I emailed Steve Wozniak, whom everyone knows is the designer of the Apple I & II computers, for some comments on his brief foray into game design at Atari. If you don't know the legendary story of Breakout and how Steve Jobs flim-flammed Woz, I suggest you pick up a book about Apple's history (a good one is Apple Confidential), and read up. I wrote to Woz at a time where he claimed to have answered every email that he received. That would explain the very short answers, but it was still very cool to get an email back from Woz (and I still have it). He eventually got so backed up that he stopped answering every single email. Anyway, to the subject at hand:

Q: How (be as technical as you want) did you go about minimizing the amount of gates that were used in your design of Breakout?

Woz: I was always a very minimal designer with tons of tricks. I don't have that particular schematic in front of me, but it was just another project for me.

Q: Was your results the same as Atari's when they had to redesign the game (i.e. the screen output, etc.)?

Woz: I have no idea. I doubt it. I suspect that where I was 'close' to NTSC Atari got closer, at a small cost. I don't even know all the changes they made, and the arcade game gives me no clue.

Q: Why didn't you join Atari when Al Alcorn asked you to? This would have been a dream job to me!

Woz: I worked for HP designing calculators. That was better for me. I wanted to be an engineer for life and a scientific calculator meant more to me than arcade games.

Q: And finally, did you have any other game design ideas (besides your version of Pong)?

Woz: Yes, I had designed but not built versions of SpaceWar. But that was before microprocessors changed game design from hardware to software. Other than that, no. I can't say if I would have been able to complete something like a realistic car game myself in hardware.

[NOTE: Back in 2001 when I emailed Woz, I also emailed Steve Jobs to ask him some questions about his time at Atari, with the very slim hope that he'd get back to me. As I expected, I never got a response. He wasn't one to dote on the past, as has been extensively documented, and was a very busy man at the time. May he rest in peace...]