Breakout

打砖块

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，阿尔·奥尔康正坐在雅达利公司的办公室里，罗恩·韦恩冲了进来。“嘿！史蒂夫回来了!”他喊道。

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

“天哪，快让他进来。”奥尔康回答。

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.

乔布斯光着脚走了进来，穿着一身橘黄色的袍子，手里拿着一本《此时此地》，他把书递给奥尔康，坚持要他也看看。“我能回来工作吗？”他问。

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

“他看起来像个哈雷·克里希纳寺的僧人，但见到他我很高兴，”奥尔康回忆，“于是我说，当然！”

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.

为了公司内的和谐，乔布斯再次被安排上晚班。沃兹尼亚克当时在惠普工作，就住在附近的一处公寓，他会在晚饭后去找乔布斯玩游戏。他在森尼韦尔的一家保龄球馆里爱上了《乒乓》游戏，他还开发出了一个版本，可以连接到自家的电视机上。

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，对当时盛行的“球拍类游戏即将完蛋”的言论嗤之以鼻的诺兰·布什内尔，决定开发《乒乓》的单机版本：玩家不再跟对手竞争，而是将球击向一堵墙，每击中一次，墙上就会减少一块砖。他把乔布斯叫进办公室，在自己的小黑板上画出了草图，然后叫他去设计。布什内尔告诉他，如果使用的芯片少于50个，那么每少用一个，就会有一笔奖金。布什内尔心里清楚乔布斯并不是一个伟大的工程师，但是他猜测——也猜对了——乔布斯会招来总在附近晃悠的沃兹尼亚克。“我把这看做是买一赠一，”布什内尔回忆道，“沃兹是个更加优秀的工程师。”

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.

当乔布斯邀请沃兹帮忙，并提出两人平分收入的时候，沃兹很兴奋。“这是我人生中受到的最美妙的一次邀请，我可以真正设计一款人们会用到的游戏。”他回忆说。乔布斯说任务必须在4天内完成，并且要使用尽可能少的芯片。乔布斯没有告诉沃兹，截止日期其实是自己定的，因为他需要赶去团结农场帮忙迎接苹果丰收。他也没有提到少用芯片会有奖金。

“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.

“这样的一款游戏需要耗费大多数工程师几个月的时间，”沃兹回忆说，“我觉得我肯定完成不了，但史蒂夫让我相信自己一定可以。”于是他接连4天没有睡觉，完成了任务。白天在惠普上班的时候，沃兹就在纸上画设计草图。下班之后，匆匆吃上一顿快餐，他就会赶到雅达利，在那儿待一晚上。沃兹尼亚克在设计的时候，乔布斯就坐在他左边的凳子上，将芯片布线到电路板上。“史蒂夫捣弄电路板的时候，我就玩我最爱的赛车游戏《极速赛道10》（GranTrak10）。”沃兹尼亚克说。

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.”

令人惊讶的是，他们真的在4天时间里完成了任务，而且沃兹只用了45块芯片。虽然后来对此事的描述有多个版本，但在多数版本中，乔布斯只给了沃兹基本酬金的一半，而节省5枚芯片得到的奖金被他独吞了。直到10年以后，沃兹尼亚克才知道乔布斯得到奖金的事情〖他看到了一本讲述雅达利公司历史的书《咔嚓》（Zap）中的故事〗。“我想史蒂夫需要那笔钱，他只是没有告诉我事实而已。”沃兹如今这样说道。当他说起这件事的时候，停顿了很长时间，他也承认这事让他很痛苦。“我希望他当时能对我实话实说。如果他告诉我他需要那笔钱，他应该知道我肯定会把钱给他的。他是我的朋友，帮助朋友是天经地义的事情。”对沃兹尼亚克来说，这件事展现了他们两人性格上的差异。“对我来说道德总是很重要的，我直到现在都不明白，他明明收到了那笔奖金却告诉我他没有拿到，”他说，“但你也知道，每个人都是不同的。”