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Bouncer and Turbo Sub

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Today's post post is a preliminary one covering two rare games from the golden age. I don't have a lot of info on these games beyond what's already out there but I'm hoping to interview some more of the principals in the future.
 
There is already an excellent website devoted to Bouncer and Turbo Sub at http://www.turbosub.com/ with lots more info, including interviews with the creators and storyboards forTurbo Sub. Turbo Sub is also on MAME.
 
Entertainment Sciences

 

           Entertainment Sciences was founded in 1982 in Huntington Beach, CA from a company called Creative Sciences[1]by Ulrich Neumann and a partner (probably Ron Clark, who served as president, or Robert Rauch). Neumann had formerly worked for Gremlin before Sega shut it down and moved to Los Angeles. The two decided to form a company to create a programmable game system that would allow operators to cheaply and easily swap out old, poorly performing games for new ones. While his partner raised the money, Neumann set to work on a state-of-the-art hardware system called RIP (Real-time Image Processor) that was capable of generating high-resolution graphics with 16,000 colors The system also had a megabyte of RAM, a 16-bit microprocessor, three 8-bit microprocessors, and a display with a 500 x 384 resolution.  The system took Neumann about nine months to complete. Meanwhile, in October of 1982 Entertainment Sciences  hired programmer Rob Patton who'd just left Cinematronics.

Bouncer
 

 
During his job interview, Patton pitched ideas for a number of games, including Bouncer - a game that cast the player as Mr. B - a burly, chrome-domed bouncer who had to keep annoying barflies from pestering customers, causing barroom brawls, and interfering with the waitress Julie. Enemies included Fatso (who stole the customers' food), Soppy (who stole drinks), Romeo (a flasher who was added as a replacement for a prostitute named Bambi), and Scooter (who tripped people with his skateboard). Shortly after he was hired, Patton's new coworkers took him to lunch and gave him  T-shirt that said "Welcome Rob" and a sleeve that said "Malcom's 10%". At the time Patton was being represented by Malcolm Kaufmann - the first known video game agent. Before long, Patton set to work on the game. He hired an artist who created a large storyboard of a barroom with moveable cutouts to represent the various characters. He also hired an animator from Disney. To help with programming, Entertainment Science brought in Lonnie Ropp from Rock-Ola, which had recently shut down its video game division. Bouncer featured four different settings: Gilleys (based on the famous Pasadena, Texas bar from Urban Cowboy), Hussong's Cantina, The Ritz, and Studio 64. The game was tested in the San Diego area and displayed at the 1983 AMOA in Chicago where it generated a good deal of interest. Steve Harris of the U.S. National Video Game Team (who provided game reviews for Replay magazine) considered it the best game of the show (though he noted that it was not shown in the main auditorium and thus didn't draw as large an audience as it might have). Atari negotiated for rights to the game but never pulled the trigger (one reason may have been its $4000+ price tag). Entertainment Sciences also paid to have the game featured in the 1984 film Ninja III: The Domination (in which the spirit of a dying ninja possesses a sexy aerobics teacher - at one point the spirit actually comes through the game).
 

 
In the end, despite having perhaps the most powerful hardware and arguably the best graphics in the industry plus a game that drew rave reviews, Bouncer was never released. So what happened? In a February, 1985 Replay article Ron Clark claimed that the game failed because the graphics were too good. So good that many mistakenly believed the game was a laserdisc game at a time when laserdisc games were getting an increasingly bad reputation for reliability (the website turbosub.com, however, claims that operators at the AMOA show rejected the game when they found out it wasn't a laserdisc game) . After the failure of Bouncer, RobPatton left to work for Sega. Lonnie Ropp (who had actually been hired to work on a different game, and didn't want to work on Bouncer to begin with) left as well.

 
 
 
 
 

A review of bouncer from the January, 1984 issue of Replay by Steve Harris

 
 


An AP article on Bouncer that appeared in various newspapers starting around August 17, 1983


 
 
Turbo Sub
 

 

 

After the failure of Bouncer, Entertainment Sciences spent a year and a half doing government contract work while they sold and tried to attract investors for the production of another video game. In early 1985, the game was finally ready. Turbo Sub was a first-person game in which a player navigated a submarine through an underwater seascape of tunnels and rock formations facing exotic sea creatures like manta rays, jellyfish, mechanical sharks, and fireballs.  Turbo Sub shipped in two different cabinet configurations. Onewas a cabinet with a slide-out drawer called the "Solo" system designed by San Diego's Pacific Coast Games. Other games were mounted in Atari Star Wars cabinets. Both cabinets used the Star Wars yoke controller. The buttons on the front fired the lasers while the thumb buttons engaged the "turbo engines". Once again, the game had stunning graphics - perhaps even more-so than Bouncer. The game appeared at a Los Angeles area video game tournament in February of 1985. Entertainment Sciences announced plans to release fifty "seed" units in May followed by 200 more in June. A series of tournaments was held to promote the game in 1985 with a grand championship in June of 1986 sanctioned by Twin Galaxies and organized by Steve Harris with a grand prize of $3,000 and a Turbo Sub game. Entertainment Sciences also gave away T-shirts to the first players to finish a game at various locations.
 
 
 

The two photos above were taken from the April, 1985 issue of Replay. the creator of TurboSub.com says that he thought Jeff Peters won the TurboSub grand championship in 1986, but he might have been thiking about this tournament. Phil Britt won the 1984 Track & Field tournament and the 1985 Coronation Day event (aka the 3rd Annual North American Video Game Challenge).

 
 
After Turbo Sub, other games were planned for the RDI system, including a sequel to Turbo Sub that would allow the sub to surface "and face bizarre challenges both on both on and below the high seas". Other planned games included a revival of Bouncer and a "graphically stunning" driving game.  As far as anyone knows none of them came to pass and Entertainment Sciences itself eventually folded after a long legal struggle.


Odds and Ends

A few more unTAFA'd games
 
Amusement Technology (aka AmuTech) Grand Prix (from September, 1976 Play Meter). I believe this was done for a specific arcade chain.
 
 
 
Burkheister's Jumpers from Play Meter, November, 1978
 
 
Gametech's Chucker from Play Meter, July, 1976
 
 
 





[1] Creative Sciences was incorporated on August 10, 1981 and Entertainment Sciences on January 12, 1983


Pinball Before Baffle Ball

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Today's post is a bit off topic. It's a subject I should probably leave to those better versed in it than I - the prehisotry of pinball. While none of this info is new to pinball historians and can be found on numerous pinball history websites, it's probably less known to video game history fans.

Video game history books usually mention pinball but they seem to always write as if David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball was the first real pinball game. The rather pathetic Wikipedia article on the game states flatly "It was the first pinball machine." It's too bad because pinball has a fascinating history that goes back a long way before Baffle Ball.
I was going to say that this article only scratches the surface, but it really doesn't even do that.

