its Odyssey system. In essence, he had assigned Alcorn to reproduce the Magnavox game. “It’s like the movie The Producers, you know?” Alcorn reminisced years later. “We’re going to steal this idea from Magnavox, but it’s a turkey so what’s the problem? [But] all of a sudden it’s a success.” (Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement, eventually settling out of court.)

Bushnell’s misdirections and exaggerations freed Alcorn to achieve technical feats he otherwise would have talked himself out of attempting. “‘It can’t be done! You don’t want to do that!’: I used to say that a lot in my life,” Alcorn later explained. “I fortunately had Nolan to goad me into doing it anyway.” Alcorn, who had the technical skills to build just about anything but was not a dreamer as a young man, needed someone like Bushnell to spark and channel his talent. Bushnell recorded so many new ideas every day that little sheets of paper covered in his scrawled hand-writing regularly dropped from his pockets.

And Bushnell, with his nearly limitless imagination and more limited technical ability, needed Alcorn to help realize his visions. “Nolan is a dreamer,” Alcorn says. “I get the dirty end of the stick and have to make these things happen.”

Pong Overfloweth

Far from the elegant sculpted fiberglass that encased Computer Space, Pong’s cabinet was a simple wooden box painted orange, with two silver knobs to control the on-screen paddles. A metal panel with P-O-N-G on the front offered the only nod to aesthetics. Onto the side of the box, Dabney welded a coin slot of the sort used in Laundromats and kiddie rides.

Alcorn connected the prototype board to the black-and-white television, shoved the entire contraption into Dabney’s cabinet, and drove with the founders to a nearby bar. Andy Capp’s Tavern was dim, smoky, and, like many bars in Sunnyvale in the summer of 1972, notable only for cheap beer and pinball machines. Bushnell and Dabney knew the owner. Atari ran a small side business servicing pinball machines for a percentage of the take, and Andy Capp’s was a customer.

The three Atari employees plunked Pong down on a decorative barrel. It was not much to look at, particularly next to the slickly packaged, blinging and flashing pinball machines and the beautiful Computer Space Bushnell had convinced the bar owner to put on the floor.

Nonetheless, two guys soon separated themselves from the crowd of muttonchopped men at the pinball machines and began inspecting Pong. After a minute, one man dropped a quarter into the coin box.

The prototype Pong had no directions, but the players figured it out. They seemed to enjoy their few minutes of playing, their heads pushed together in front of the screen.

When the game ended, they did not put in another quarter. They walked away.

Bushnell stood up. He had to go talk to those guys, he said. He wanted to know how they’d liked the game. Alcorn followed him across the bar.

Bushnell said hello to Pong’s first-ever paying customers and then, nodding toward the game and keeping his voice neutral, asked, “What do you think of that?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve played these things before,” one player replied. “I know the guys who built these things.”

No one corrected him. There was some satisfaction in having built a game so cool that people were pretending to have a connection to it. “Watching people play your game,” Bushnell later explained, “is like getting a standing ovation.”

About a week later, the bar’s manager called Alcorn. There was something wrong with the Pong machine. Alcorn drove over in his secondhand ’63 Cadillac Fleetwood and was greeted inside the bar by a small group of Pong fans. Explaining that he would need to play a few games to diagnose the problem, Alcorn bent to unlock the coin box so he could throw the inside switch that would grant unlimited free games.

As soon as he pulled the door open, he saw the quarters. Coins had filled the coffee can that served as a coin box and overflowed onto the wooden floor of the cabinet. There had to be $100 in quarters. Pong had not been starting because the coin box was too full to trip the start mechanism.

Alcorn swept up Atari’s half of the take and handed the manager the balance and a business card. “Next time this happens, you call me at home right away. I can always fix this one,” Alcorn promised. His immediate solution was to replace the coffee can with a larger receptacle: a milk carton.

The next step was to build a few more prototype machines and send them to other bars for testing before deciding on the exact features to include in the final version of the game. Dabney found a local shop, P. S. Hurlbut in Santa Clara, to build a freestanding tall cabinet to house the game’s screen and components. Alcorn drove over to Andy Capp’s to get a clearer sense of the demands Pong faced. He counted the coins that had been deposited through the coin slot. If each quarter represented 20 or 30 turns of a knob, Pong needed a potentiometer that could rotate a million times in three months without failing. He set about to find one.

Bushnell, meanwhile, worried about game play. He told Alcorn that the game needed instructions. Alcorn thought that was absurd. The players at Andy Capp’s had figured it out, hadn’t they? But again he decided to play along. He wrote three commands to appear on the game’s faceplate:

• Deposit quarter

• Ball will serve automatically

• Avoid missing ball for high score

Within a few weeks, 10 bars had Pong games. Alcorn, Bushnell, and Dabney were confident that they had built machines that could survive semi-intoxicated players with sloshing beer cups, but they had underestimated the abuse that the games would face. Players chucked pool balls at the cabinets, figuring that if a certain spot were hit just right, the reward would be a free game. The machines shorted out when they were shaken, or even just played often, because quarters would fall on the printed circuit board under the coin mechanism.

