Breakout

打磚塊

One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at Atari when Ron Wayne burst in. “Hey, Stevie is back!” he shouted.

1975年初的一天，阿爾·奧爾康正坐在雅達利公司的辦公室里，羅恩·韋恩沖了進來。“嘿！史蒂夫回來了!”他喊道。

“Wow, bring him on in,” Alcorn replied.

“天哪，快讓他進來。”奧爾康回答。

Jobs shuffled in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe and carrying a copy of Be Here Now, which he handed to Alcorn and insisted he read. “Can I have my job back?” he asked.

喬布斯光著腳走了進來，穿著一身橘黃色的袍子，手里拿著一本《此時此地》，他把書遞給奧爾康，堅持要他也看看。“我能回來工作嗎？”他問。

“He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was great to see him,” Alcorn recalled. “So I said, sure!”

“他看起來像個哈雷·克里希納寺的僧人，但見到他我很高興，”奧爾康回憶，“于是我說，當然！”

Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked mostly at night. Wozniak, who was living in an apartment nearby and working at HP, would come by after dinner to hang out and play the video games. He had become addicted to Pong at a Sunnyvale bowling alley, and he was able to build a version that he hooked up to his home TV set.

為了公司內的和諧，喬布斯再次被安排上晚班。沃茲尼亞克當時在惠普工作，就住在附近的一處公寓，他會在晚飯后去找喬布斯玩游戲。他在森尼韋爾的一家保齡球館里愛上了《乒乓》游戲，他還開發出了一個版本，可以連接到自家的電視機上。

One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan Bushnell, defying the prevailing wisdom that paddle games were over, decided to develop a single-player version of Pong; instead of competing against an opponent, the player would volley the ball into a wall that lost a brick whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into his office, sketched it out on his little blackboard, and asked him to design it. There would be a bonus, Bushnell told him, for every chip fewer than fifty that he used. Bushnell knew that Jobs was not a great engineer, but he assumed, correctly, that he would recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. “I looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell recalled. “Woz was a better engineer.”

1975年夏末的一天，對當時盛行的“球拍類游戲即將完蛋”的言論嗤之以鼻的諾蘭·布什內爾，決定開發《乒乓》的單機版本：玩家不再跟對手競爭，而是將球擊向一堵墻，每擊中一次，墻上就會減少一塊磚。他把喬布斯叫進辦公室，在自己的小黑板上畫出了草圖，然后叫他去設計。布什內爾告訴他，如果使用的芯片少于50個，那么每少用一個，就會有一筆獎金。布什內爾心里清楚喬布斯并不是一個偉大的工程師，但是他猜測——也猜對了——喬布斯會招來總在附近晃悠的沃茲尼亞克。“我把這看做是買一贈一，”布什內爾回憶道，“沃茲是個更加優秀的工程師。”

Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help and proposed splitting the fee. “This was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,” he recalled. Jobs said it had to be done in four days and with the fewest chips possible. What he hid from Wozniak was that the deadline was one that Jobs had imposed, because he needed to get to the All One Farm to help prepare for the apple harvest. He also didn’t mention that there was a bonus tied to keeping down the number of chips.

當喬布斯邀請沃茲幫忙，并提出兩人平分收入的時候，沃茲很興奮。“這是我人生中受到的最美妙的一次邀請，我可以真正設計一款人們會用到的游戲。”他回憶說。喬布斯說任務必須在4天內完成，并且要使用盡可能少的芯片。喬布斯沒有告訴沃茲，截止日期其實是自己定的，因為他需要趕去團結農場幫忙迎接蘋果豐收。他也沒有提到少用芯片會有獎金。

“A game like this might take most engineers a few months,” Wozniak recalled. “I thought that there was no way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could.” So he stayed up four nights in a row and did it. During the day at HP, Wozniak would sketch out his design on paper. Then, after a fast-food meal, he would go right to Atari and stay all night. As Wozniak churned out the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left implementing it by wire-wrapping the chips onto a breadboard. “While Steve was breadboarding, I spent time playing my favorite game ever, which was the auto racing game Gran Trak 10,” Wozniak said.

“這樣的一款游戲需要耗費大多數工程師幾個月的時間，”沃茲回憶說，“我覺得我肯定完成不了，但史蒂夫讓我相信自己一定可以。”于是他接連4天沒有睡覺，完成了任務。白天在惠普上班的時候，沃茲就在紙上畫設計草圖。下班之后，匆匆吃上一頓快餐，他就會趕到雅達利，在那兒待一晚上。沃茲尼亞克在設計的時候，喬布斯就坐在他左邊的凳子上，將芯片布線到電路板上。“史蒂夫搗弄電路板的時候，我就玩我最愛的賽車游戲《極速賽道10》（GranTrak10）。”沃茲尼亞克說。

Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four days, and Wozniak used only forty-five chips. Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus. “I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.” To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you know, people are different.”

令人驚訝的是，他們真的在4天時間里完成了任務，而且沃茲只用了45塊芯片。雖然后來對此事的描述有多個版本，但在多數版本中，喬布斯只給了沃茲基本酬金的一半，而節省5枚芯片得到的獎金被他獨吞了。直到10年以后，沃茲尼亞克才知道喬布斯得到獎金的事情〖他看到了一本講述雅達利公司歷史的書《咔嚓》（Zap）中的故事〗。“我想史蒂夫需要那筆錢，他只是沒有告訴我事實而已。”沃茲如今這樣說道。當他說起這件事的時候，停頓了很長時間，他也承認這事讓他很痛苦。“我希望他當時能對我實話實說。如果他告訴我他需要那筆錢，他應該知道我肯定會把錢給他的。他是我的朋友，幫助朋友是天經地義的事情。”對沃茲尼亞克來說，這件事展現了他們兩人性格上的差異。“對我來說道德總是很重要的，我直到現在都不明白，他明明收到了那筆獎金卻告訴我他沒有拿到，”他說，“但你也知道，每個人都是不同的。”