It's taken from one of the appendicies in my book that gives a very brief history of a couple of dozen other types of coin-op amusement devices found in arcades at the time of Pong and prior to it.
 
------------
 
The origins of pinball stretch back to over 400 years before the appearance of the first video game. During Elizabethan times lawn bowling (which had been around since at least the 13th century) was extremely popular. A miniaturized indoor version called Nine Pins began appearing in English taverns in the 1500s. By 1600 an outdoor version called Nine Holes had appeared, replacing the pins with nine shallow holes in the ground (eliminating the need to reset the pins after each roll). As with lawn bowling, miniature indoor versions began to appear in which the player used a curved stick to propel the balls down the table to a curved back wall where they dropped into the scoring holes. By 1710 the French had added scoring pockets and wooden pegs to the playfield. Around 1775 the game began being referred to as bagatelle. The game moved to America during the Revolutionary War, American army officer began playing the game with their French comrades. By the mid-1800s, the wooden pegs had been replaced by brass pins.



            Cockamaroo was an English version of Bagatelle with the addition of shooting lanes on the left and right sides of the board and numbered troughs to keep score. An Americanized version of Cockamaroo called Tivoli (aka Peg Pool) became popular in bars and taverns in the 1860s and 1870s. Tivoli and other bagatelle games remained popular until the early 1900s. An 1864 political cartoon showed Abraham Lincoln playing bagatelle against presidential rival George B. McClellan.





In 1871 Montague Redgrave received the first US patent for a bagatelle machine titled Improvements in Bagatelles. Redgrave's machine replaced the cue stick with a plunger and many consider this the first pinball game (though the plunger, or "ball shooter" had been used at least as early as 1700-1750 in a German-made machine). Redgrave and Frederic Wilson formed the company Redgrave and Wilson in Chicago, which made bagatelle games for the home and taverns between 1873 and 1875 before Redgrave moved to Jersey City, NJ and began building machines there. 

Montague Redgraves' origial patent model - from the National Museum of American History

 

In the late 19th century, parlor versions of the game such as Haydon and Urrry's Bagatelle were popular. Caille Brothers Log Cabin, introduced in 1901, was aggressively marketed and appeared in hundreds of bars and taverns across the country (though it was considered a trade stimulator at the time). Another early pinball predecessor was created by Harry Reed of Salem, MA in the early 1900s. Reed took a folding bagatelle board, added flashing red, white, and blue lights to form a crude backboard, and lugged his contraption to various fairs and carnivals. It would be decades before the next electrified game appeared. 1928's Billiard Skill by A.B.T. Manufacturing was the first game with steel balls and a flat playfield. In 1930 and 1931 a handful of machines were created that could be considered the first modern pinball games.


The Caille Brothers Log Cabin



This 1893 patent by Charles Young is very similar to Log Cabin



In late 1930 Arthur Paulin, a carpenter from Youngstown, Ohio built a modified bagatelle game for his daughter's Christmas present. When she liked it, he took it into town and put in on the counter of Myrl Park's radio shop where Park liked it so much he suggested adding a coin slot. The pair was joined by friend Earl Froom and the three attached a coin slot to the game and put it in a local general store. After an hour they opened to coin box to find $2.60 in nickels. Deciding to bold ten more they formed a company called Automatic Industries and began producing their game, which they called Whiffle. 27,000 Whiffle units had been sold by the end of 1931 and many consider it the forefather of today's pinball industry.


Robert Froom, son of Whiffle inventor Earl Froom, with the original location test model of the game. From Dick Bueschel's stupendous Pinball 1



In the summer of 1929, a Chicago janitor named George Deprez created a version of Redgrave's machine that is another prime candidate for the world’s first pinball game. While the inventor had created the game only for the amusement of his friends, it soon came to the attention of a tenant in one of the buildings where Deprez worked named Nick Burns. Burns operated a shooting gallery and, with his brother, ran the In & Outdoor Games Co He quickly purchased exclusive rights to Deprez's game and began manufacturing it as the Whoopee Game. Jack Sloan, advertising manager for The Billboard saw the game in the Chicago Loop hotel while making his rounds. He suggested adding a coin-slot and pointed the two to Midway Pattern Company to have them manufacture the game. The first handmade unit was put in an arcade in August of 1930.


Another photo from Bueschel's Pinball 1 - this is Pigeon Hole Table, built in 1885 (though the photo is from 1970) - photo originally from Grover Brinkman



One issue with Whiffle and Whoopee was that they cost between $100 and $200 apiece. In addition, they cost a nickel to play - no small amount during the depths of the Depression when every penny counted. In May of 1931 the Hercules Novelty Company released Roll-a-Ball, a game designed by Polish immigrant Charles Chizewer. The game sold for just $16.50 and offered the customer five balls for a penny. 



 


The game most commonly credited with launching the pinball industry, or even (inaccurately) as the first pinball game came out in 1931. In 1930 the Bingo Novelty Company released Bingo, a bagatelle game created by Nathan Robin. The game was eventually offered to David Gottlieb, who improved the game and released it. While Bingowas a modest success, its true significance was that led to Gottlieb building his own machine which he dubbed Baffle Ball. The game went on to become one of the biggest hits of all time with over 50,000 units sold at $17.50 apiece. While games like Baffle Ball were forerunners to modern pinball, there are many differences between these early machines and the pinball with which most people are familiar. First was the size, Baffle Ball and other bagatelle and pinball games of the time were countertop games - that is, they were small enough to be placed on top of counters (though a stand was available). Secondly, there were no flippers. For a penny, the player shot seven balls onto a playfield which contained several scoring holes surrounded by rings of pins (hence the name). If the ball missed the scoring holes, it fell into a series of lower-scoring bins at the bottom of the playfield.  There were also no bumpers, drop targets, or electricity. All of this meant that early pinball games relied much more on chance than skill. There was also no automatic score-keeping mechanism. Players had to keep their own score in their head or on paper. Nonetheless, Baffle Ball's influence was enormous.


Odds and Ends

While we're on the subject of Pinball, here's an oddball I found in a 1977 Play Meter - a pinball-themed skate park



This one has nothing to do with pinball but here's another un-TAFA's, un-KLOV'd game. Wesco Systems Basketball, from the May, 1979 RePlay (I apologize for the lousy black-and-white photo).

 

Early Video Game Tournaments And Players

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Two questions for today:



1) What was the first arcade video game tournament - or at least the first national one?



2) Can you name the player who may have been the first arcade video game player to gain national attention? I'm not talking about an AP or UPI story that got picked up by local papers across the country. This guy was featured in a truly national medium.



