I'm about to take a bite from a slice of Key lime pie at the Toothsome Chocolate Emporium when a host named Jacques stops by. He looks at my plate and tells me it's a good thing the desserts weren't made to his specifications. If it had been up to him, my pie would be filled with mini metal keys. That's because Jacques is a robot. Or, rather, an actor playing a robot in a costume made of random clamps, clasps and metal hands, with leather overalls in various shades of cocoa and a bowler cap.

Pong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it's true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic. The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle "paddle", moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain's response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball.

Today's video games may boast photorealistic graphics, surround sound and worldwide multiplayer support, but many still long for the days when games were simple. You know, when a game didn't require more than a joystick and a button or two? Perhaps it's no surprise, many are buying cabinets for the home, including replicas of classic coin-operated ("coin-op") games and pinball machines. "Simple games that are'quick to learn but difficult to master' have a special addictive quality that we tried for when designing them with our limited graphic palette," recalls Nolan Bushnell, who established Atari and Pong in the '70s, and shortly thereafter, founded Chuck E. Cheese (smartly, as a distribution channel for Atari games). "Often games are for turning off your mind and entering kind of a Zen state."

Long disparaged by the Baby Boomer generation as either a childish distraction or a leading cause for the downfall of civilization, video games have weathered that criticism and grown into the dominant storytelling medium of the modern world — not to mention a $136 billion industry. In his latest book, Becoming a Video Game Designer, journalist Daniel Noah Halpern examines the career of gaming titan Tom Cadwell from his roots at MIT, where he became one of the world’s top Starcraft II players, to his meteoric rise as head of design at Riot Games. Through exhaustive interviews with Cadwell and other leading industry figures, Halpern provides a unique and valuable snapshot for aspiring designers into the business of gaming.

An autonomous idea-creation system that already has invented patentable concepts has itself now been patented. The U.S. Patent and Trade Office has awarded a patent to Stephen L. Thaler, president and CEO of Imagination Engines Inc., for his Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS). Formally, the patent is titled "Electro‐Optical Device and Method for Identifying and Inducing Topological States Formed Among Interconnecting Neural Modules," which Thaler says constitutes a "successor to deep learning and the future of artificial general intelligence." With DABUS, "vast swarms of neural nets join to form chains that encode concepts gleaned from their environment," Thaler said in a press release. "It also teaches the noise‐stimulation of such neural chaining systems to generate derivative concepts from their accumulated experience (i.e., idea formation)."

Take it from Gov. Jared Polis, a veteran of the tech startup scene introduced as Colorado's "innovator in chief" Wednesday at a Denver Startup Week panel on the evolution of technology and its impact on everyday life. "I was just at Amazon's new facility in Thornton," Polis said. "Inside, where we used to see human-operated forklifts they have little intelligent robots that are carrying the crates around." The question now, Polis said, is how will public policy take shape around that AI technology so that it supports innovation but keeps human beings relevant in the economy going forward? Polis sat opposite Nolan Bushnell during the session.

The week begins, but kind of doesn't, as most of us are enjoying a three-day weekend. To celebrate, we're reporting on the best phones to drop on the floor (well, you know what I mean), BBQ upgrades for Engadget readers and amateur pitmasters, as well as the potential for facial recognition to save primates. He was instrumental to Atari's early days. Ted Dabney, who co-founded Atari along with Nolan Bushnell, has died after deciding against treatment for esophageal cancer. He and Bushnell created Atari's predecessor Syzygy in 1971 and produced Computer Space, the first commercially available arcade game. They then used that experience as the launching pad for Atari and, along with developer Al Alcorn, released the iconic game Pong in 1972.

The game industry has lost one of its most influential early figures. Ted Dabney, who co-founded Atari along with Nolan Bushnell, has died after deciding against treatment for esophageal cancer. He and Bushnell created Atari's predecessor Syzygy in 1971 and produced Computer Space, the first commercially available arcade game. They then used that experience as the launching pad for Atari and, along with developer Al Alcorn, released the iconic game Pong in 1972. Dabney was destined to work in tech early on.

Thu 1 Feb 2018 08.08 EST Last modified on Thu 1 Feb 2018 08.10 EST A major video game industry event has cancelled its decision to honour Atari founder Nolan Bushnell after attention was drawn to well-documented examples of a sexist culture at the company he oversaw in the 1970s. Bushnell was due to receive the Pioneer award at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March, recognising his 40 years of involvement in the industry. Together with Ted Dabney, he set up Atari in 1972, developing the seminal arcade machine Pong, before manufacturing the Atari 2600, one of the first home video game consoles. However, after the decision to award Bushnell was announced on Tuesday, the news provoked an outcry on social media, as games industry members pointed to examples of Atari's sexist culture. In the book The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steve Kent, Atari employee Al Acorn remembered Bushnell holding company meetings in a hot tub and attempting to coax a female employee to join him.

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn's work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn's Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. "It's a company car," he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the "game on a TV screen" that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company. The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another. Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its "spacey-looking" shape.