Even well-intentioned bar owners broke the Pongs. The owners were accustomed to pinball machines with mechanical relays, flippers, and lights that could be fixed with a screwdriver or a file. If a Pong machine was not loud enough or the screen not bright enough, the bar owners would open the back and start looking for something to adjust. More often than not, they settled on an appealingly accessible dial—and began turning, not realizing it was the game’s external power supply. Every prototype came back to Atari with the power blown. Despite the problems, the Pong machines brought in some $150 per week, roughly three to five times as much as the typical pinball machine. The game was simultaneously intuitive (turn knob, move paddle) and astonishing in 1972, when most Americans had only seen screens display images sent from a broadcast network or projected from slides or a reel of film. Pong was different. It was interactive, viewer-commanded television. Bushnell would grow accustomed to people asking how the television networks sensed that Pong’s knobs had been rotated.

Alcorn began hearing stories of lines outside the bars at nine in the morning—not to drink but to play what Alcorn sometimes called “this stupid Pong game.” In Berkeley, Steve Bristow, an engineering student who had done the same Ampex rotation program as Alcorn (and who had helped build Computer Space using Ampex parts) worked part-time for Atari, maintaining pinball machines and collecting Atari’s weekly take.

He began to fear for his safety after Pong was installed at a bar on his route and his canvas bags earmarked for Atari swelled to hold some $1,000 in quarters. When the police refused to issue him a gun permit, he scared up a novel mode of protection: the hatchet he had used in a previous job roofing houses. He gave his wife the hatchet to carry while he walked behind her with the heavy money bags. “Even in Berkeley, people would part for a crazy woman with hatchet,” he said with satisfaction.

The success of the prototype Pongs lit a fire under Bushnell and Dabney. “We got hit in the ass by lightning with Pong. Holey moley!” Alcorn says. Atari rushed into large-scale manufacturing.

The Rift

Bushnell had never run a company, but he possessed a number of gifts that would serve him well as an executive. He carried himself like a leader. “I expect one day to be working for him,” his Ampex boss had written on Bushnell’s evaluation. Bushnell’s monumental enthusiasm, which led one early videogame journalist to call him “about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game,” would also inspire customers and Atari employees. Bushnell loved games of all sorts; he even created them out of everyday circumstances. One former Atari employee says, “If there were two flies on the wall, Nolan would be betting on which fly would take off before the other one.”

But Bushnell was alone. He had no mentors, no venture capitalist backing him, no business school professors or consultants watching over his shoulder. There were no videogame industry leaders to ask for help or analysts to measure Atari’s performance against its competitors’. Atari had an attorney who had helped with the incorporation but did not seem useful for much more. Dabney knew no more about business than Bushnell, and Alcorn knew even less.

So Bushnell read books. He consumed business tomes in the same way he had once devoured guides to chess and Go, looking for classic strategies and unexpected moves. He read about how to name companies and how to find customers. In essence, he decided that if videogames could be a big business, then business could be played like a big game. He needed to unravel the motivations of all the players: the employees, the customers, the suppliers, the banks that granted Atari $2.5 million in lines of credit at usurious rates.

Bushnell put this gamesmanship into practice almost immediately. He talked suppliers into giving Atari between 30 and 60 days to pay for the televisions, chips, harnesses, and cabinetry inside Pong. At the same time, he insisted that Atari’s customers, game distributors who were buying the machines as fast as Atari could build them, pay on delivery. With Pongs selling for roughly $1,100 and costing roughly $600 to build, it was a classic bootstrapping operation: the high gross margin allowed Atari to self-finance its growth. To save the time and expense of posting job openings, Bushnell and Dabney hired manufacturing employees out of the lobby of a nearby unemployment office and from a training center whose president brought in a few students and suggested, “You wanna hire these guys.”

Some 7,000 Pong games were sold in six months—not Bushnell’s 100 per day, but impressive nonetheless. Most Pong games ended up in bars or arcades. But airports, hotels, and high-end department stores that never would have considered a pool table or pinball machine also hosted the game, prized for its relative quiet, novelty, and cutting-edge feel.

Atari moved its manufacturing operations to an abandoned roller skating rink in Santa Clara. Alcorn, the head of engineering, was working on new games along with his small team of engineers, some of whom were drawn to the company because it was one of the few places doing computer graphics work with no connection to the military. The war in Vietnam was still raging, and there were also mounting concerns about President Nixon’s involvement in the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex.

Steve Bristow, the former ax-wielding Berkeley student and an excellent engineer, had come to work full-time at Atari as soon as he received his degree. Alcorn and Bristow wore their hair and beards long and their pants bell-bottomed, but they saw themselves as professionals in a sophisticated engineering operation. When their workdays ended, they went home to their families.

That kind of professionalism could seem unusual at Atari. Pong was born into an industry already censured, or even banned, by polite society. The game was classed with pinball machines, and in 1972, pinball was still illegal in New York and had only recently been legalized in Chicago. Pinball machines were considered games of chance with a “payout” in the form of a free game: a small step removed from gambling. Even as the occasional Pong sneaked into a nice lounge, the seedy feel of sticky bar stools and dingy pool halls hung over the videogame industry. The first major profile of Bushnell, written by Alcorn’s fraternity brother Bob Wieder, appeared in the skin magazine Oui. Alcorn had a gun pulled on him by a distributor who claimed that Pong was encroaching on his territory. At one trade show where Atari displayed its games, another product on offer was “The Duke,” “the First, Original, And All New Adult Movie Machine.” For a quarter, a patron could step into a phone-booth-like cabinet (designed for “ease of cleaning”), shut the door behind him, and watch a short 8mm film in privacy.