As for question 1. I actually don't know the answer and no one else seems to either.
According to Walter Day, the first video game tournament ever was the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, which took place in Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab on October 17, 1972. This was a computer game tournament, however, not an arcade game tournament.



Given the popularity of foosball and pool (and later Air Hockey) tournaments around the time Pong came out, it seems likely that there were arcade video game tournaments in 1973 but I haven't found a documented one.



Here's one I did find, from the December, 1974 issue of Vending Times:




Could this be the very first arcade video game tournament? Probably not, but it might well be the first national one. It's actually not 100% clear from the article that this was an arcade, rather than a home game tournament but given that Sega sponsored it and it was reported in Vending Times, it seems likely that it was.




International Coin Olympics

Another early attempt started in 1976. Millie McCarthy, president of the New York State Coin Machine Association had long wanted to create an International Coin Olympics that would include video games, pinball, foosball, and pool. On January 10, 1976 it seemed her dream was on the way to reality when a group of operators met in Atlanta to form the Games Tournament Board (though it seemed to concentrate mostly on pinball) . In 1978 McCarthy began to organize the first International Coin Olympics. Qualifying tournaments were to be held starting in November, continuing over an 18 month period with finals in New Orleans in February of 1980. A prize fund of $135,000 was announced, promotional kits, seminars, and films were created and the event was even announced in trade magazines, but it never came to be. The event was cancelled when pinball manufacturers started staging national tournaments of their own.

Scores Winter Pinball Olympics

In May of 1979, Play Meter reported on a video game tournament conducted by Scores arcade of Dallas, TX as part of the Winter Pinball Olympics. Four video game tournaments were held on individual games - Atari Football, Double Play, Triple Hunt, and Space Wars. A fifth competition was a "decathlon" consisting of five pinball games and five video games (Space Invaders, Breakout, Sea Wolf, Laguna Racer, and Destroyer). The Atari Football tournament drew the biggest field (512) and was won by Rock Hornburgh.

National Space Invaders Championship



            It wasn't an arcade tournament but the November, 1980 National Space Invaders Championship was one of the earliest and most influential national video game tournaments in the U.S.. Sponsored by Atari in conjunction with the release of its Atari 2600 Space Invaders cartridge, the tournament drew over 10,000 contestants. Regionals were held in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fort Worth, Chicago, and New York with the five regional winners facing off on the home version of the game at Warner's New York headquarters. Bill (now Rebecca) Heineman of Los Angeles (who later co-founded Interplay) won the finals and a new Asteroids cocktail machine. Electronic Games said of the tournament "More than any other single tournament, the 'Space Invaders' Tournament established electronic arcading as a major hobby[1]."

 
Here's a photo from the New York regionals:


OK. How about question #2.

Well, this isn't the answer to the question, but this may be one of history's first forgotten gamers - Sabrina Osment.






Who? Sabrina Osment - that's who. And who is Sabrina Osment? Why one of the "Gremlin Girls" of course. And who the heck were the Gremlin Girls?


Back around April of 1977, Gremlin introduced their new game Hustle. To publicize the game, they launched a 12-city tour in which the "Gremlin Girls" (Sabrina Osment and Lynn Reid) took on all challengers in the game. Any player that could win 2 out of 3 games from the girls took home a crisp $100 bill. The results? The Gremlin Girls won 1,233 to 7. Yep, you read that right - 1,233 to 7. On Hustle. Color me cynical but something doesn't seem right here. I mean, it's Hustle people. Why kind of strategy could there be? Some of you are probably thiking that male players just threw the games to the ladies, but I can't believe that 99.9% of them would - espeically if they had to forego a hundred bucks to do so (and this was 1977).


OK. On to question #2.


Who was the arcade player who won national media attention for his skills.


Why Greg Davies of course.


Huh?!?


Don't I mean Steve Juraszek?


Nope. This guy came first.


On July 23, 1980 Greg Davies played Asteroids for 21 hours and 50 minutes on a single quarter at T's-N-Tilts arcade in Murray, Utah scoring 10 million points. The feat landed him a guest spot on the Nickelodeon talk show Livewire in July of 1981 (six months before Juraszek appeard in Time). Davies' fame was short-lived, however. When the Atari Coin Connection newsletter reported the score, they listed him as Shawn Davies. Five months earlier, in the May, 1980 issue Atari Coin Connection had reported a high score of a million on the game, noting that it was "…the highest score known". By the next issue they'd already received word of a score of over 7 million.


I said I wasn't counting AP or UPI stories, but if I did, another early player would be Randy Otto, who was featured in an AP story in August of 1981 for his Pac-Man high score.


So does anybody know more about these players or tournaments or about any earlier ones?


If Walter Day is reading this, maybe he has records of them in his voluminous arcades (unless he's tossed them out).











[1]Electronic Games, March, 1982






What Was The First Coin-Op Video Game to Feature Scrolling?

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What was the first coin-op video game to feature scrolling?
I'm actually not sure and I'm not going to give a definitive answer for one main reason - I haven't played every arcade video game ever made (something that hasn't stopped others from making definitive claims, as we shall see).
 
Of course, the answer to the question depends on (at least) two things: your definition of "scrolling" and your definition of "first" (I suppose it could also depend on your definition of "coin-op" and "video game" but we won't go there). A debate over the definition of "scrolling" is beyond my scope. It might seem less obvious that the definition of "first" is ambiguous but there are a number of possible meanings - first game "released", first game available to the public, copyright date, trademark date, first game in development etc.
Of course, even "released" is a bit ambiguous. By "released" I generally mean when the game was actually made available to distributors for purchase. Of course, games were often introduced at industry shows or open houses weeks to months before this and were put on location for testing even before that. For each game, I will include a brief "release notes" section outlining the evidence I have for release dates.
 
Anyway, here are a few candidates, in reverse chronological order.
 
Rally-X (Namco, ca October, 1980)
 


Not considered the first scrolling game, but the Wikipedia article on side-scrolling video games claims it "was the first game to allow scrolling in multiple directions, both vertical and horizontal". I'm not sure what their definition means to them, but I doubt this. Later on I will discuss another driving game that I think fit their definition that came out much earlier.
 
Release Notes:
MAME history file gives a release date of October, 1980. Unfortunately, they don't list sources for their information (someone told me a lot of it came from the game's ROMs but don't know if or where ROMs have release dates).
Publication date on the U.S. copyright registration is 10/03/80
The game was shown at the 1980 AMOA show, which started on 10/31/80
Play Meter's 10/1/84 Catalog issue listed it as being released January, 1981 but that was probably the U.S. release date.
 
