The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 119

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Electrodes are taped to a victim's paralyzed areas, such as a forearm, he said, and any electrical activity is picked up, amplified and relayed to the Pong console, where it is analyzed for use in rehabilitating the patient. He added that a New York optometrist named Dr. Melvin Schrier prescribes video games for children with learning problems, as well as to correct some types of eye ailments. (Schrier's associate. Dr.

Kenneth Bair, confirmed this claim, saying that about 20 percent of their patients with visual training problems, such as crossed eyes or wall eyes, were advised to play the video games Pong and Handball to strengthen their eye muscles.) Bushnell's company recently established a new division to develop aids for the physically and mentally handicapped, "but we're not making any medical claims," he said warily. "We're not saying video games can cure neuritis, neuralgia or even marital problems." He was also a bit reluctant to talk about video games as an educational tool, even though two Atari games, Basic Math and Hangman, an electronic version of the popular word game, are both educationally oriented. "The minute you label something 'educational' nobody buys it," Bushnell insisted. "It's the kiss of death on the marketplace." He said his company's Video Computer System currently has more than 250 video games and variations available on 15 cartridges that fit into a player that, in turn, is wired to the television set. Each cartridge is $19.95, and the player is $189.

Even though Bushnell now has com' petition from about a dozen video-game companies, both in this country and Hong Kong, he said Atari still had the biggest share of the market between 30 and 40 percent. Bushnell, who worked his way through the University of Utah by managing the games at a Salt Lake City amusement park, now lives in a style which reflects that success: He and his wife, who is pregnant, live on a 15-acre estate overlooking San Francisco Bay, and own a 41-foot sailboat named Pong, a Mercedes 450 SL and a Lake Tahoe ski cabin. By JUDY KLEMESRUD ffi New York Times News Service NEW YORK They call him King Pong, and he sat in a Plaza Hotel suite the other day with another grown man, both of them giggling, yelling and occasionally cursing as they frantically fingered the controls of a new home video game called Outlaw. Bang, boing, ping, bleep came the sounds from the color television set, as two computer-created video cowboys tried to gun each other down from behind a cactus, a stagecoach and then a wall. Finally, King Pong, whose real name is Nolan Bushnell, won the game when his outlaw gunned down his video opponent 10 times.

The outcome was not surprising when you consider that the 35-year-old Bushnell has been horsing around with these games since he invented the prototype game, Pong, in 1972. Today, with Pong pinging away in an estimated 13 million American homes, Bushnell is a multimillionaire. He is also board chairman of Atari a video-game company in Sunnyvale, which he and a partner founded in 1972 with $500, and sold to Warner Communications Inc. in 1976 for $28 million. Last year, the company had sales of $100 million, Bushnell said.

Why have Americans gone haywire over video games? "They're fun," Bushnell replied, now trying to blast space ships out of the sky in what he called his favorite video game, Space War. "I think it's the first time people have been able to talk back to their television set, and make it do what they want it to do. It gives you a sense of control, whereas before all you could do was sit and switch channels." Pow! Crash! Bang! Once again, Bushnell defeated his partner, Joseph Keenan, president of Atari, who seemed resigned to getting beaten. Bushnell was in New York supposedly to discuss the impact of video games on the consumer, and how the games may be applied in medical and educational areas. But he really wasn't much interested in talking about anything not when there were such new Atari games as Codebreaker, Hangman, Home Run and Hunt Score in front of him to play, and a willing loser like Keenan at his side.

Now and then, however, the bearded, 6-foot-4-inch, 200-pound Bushnell would look up from the current game on the television screen usually when the game was over and answer a few questions. What did he think about charges that home video games were harmful to television sets? "It's all a big smoke screen," he replied angrily. "The Federal Trade Commission came out with a disclaimer last fall, after a year of testing. There are no problems now, although the early black-and-white games of some manufacturers did do some harm." He also scoffed at another frequent i I Sv $30 I Pifef if 9 "vnr SL A M. J.

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