Steve Wozniak

He refused.

He could never leave HP.

But Jobs wouldn't let his friend disappear into the comfortable world of calculators.

Atari's games were bloating to 200 chips each.

They needed someone who could do more with less.

Jobs wanted Wozniak to redesign their new single-player version of Pong.

A brief aside here just to answer the question why the number of chips matter so much.

Not only were they expensive, but they were necessary.

Back in the days before a CPU, the entire game had to be implemented in hardware.

There was no game program.

It was all hardwired.

So the fewer the chips, the cheaper it was to make, the easier it was to test.

But WoW is one of fewer chips because more chips was just unnecessary complexity.

It wasn't simple.

It wasn't elegant.

Seeing Wozniak had built Pong with just 28 chips, one of the Atari founders desperately wanted him to do it for a single player game of Pong.

Jobs approached him and Wozniak agreed immediately.

Then Jobs did what Steve Jobs does and dropped the bomb.

It has to be done in four days.

four days for what would take a normal team months.