Defender  (Williams - November 1980/February 1981)
 
No, I don't think Defender was the first game with scrolling - not even close. Others, however, seem to think so. One wikiepedia article made the claim and if you read the Talk notes, the guy who wrote the article got into a kind of whizzing contest with others who claimed he was wrong (it seems he basically rejected all their evidence as "original research" and opted for something he'd read in a published work somewhere - it also seems he had very little knowledge of early video games).
Others have made the more modest claim that Defender was the first scrolling shooter (i.e. the Wikipedia side-scrolling article). Again, I'm skeptical even of this more modest claim but the subject of this post is the first scrolling game period, so we'll move on.
 
Release Notes:
Play Meter catalog issue and DRA Price Guide both give a release date of November, 1980.
Copyright date of publication is 11/10/80
The game was shown at the 1980 AMOA show.
Play Meter announced its release in the 1/15/81 issue.
Vending Times did so in the 12/80 issue.
MAME lists the release date as February, 1981.
 
Space Tactics (Sega - ca October, 1980)
 
The Wikipedia side-scrolling article says "...an early first-person perspective shooter, featured scrolling in all directions, with the entire screen moving and scrolling as the player moves the cross-hairs".  If that is considered scrolling, a number of games did it much earlier.
 
Release Notes:
Mame - 10/80
DRA Price Guide - 11/80
Shown at 1980 AMOA show.
 
Star Fire (Exidy - ca December, 1978)


 
By the Space Tactics definition of scrolling above, Star Fire qualifies. I think Star Fire is one of the great forgotten games of all time and one of the most innovative but that's a topic for another post. For the purposes of this post, there were other games that had first-person scrolling before it.
 
Release Notes:
Mame and the old bronze age list give a release date of December, 1978
Its release was announced in the December, 1978 issue of Vending Times.
It was shown at the 1978 AMOA show, which started on 11/10/78.
Play Meter catalog gives a release date of September, 1979 but I suspect they are talking about one of the later cabinet variations.
 
Atari Football (Atari - October, 1978)
 
A GamesRadar article on "Gaming's Most Important Evolutions" listed this as the first scrolling video game. Personally, I don't even consider it Atari's first scroller, much less the first period. I also find such claims to be a bit amusing and presumptuous. There were hundreds of video games made in the bronze and golden ages (I have over 3,000 listed and that's just coin-op - not counting home games). To claim definitively that something is the "first game" to do XYZ seems rather silly to me, especially when most of the people making the claims don't seem to have played many of the bronze age games - especially not the early ones. My knowledge of the games is far from encyclopedic but even with my limited knowledge, the majority of the "first game to ___" claims seem to be wrong. Its probably best to avoid such flat out claims.
 
Release Notes:
As with other Atari games, this date comes from the Atari internal document that has made the rounds on the web. The date is supported by the Play Meter catalog issues (as are the other Atari dates below).
It was also at the 1978 AMOA show.
 
Fire Truck (Atari - June, 1978)
 
Oddly enough, the very next game after Atari Football in the Games Radar article is this one. Maybe they don't consider this a scrolling game. Or, since the list is in (at least roughly) chronological order, maybe they think Football came out first.
In any event, I consider Fire Truck to be a scrolling game just not the first and, once again, not even Atari's first.
 
Sky Raider (Atari - March, 1978)
 
There may be some who don't consider this scrolling since it wasn't free form, but I don't see why that would matter. In any event, we still haven't reached what I consider the first Atari scroller.
 
Super Road Champions (Model Racing - 1978??)
 
This one had a perspective sort of similar to Sky Raider but in a racing game.
 
Release Notes:
The problem I have with this one is dating it. The Arcade Flyer Archive and KLOV give a date of 1978 but I'm not sure of the source and they don't give even an approximate month.
 
Super Bug (Atari - September, 1977)
 


OK, now this is the game that I consider the first Atari scroller. If you consider Fire Truck a scroller, you have to include this as well (play them both on Mame and you'll see why - especially when you crash).
This one doesn't seem to get mentioned much in discussions of scrolling in video games, but if you consider Rally X to be a scroller, I don't see how you'd exclude this one. Maybe because of the lack of radar or a map? Or because it wasn't free form enough?
 
 Starship 1 (Atari - July, 1977)

Another game that seemingly qualifies based on the Space Tactics definition.

Cobra Gunship (Meadows, ca July, 1976)



Another alleged first-person scroller, but I can't tell from the flyer if it did so. If it did, it's a leading candidate for the first first-person scroller. Oh, and if you didn't know, this one was designed by Atari cofounder Ted Dabney, who briefly worked for Meadows after leaving Atari (it was his idea to put the Flim and Flam feature in Flim Flam).

Release Notes
Vending Times, Replay, and Play Meter all announced the release of the game in their July, 1976 issue.

Moto-Cross/The Fonz/Road Race (Sega, ca May-November 1976)

The wikiepedia video game timeline lists these games as "forward scrolling games". Moto-Cross was a motorcycle racing game - supposedly rebranded as The Fonz. Road Race was car racing. I haven't played any of them or seen a YouTube video but from the flyer, I am not sure Road Race scrolled or not.

Release Notes:
Dating these games is another issue.
Vending Times announced the release of The Fonz in its November, 1976 issue and Replay did so in its December issue but both said it would be introduced at the AMOA show (which started 11/12/76).
My notes have a release date of 8/76, but I don't know where it came from.
In any event, if it was just Moto-Cross rebranded then the release date of Moto-Cross is more important.
Replay announced the release of Road Race in the May, 1976 issue but this was the U.S. release date.

Fire Power (Allied Leisure, ca January, 1976)



The Arcade Heroes website calls this a "vertically scrolling tank game" but I cannot confirm as I haven't played. The Vending Times article on the game's release doesn't give me enough info to determine if it scrolled or not. It was a tank-vs airplane game where you were the tank.

Release Notes:
Play Meter's 1979 catalog gives a release date of January, 1976.
Its release was announced in the December, 1975 issue of Vending Times.

Seed Race (Taito, 1974)



Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado (of Space Invaders fame). The wikiepedia article on Nishikado says this game introduced scrolling, giving the source as Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton's Vintage Games (I don't have my copy handy to see what their source is).
Midway released it as Wheels (though I don't know if they modified it - I don't think they did).
Nishikado mentioned the game in a USA Today interview but didn't say anything about scrolling (he did say he thought it might have been the first Japanese game released in America).
This one IS available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc5_UXYFJZo).
Some might argue that it doesn't scroll since all they really appeared to do was animate the "grass" strips on the roadside but you can watch it and decide for yourself.
 There were a number of other early driving games (i.e. Laguna Racer) that used a similar concept.

Oh, and in case anyone wondered, Atari's Space Race didn't scroll - you just went to the top of the screen then reappeared at the bottom.


Release Notes
Unfortunately, I don't have more precise release date info for early Japanese games.
Vending Times and Play Meter announced the release of Wheels in March of 1975 so I'd guess that Speed Race came out in late 1974 in Japan.
 

