A quick transcript of a few questions posed to Steve Wozniak. by Andy Welburn www.andys-arcade.com ANDY: Were you officially employed by Atari? or did you just drop-in to help out? i understand atari was a pretty laid back place to work at WOZ: I designed my own pong game on my own. Atari heard about it and I met the key people there. Nolan Bushnell offered me a job on the spot but I said no. HP was too good a company to ever leave. Eventually, Nolan asked Steve Jobs to get me to design a low chip count single-player pong game, Breakout. This I did. Steve was paid and shared the money with me It was very laid back at Atari and all the people carried that feeling ANDY: Aproximately what dates did you work there? WOZ: 1974, about a year before I designed what became the Apple I ANDY: Which projects did you have a hand in creating, apart from Breakout? WOZ: None ANDY: Do you know when Steve Jobs worked at Atari? approx dates? i have some info of him signing on some ECN sheets and diagrams for other games, but can't work out his involvement. WOZ: 1973-1974 I think He made adjustments to games that were designed primarily by the R&D group in Grass Valley ANDY: The story about you creating Breakout is told many different ways, did the reduced number of chips version that you created actually get put into production? people say the engineers couldn't figure it out, so they started over again? Did you help out with production in any way once it was under way, like the cocktail mod board? WOZ: It was tight and clever and used chips in clever ways. The engineers couldn't figure it out. They probably wanted to adjust the horizontal or vertical timing slightly. They should have just called me. I don't know who did it over from the start. Too bad, since it was very few chips and worked. I never saw anyone at Atari regarding Breakout, either before or after designing and delivering it in a 4-day period. I only interfaced with Steve. We went in at night when nobody was there, for those 3 or 4 nights ANDY: Any idea what happened to the original wirewrap prototype? do you still own anything from Atari at that time, as a souvenir? WOZ:No idea ANDY: What was Steve Jobs' main role at atari, and how many games did he work on? WOZ: I don't have the exact answer, but he would take freshly designed games and modify them and add better sounds and things like that. It wasn't exactly original engineering, but was helpful to Atari. I don't know how many projects he worked on. It may have been between 4 and 12, but I don't know ANDY: I have uncovered Breakout PCB's with 'Breakthru' screened onto the pcb, i assume this is just a working title, and nothing else? how many pcbs do you think were produced under the working title? WOZ: I don't know. I never talked with people at Atari. They came up with the name and the game definition ANDY: Does the Atari VCS2600 naming convention have any meaningful association with the magic 2600hz tone? WOZ: I never thought about that, but I would guess not ANDY: PS- If you ever get to the UK, you are more than welcome round to our private classic arcade (60+ machines :) WOZ: Thanks. London used to be my favorite place in the world and I went often. I even carry a set of instructions that I wrote as to how to solve the Longleat Castle maze. It took me many trips to compile that list, with the help of my kids -- Regards, Steve (is tv wake zone?)