Duke pushed through the doors of the converted storage room, the sound of the theme park crowds fading behind him.
The space had been repurposed overnight into a makeshift office for Atari.
Nolan Bushnell stood over a table, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
He wore his trademark hawaii shirt, looking visibly exhausted but radiating energy still for some reason.
A small group of engineers sat around the table.
They had breakfast spread out in front of them. One was holding a KFC bucket, while another had a bag of Wendy's.
"Duke, you have to see these field reports," Nolan said. He stepped away from the workbench and grabbed a stack of printed data to give him.
The sheets showed the rollout of the Star Wars arcade cabinets across major test markets.
The numbers were big, 30k arcade machines were already ordered to be distributed.
Nolan explained that route operators were calling in since coin boxes inside the cabinets were jamming from how much market the arcades were seeing.
Duke smiled.
He traced his finger over the exponential revenue growth charts, he liked it, but this was probably driven a lot by Star Wars success.
He wondered if Star Wars was going to become the greatest IP for Paramount, after all, Americans loved it.
"The sales are phenomenal, Nolan," Duke said.
"But tell me about VCR's."
Nolan smiled and walked over to a television cart where a bulky VCR unit sat on top.
The VHS format had hit retail shelves in late 1976 in a collaboration between Atari and Panasonic.
Atari had positioned itself as the vanguard of the home video movement through strategic alliances, which meant they controlled the hardware distribution pipelines for America and Europe.
Meanwhile their partners at Panasonic were flooding Asian territories with compatible hardware.
Of course, there was a problem Sony held an almost monopoly in the United States by this point.
Why? Pretty simple, Sony's early monopoly.
Sony launched Betamax in Japan and the United States by late 1975.
And for nearly a year, Sony faced no competition in the market, enjoying 100% of the U.S. home Video market share.
By this point in may 1977, if an American consumer owned a machine that could record television at home, it was almost certainly a Sony Betamax.
In his past life, Panasonic didn't commercially launched in North America until 1977.
Of course, Atari had brought a difference to the situation, launching VHS in the US in October 1976 but it had not catch up on most of the market.
Behind the scenes as they spoke, Atari was coordinating an alliance and to go for a full on advertisement spend on June 4, 1977, when the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show (CES) would happen.
Unlike Sony's Closed Loop. Where Sony would be heavily protective of its proprietary technology and expected other manufacturers to simply license and build Betamax machines exactly to Sony's specifications.
Atari was aiming to do the opposite, freely licensing the VHS standard and building a consortium of partners Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Panasonic and even General Motors.
The alliance had one focus to decentralize manufacturing and lower consumer prices.
The format war relied on an argument.
The Sony Betamax system had better picture quality, but it had a flaw.
Betamax tapes only held an hour of footage. So feature films had to be split across two expensive cassettes.
Meanwhile the VHS format, while worse in picture quality, offered 2 hours of recording time right out of the box.
Duke had also started to make plans to weaponize his studio's library.
If he made Paramount's blockbuster movies available exclusively on VHS.
Consumers would had a big reason to choose his hardware. He wondered for a moment if Paramount should invest in Blockbuster, but didnt remember when it would be founded.
"We are slowly gaining our place in the format war," Nolan confirmed.
"Adoption rates are climbing every week. But the tape are just the first Trojan horse into the living room."
Nolan reached under the cluttered table and pulled out a sleek rectangular object.
It was the latest working prototype for their new home video game console.
Code-named Leia, soon to be known as the Atari 2600.
Duke took the prototype in his hands and turned it over.
It had a sturdy plastic casing.
Up until this point, home games consoles were dedicated units.
You bought a machine that played a simple variation of an specific game and once you got bored, it gathered dust in a closet.
The Atari Pong Console gave access to 12 basic games, but most users would only use it to play Pong.
They hoped that with this new prototype things would change.
It had a microprocessor and was able to use interchangeable cartridges to play different games.
A family could buy the base console once and it would bring 2 joysticks and a game yet to be decided for people to play together.
Perfect for families.
Nolan started to take a breath to explain te features to Duke, but got interrupted.
"Show it to me in action," Duke said. He gestured toward the Zenith television.
Nolan grabbed a small unmarked plastic cartridge and connected the console's output cable to the terminals on the back of the TV.
He flipped the switch box from 'TV' to 'GAME' as static hiss faded.
The screen came to life, It was a home port of Star Wars: Millenium Falcon, a game where you control a laser cannon at the bottom of the screen to destroy waves of descending aliens.
Duke watched as Nolan picked up a black joystick.
Nolan maneuvered his ship and move his laser along the bottom of the screen.
Rows of aliens moved side to side, dropping lower on the screen each time they hit the edge.
They speed up as he destroyed more of them and fewer remained on the screen.
"The gameplay is solid," Duke observed. "It needs to be easy enough for a 10 year-old to understand within seconds. But challenging enough that a grown adult wants to play after the kids go to bed."
Paramount demographic was still Male. Although surprisingly, Star Wars had a lot of female fans interested in the universe.
On the Paramount Park outside, the posters of Luke Skywalker, played by Pierce Brosnan had dissapeared from the shops despite being refilled several times.
Nolan nodded. "The release date is 10 of september."
10 of September 1977 was the American release date for Paramount's 8 bit console.
It was not the first 8 bit console in america, since that title was already claimed by Fairchild Channel F.
Released in 1976 by Fairchild Semiconductor and led by engineer Jerry Lawson, a black engineer and Videogame piooner.
As for competition? There was none.
The Fairchild Channel F library of games reached its limit at around 26 cartridges, while Atari would probably have 26 games in its first year on the market alone.
Basically Fairchild was selling a console but with no games, most games were just copies of popular concepts, but no original creativity.
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Next chapter... Activision and Chuck e Cheese