America's Oldest Coin-Ops

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Today's post is definitely off topic, but I think it's interesting anyway. I thought I'd do a brief post on a couple of really old American coin-op machines.

First, up is this one:


This is believed to be the oldest coin-op device made in America. It's a tobacco-vending machine called Penny Papers made by the Green & Broad of New York in 1839. For a penny (which were large at the time) in dispensed a small packet of tobacco. Vending machines were actually the first coin-op devices. A number of books have mentioned a coin-operated holy water dispenser invented by Heron (or Hero) of Alexandria in 215 B.C. That seems to have been more of an anomaly that the start of a trend. It's actually not known if Heron invented it or not or when or if it was produced. Heron (who actually lived in the first century AD) just described it. I think that the next coin-op device after that may not have come around until the early 17th century when "honor boxes" started to appear (snuff dispesners where you put in a coin and were on your honor to only take a pinch and close it when you were done).
The photo above is from the August, 1991 issue of RePlay.

Here's the second machine:


That's The Locomotive by William T. Smith, produced in Providence in October, 1885. It is considered the first coin-operated amusement device produced in America. For two cents, you got to watch the little train go through its motions. It didn't go anywhere (obviously). You just watched the wheels go round, the whistle blow etc. Called "exhibition machines", these were somewhat common at the time. In 1889, Edward Ahmet of Chicago created a couple of others - Power Station (a miniature power station) and Steamboat (which had a miniature boat floating around a lighthouse).

I acutally love these things. One of my favorite variants was a type that was common in England that involved little minature morality plays on subjects like the evils of alcohol. Drop in your farthing (or whatever they used) and you were treated to a motroized scene where a drunk fell asleep only to be awakened by tormenting demons.

To give you a little video game content, here are some more unKLOV'd  games:

1) From Play Meter, February, 1979

 
2) From Play Meter, November, 1979


3) From RePlay, November, 1982


I'm not sure what kind of company "Shadco" was. Given all the games from other companies they list, I'd have thoght they were a distributor but the ad makes it look like they manufacture games under license (could they have had licenses for all those titles, some of which were licensed to other companies).
Mr. Doodle, Naughty, Bang Bang, and Shogan I've never heard of.

4) Here's a better photo of Wesco's 1979 game Basketball


5) From Vending Times' coverage of the 1982 AMOA show

 
 
Battle Back actually is on TAFA but the flyer has no photo of the game so I thought it was nice to get some confirmation that it actually existed. BTW, RePlay had a photo of Shine's Witch Way at the same convention - another one where the flyer exists but I haven't seen a cabinet photo (though the flyer has screenshots).

6) Finally, one from the 1984 AMOA - Venture Line's Camelot.

The Video Game Industry Year by Year: 1973-1975

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I don't know if this kind of thing will be of much intrest or not.

One thing I plan to include in my book is a couple of chapters offering brief summaries of the coin-op video game industry as a whole. The details of each company will be covered in separate chapters but they somtimes jump forward and back in time and I thought I needed some chapters to sum up what was going on in the industry. Starting around 1978, these chapters will include more extensive statistics from trade magazines, but these weren't available for the early years. This post will cover three years, since there isn't as much info for these years.


1973



            Prior to 1973, only a handful of coin-op video games were released (Computer Space, Galaxy Game, For-Play's Star Trek, and Pong) and Pong was released in November of 1972. The coin-op video game industry really kicked off in 1973, though the games were still new and had yet to take the industry by storm. In a January, 1974 report on the recent MOA convention, Ralph Baer estimated that about 50,00 coin-op video games had been produced[1]. The true number was likely higher since Baer's figures omitted some top selling games (most notably, Allied Leisure's Paddle Battle). 90% of them were ball-and-paddle games. While there were over 50 different coin-op video games released during the year, many of them were from small companies. The coin op industry was still largely dominated by the three Ps - phonographs, pinball, and pool tables.


            Video games, however, did bring changes to the industry. In his MOA report, Baer notes that prior to video games, operators had such a hard time recouping their investment on games and cash flow was so poor that the mafia was not  interested in coin-op games. Video games paid for themselves within 4 or 5 months, as opposed to a year or more for other coin-op games. The general mood at the MOA, Baer reports, was good. But then things changed "Right about the time of show business takes a nose dive - Why? - general panic in industry - little guys starving -Midway Mfg only making about 50 units/week - Atari struggling - I'm told….Best guess as to cause - everybody copies each other's game…creative engineering practically non-existent - public suddenly fed-up with 23x same damn thing![2]"   In a 1979 interview, Michael Green of England's Alca echoed Baer's observations.
 
[Michael Green] At one time the [coin-op] market was looking a little stale, with few new ideas. Then in 1972-73, video games provided a major breakthrough which rejuvenated the entire industry. In those early days it looked as though the video game would provide a serious challenge to the position of pinball as the world's leading amusement device. But, for a time, the game was a dismal failure, mainly because most of the U.S. manufacturers just copied Nolan Bushnell's original game, and world markets became flooded with what was essentially the same game. When it became obvious to everyone what was happening-in the fall of 1973-and that video games were not what they were made out to be, many factories pulled out. Some even went into liquidation[3].


Video games weren't the only new thing. Foosball had been around (in the U.S.) since the 1950s but was undergoing its greatest period of popularity. At the 1972 MOA show, Brunswick introduced a new game called Air Hockey and scored an immediate hit (they eventually sold 33,000 copies).



Statistics[4]


# of Different Video Games Released[5]: ca 50



Significant Games


Pong(Atari, released 1972), Gotcha (Atari), Space Race (Atari), Paddle Battle (Allied Leisure), Winner (Midway), Paddle Ball (Williams)



Entering Video Game Industry


Allied Leisure, Amutronics, BAC Electronics, Bally/Midway, Brunswick, Chicago Coin, Competitive Video, Computer Games, Mirco Games, PMC, Ramtek, Seeburg, See-Fun, Sega, Taito, U.S. Billiards, Williams



Exiting Industry


BAC Electronics (?), Brunswick, For-Play Manufacturing (?) , Seeburg, See-Fun (?),



Top machine types, average weekly earningsCashBox: Jukeboxes (tavern locations) $40, TV Ping Pong Games $38, Hockey Tables $35, Pool Tables $34, Pingames $24

Most Popular Machine Types by Location Type (CashBox)


Taverns: 1. Pool Tables (by far), 2. Pingames, 3. Shuffle Alleys, 4. TV Ping Pong Games


Restaurants: 1. Pingames (by far), 2. TV Ping Pong, 3. Target (gun)
Off-Street Locations: same as Restaurants




When did the term "video game" come into use? I have yet to thoroughly investigate this, but the conensus seems to be that it started in 1973. But when, exactly? The above article from the March 17, 1973 issue of Cash Box uses the term "video game" to describe For-Play's Rally. Or does it? It seems pretty clear from the title but when you read the article, it isn't so obvious. The body uses terms like "video skill game" and "television control game", which were more common at the time. So does the title count as a use of "video game" as a phrase or is it just an example of a "headline-ese" shortening of a term like "video skill game"? 





The UPI article above appeared in the Febuary 15, 1973 edition of the Boston Herald. No, it doesn't use the term "video game" (in fact it calls them "pinball machines").
This article is actually about Atari.
The reason I posted it is that it still refers to the company as "Syzygy" despite the fact that they had incorporated as "Atari, Inc." over 6 months earlier.
Interesting - to me, at least, if no one else.


1974
            The video game market in general, continued to expand in 1974. An April, 1974 issue of Time magazine estimated that video games were pulling in $900 million annually (though much of that was likely due to home games). 1974 also saw the industry's first shakeout (as noted by Baer in his MOA report). In 1973 and '74 dozens of companies entered the video game arena with little or no knowledge of the technology and even less knowledge of the coin-op industry and by the end of 1974, the glut of uninspired Pong clones led to the industry's first decline. Midway, for instance, saw revenues drop almost $2 million in 1974. Operators, meanwhile, found themselves saddled with Pong games that no one wanted to play and even fewer wanted to buy. Even worse, some had bought the games on credit when the industry was flying high and the games could seemingly do no wrong
In an interview in the January, 1975 issue of Play Meter, operator John Trucano expressed surprise that at the 1974 MOA show, "..the number of video game manufacturers was so greatly reduced over the previous year" (the interviewer indicated that this was "as it should be" since the weaker manufacturers were being weeded out). Many in the coin-op industry still viewed video games as nothing more than a passing fad that had already passed. The debut issue of Play Meter (December, 1974) included an article titled "TV Games: Really That Bad?". The article opined that "…the video game market is suffering from the "post TV-game-rush-blues" and that  "The very nature of the video market, it seems, is one of pure novelty." The article goes on to note that "the video gear became 'obsolete' at a breath-taking pace, as new innovations on the video theme replaced the original lines quickly". and "With the resale value of the games very low because of the lack of demand for them, warehouses became what some operators thought may prove to be burying grounds for their investments." According to Ralph Baer's 1976 figures, 87% of video games released in 1973 were ball-and-paddle games versus 38% in 1974 and 21% in 1975. Baer's figures, however, are incomplete and omit a number of popular Pong clones. A rough count of the number of titles released each year shows that 90% were ball-and-paddle games in 1973 versus 70% in 1974. In terms of percentage of total sales, the 1974 figures were probably somewhat lower due to the sales of Tank and Gran Trak, perhaps the first major hits outside of the ball-and-paddle genre.

On the other hand, a number of operators saw video games as more than a nine-day wonder. The same Play Meter article cited above notes that "…the overall market for video games is still on the upswing in most major markets." The following month, Play Meter editor Ralph Lally  opined "…what a change video games have brought to this industry. Less than three years ago, the first video game appeared on the market. The public's initial response to the new type of game was so fantastic that the video market grew tremendously in an incredibly short period of time." Cocktail table games also hit it big in 1974, with a number of new companies appearing on the scene to produce them. The games, however, had something of an unsavory reputation in the industry as they were often sold by fly-by-night companies. The most unscrupulous were the "blue sky" operators, who would place want ads offering package deals on hot games and even promising to help new operators find a location only to disappear once they had the money. On the other hand, the games opened up the market to many types of locations that normally shunned coin-op games, such as high-end restaurants and cocktail lounges.  More significantly, games like Tank and Gran Trak showed that there was a video game market beyond Pong clones (something that many in the industry doubted)


     The coin-op industry continued to fight to improve its image in 1974. In an interview with Play Meter at the 1974 MOA convention, MOA Executive VP Fred Granger commented "….people tend to think of an arcade as a place down in the bad part of town, with peep shows and all that kind of stuff" and further noted that "If you call an arcade an 'amusement center' or a 'family fun center', it is received much easier..." Changing terminology, however, would not solve the industry's image problems, which would continue to be an issue throughout the golden age. On the home front the major news was the introduction of Atari's home Pong.


     


Statistics:



# of Different Video Games Released: ca 70



Significant Games


Tank (Atari/Kee), Gran Trak 10/20 (Atari), Leader (Midway), Pace Car Pro (Electra), Flim Flam (Meadows)



Entering Video Game IndustryBristol Industries, Digital Games, Electra Games, Electromotion, Elcon Industries (?), Exidy, Konami (?), Meadows Games, NSM, Renee Pierre, United States Marketing, Venture Line, Volly, Zaccaria (?)


Exiting IndustryAmutronics (?), Computer Games (?), NSM, United States Marketing, Volly

1975



The cocktail craze of 1974 continued into 1975 as did the industry shakeout. While cocktail table games brought new operators into the industry who were often enthusiastic about the future of video games, many older operators were reluctant to purchase games after having been burned by the oversaturated Pong clone market. An article in the June-July issue of Play Meter explained "A well-established operator, thinking about his old two-player tennis games that are gathering dust, told me 'to buy a new video game is throwing good money after bad. Look, I've been in this business some 15 years and have never had so many machines collecting dust." One attempt to address the issue was conversion kits offered by companies like Edcoe, Elcon, JRW, and RDM Associates that converted existing games to new ones (or to cocktail cabinets). Unfortunately, the converted games were generally just ball-and-paddle games with a few new features. An economic decline triggered by the oil crisis, also affected the industry.


     Nonetheless, overall coin-op amusement sales increased in 1975, even if only modestly. Replay's premiere issue (cover dated October, 1975)  enthused "Just by looking at the figures in New England. we can readily see that 1974 was the biggest game sales year in over ten years; and yet. 1975 surpasses this mark. The reasons are quite obvious. With the influx of television games. many of us have seen new spirit shine in the old time games operator…" The article goes on to note that coin-op games were more accepted by the public, citing video games and cocktail tables as a major reason. The biggest change of the year, however, was that the ball-and-paddle era finally appeared to be drawing to a close as a number of non-Pong games appeared (though ball-and-paddle games still represented more than half the new titles). Atari's Tank continued to sell well, along with other games like Midway's driving game Wheels. At the MOA convention, the big news was the proliferation of solid-state and microprocessor games. Midway's Gun Fight was the only microprocessor video game there but there were a number of non-video games that used the technology, like Allied Leisure's Dyn-O-Mite pin and Micro's Spirit of 76 (the first released microprocessor pin). Foosball also continued to be popular with a number of improved tables appearing (a dozen foosball manufacturers attended the MOA convention). Play Meter even dubbed 1975 "The Year of the Super Soccer."


     On the home front, Atari's Pong was a major hit of the 1975 Christmas season. Atari sold $40 million worth of home Pong units in 1975. Magnavox released the Odyssey 100.



Statistics:


# of Different Video Games Released: ca 100



Top Games


Replay (March, 1976): 1. Tank I & II (Atari), 2. Wheels I & 2 (Midway), 3. Gun Fight (Midway), 4. Indy 800 (Atari), 5. Gran Trak 10/20 (Atari), 6. Twin Racer (Atari/Kee), 7. BiPlane (Fun Games), 8. Racer (Midway), 9. Demolition Derby (Chicago Coin), 10. Street Burners (Allied Leisure)



Entering Video Game Industry (major manufacturers only)


Cinematronics, Control Sales, Fun Games, JRW Ecdoe, Electronics, Project Support Engineering (PSE), RDM Associates, Technical Design Corp, URL, Video Game Inc, Westlake Systems (plus at least 20-25 others)



Exiting Industry (major manufacturers only)Chicago Coin, Control Sales,  JRW Electronics, PMC, RDM Associates (?), Technical Design Corp (?), Westlake Systems

Top machine types, average weekly earnings:


Replay: Pool Tables $44, Video Games $43, Flipper Pins $36



Most popular game types (Replay)Taverns: 1. Pool Tables, 2. Flipper Games 3. Video Games & Shuffle Alleys (tie) Restaurants: 1. Flipper Games, 2. Video Games, 3. Electronic NoveltiesOff-Street Locations: 1. Flipper Games, 2. Pool Tables, 3. Video Games

















[1] Baer, In the Beginning,  p.95

[2] Baer, p. 96

[3]Play Meter, August, 1979

[4] Two things to bear in mind when looking at industry statistics: 1) many suspected that operators regularly underreported collections to avoid paying taxes on them (though whether or to what extent this was true I can't say), 2) RePlay and Play Meter operator surveys generally appeared around the November issues and covered the period up to late summer

[5] Note that the number of different games released is a somewhat rough approximation, especially for the early years. A simple count of titles in KLOV or my own lists is not straightforward as you have to decide whether to include bootlegs, gambling games, or to count licensed games more than once.. The ball-and-paddle percentage is the percentage of titles, not the percentage of actual units sold.

Potomac Mortgage Company, Blue Sky Operators, and Other Golden Age Ripoffs

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During the writing of my book, I slowly came to believe that every video game and every video game manufacturer, not matter how boring they might seem, had a story to tell. I've sometimes doubted that belief, but today's post is a good illustration of its truty.
Recently, on the AtariAge Forums, the subject of Potomac Mortgage came up.
Potomac Mortgage was a Dallas-based manufacturer primarily known (by the few who know them) for a handful games they produced in the 1980s - Star Invaders, Star Fighter, and Star Warrior



Before reading the post and doing some research, that was bascially all I knew about the company. Well, it turns out they were quite the interesting - and sleazy - little company.

A check of the trademark office shows that they reigstered trademarks for a number of other games: Star Fighter, Star Assassin, Star Quest, Star Legion, Star Pirate, Star Defender, and Ayatollah Assassination.

A little more digging reveals some more unsavory details about the company.
In 1981, they were sued by Irem who claimed that Star Invader was a bootleg of their own UniwarS. Here's an article from the 12 April 1981 New Braufels (TX) paper:




Potomac denied the claim . I don't have a screenshot or flyer from Star Invaders handy but here's side two of the Star Fighter flyer.


I don't know if they ripped off Uniwars but Star Fighter certainly appears to be a carbon copy of Moon Cresta (though maybe they licensed it):



But that's not the end of it - not by a long shot.
The June 1, 1981 issue of Play Meter reports that the California Attorney General's office also took action against Potomac (along with Fascination International Ltd of Chicago and Leisure Time Electronics) for misrepresenting the amount of revenue buyers could expect from their equipment. The article reported that the 3 companies actually didn't manufacture games (so maybe they did license it from Gremlin/Sega or Nichibutsu but I doubt it).
Potomac told potential customers that a $6,500 investment for 10 machines would produce a $300,000 annual profit within 18 months and that they could conservatively expect to make a 70-170% return on investment (the numbers may not add up, I'm just reporting the claim). California law required that the makers of such claims file a statement with the Secretary of State's office detailing the facts supporting the claims and also provide a copy to buyers. Potomac apparently failed to do this and was assessed a fine of $5,000 and was forced to give refunds to 23 California customers.

Looking further, I found a number of ads for Potomac from papers accross the country - it appears they were quite prolific. Here are just a few examples:

Portland, Oregon, 22 June 1980




San Diego, 22 June 1980


Syracuse, NY 9 February 1981



It appears that they were also a real estate company. I found a number of ads from 1970s offering loans for real estate development.
From the above ads, it appears that Potomac may have been what was known in the industry as a "blue sky" dealer.
Largely forgotten today, these sleaze merchants were somewhat common in the 1980s.
They would sell you coin-op video games at inflated prices, promising unrealistically large earnings (often supported with overblow newspaper stories) and even offering to help you find a location, service the games for you, provide insurance etc.
Once they had your money they would (if you were lucky) deliver substandard games that failed to live up to their performacne. If, that is, they delivered anything at all. Sometimes they just took your money and skipped town.
I can't say whether Potomac was this kind of outfit, and I don't know any more details, but I can describe a typical example of this kind of operator.

Blue Sky Operators

Known as "blue sky operators" or "blue suede shoes men" these kind of scammers had been around since the beginnings of the video game industry. The reason many in the industry distrusted cocktail games when they were all the rage in 1974 and 1975 was that many were sold by such con artists.
The December 1, 1981 issue of Play Meter tells the story of one such outfit - Marketing Associates, Inc. - aka Return on Investment Inc. aka William Beilman.
Gustav Gagne, who was taken for $20,000 by Beilman, did something about it.
Gagne, a Colorado entrepreneur, first made contact with the company when he saw their ad and called their phone number. They sent him an information packet with a projected incom/expense statement from a "CPA", a document claiming they had an "A" rating from the Better Business Bureau, a contract, and copies of articles from TV Guide and the Wall Street Journal touting the amazing earning potential for coin-op video games.

The WSJ article (13 August 1980) included the quote "In a choice location a popular video game grosses about $200 a week and may gross as much as $400 a week in its early stages".

Here's a copy of the contract:




After calling back, Beilman met with Gagne for two hours on January 23 and Gagne signed over a check for $10,000. He was supposed to get five coinop video games from Beilman's company, who would also find him prime locations, service the games, and provide insurance. He was supposed to pay the rest of the fee in two weeks when he got the games. Gagne didn't get the games but he he did pay another $10,000 on Feburary 19. On April 27, he finally got two of the promised five games - along with a bill with another $5,000 in COD charges. He apparently refused delivery and complained and the games were redelivered a week later (sans charges).
 
The promised "sophisitcated location survey" of Gagne's turned out to be nothing more than Gagne and Beilman driving around town looking for anyone who would take the games off their hands. Gagne called Beilman repeatedlly but never got anymore games. He even picketed in front of Beilman's office carrying a sign but to no avail. Finally on June 25, he went to the FTC who investigated Bielman for fraud.
As it turns out, Gagne wasn't the only one Bielman had fleeced. In a way, Gagne was lucky. Some customers didn't get any games at all. Bielman would sometimes buy games from distributors - for far less than his suckers paid him. Sometimes, that is. Other times, he wrote bad checks to distributors, who soon learned not to sell him games unless he paid in cash. And many of the games Beilman sold (when he did deliver) were far less than primo. One was cobbled together from used parts of other games.
On one occasion, Beilman arranged for Automated Amusements of Denver to service his machines. He never paid them. Unfortunately (for them) he put their name down as the service rep when he installed the games and Automated Amusements started receiving calls from irate location owners and had to service games at their own expense to avoid losing business.
The FTC charged Beilman with misrepresenting sales, lying about delivery dates, overstating earning potential, and failing to perform contracted warranty obligations. They also charged him with failure to send his customers a disclosure document with information about judgments and claims against him by former and current franchisers, company financial info, and the criminal background of the company's officers. Oh, did I fail to mention that Beilman had a previous felony conviction for fraud?

When he failed to answer the charges, the US District Court in Denver granted an injunction against him.Beilman was even investigated by a local newsman with a hidden camera posing as a customer.

Looking at the contract above, it may seem obvious it was a ripoff. The $20,000 figure seems way out of line given that new games cost $2,000-$3,000.
It may seem hard to believe that he would fall for the $200 a week claim. Such cliams were common in the media at the time but they represented peak earnings for a top machine. Yes games could sometimes make $400 a week but only in prime locations and for a shor time.
Play Meter actually published weekly earnings for specific games on their Players Choice chart for a time and the top games made around $200-250 a week but that was only a handful of games and only during their peak. The average "shelf life" of a coin-op game (the period when it actually earned money) according to various Play Meter and RePlay operator surveys was in the neighborhood of 7-9 months at the time.
And the blue sky companies rarely, if ever, delivered "top" games. If they delivered anything, it was often junk.

So, was Potomac Mortgage on the same slmy level as Beilman?
I can't say for sure, but it sure looks like they were playing in the same ballpark.









 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
\

The Saker One Space Probe

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During the Golden Age of Video Games, there were a number of attempts at creating a video game with a moving cabinet. Among them were Exidy's Vertigo,  Sente's Shrike Avenger and Amusement Technology's Max Experience. The most intriguing, however, may have been the Saker One Space Probe. Introduced in 1983, the unit was invented by John Sassak, president of the Segmented Carbide Die Company of Livonia, Michigan. The eccentric, 60-year-old Sassak, had degrees in metallurgical and aeronautical engineering. He was a reconnaissance pilot during World War II, taking some of the first pictures of a devastated Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped. After the war he worked in Ford's R&D department while earning degrees from Wayne State University. After twenty years at Ford, he left to form Segmented Carbide. When the 1970s recession hit, he changed careers yet again and entered the computer game field. Sassak was also a lifelong tinkerer. Among his other creations was a toy alligator, a beer tap, and a mechanical for a bar he owned in Westland, Michigan to cash in on the Urban Cowboy craze of 1980 (he even renamed the bar The Urban Cowboy, before changing its name to Diamond J's). In addition to his inventions and engineering work, Sassak was a helicopter pilot and owned racehorses.




Sassak's Toy Alligator

Sassak got the idea for the Saker One after witnessing a department store demonstration in which a beach ball floated on air from a vacuum cleaner[1]. Sassak went on to design a video game mounted in a spherical cabinet that floated on a stream of air moving at up to 140 MPH powered by a 30-horsepower electric turbine engine. Four fins on the outside of the Plexiglas cabinet allowed the unit to bob and weave, and even tumble end over end in response to the player's commands as he attempted to shoot down or avoid enemy spacecraft. Sassak created a prototype that he installed in Diamond J's, charging adventurous patrons $2 for a two-minute ride.  After five Sassak was ready to take the game public with plans to have it in production by June of 1983. Sassak planned to lease the game to locations for $2,500 per month. While the games cost upwards of $70,000 to produce, a March UPI story reported that Sassak had taken $30 million worth of orders.


Industry pundits were skeptical. Atari coin-op president John Farrand said he didn't think it would any effect on the industry whatsoever (though he noted that Atari was developing its own environmental games). Another company that wasn’t amused was Lucasfilm. Sassak's prototype had used videotape footage from Star Wars and Lucasfilm intimated that they might take legal action Sassak said that he never intended to use the footage in the final version and eventually he even talked to George Lucas about the idea of using it in a movie. A film script was in the works about a boy who rides a Saker One into outer space then had trouble returning to earth. In April of 1983 NASA had a unit shipped to Cape Kennedy to investigate its use in astronaut training. The unit also appeared in a brief news segment on the program Starcade (http://www.starcade.tv/starcade/one-hotlines.asp?vid=SakerOne). While no further mention has been found of the Saker One, Sassak's obituary reported that he "struck gold" with the unit and that "it really took off." (not literally, one hopes). John Sassak died in 2003 at the age of 81.
 
Images from one of the half dozen patents Sassak received for the Saker One
 

 

 



[1]RePlay (May, 1983) reported that it was a Ping Pong ball, and also reported that the game cost $30,00 to build, not the $70,000 reported by UPI.


Updates, Odds & Ends, and More

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A few quick updates on some recent stories.
 
Saker One Space Probe
 
I found some color photos of the unit in Play Meter
 
 
 
They even had a flyer.
 
 
A little more info on the Saker One.
Play Meter listed the price as $37,500. Given the other info, I suspect this is more accurate than the other articles. You could also sign a two-year lease. You paid a $4,000 security deposit for the first year (which included a maintenance contract), another $2,000 for year 2 and $1,600 a month. There was a $6,000 buyout at the end of the lease.
The article mentions that any Atari 2600 carridge could be played on the unit.
There were plays to release a laser cannon for the unit in August, 1984. They also planned a more sophisticated game where you fought off animated space monsters. Spectators could watch on external monitors. The unit would also rise through a hole in the ceiling to a second level.

 
Leisure Time Elctronics/Potomac/Fascination
The November 15, 1981 issue of Play Meter had more info about these companies.
 
After the California ruling, Potomac took steps to clean up its act (or claimed to). They hired a PR director and president David Cook issued a directive to the games division that they should comply with all state laws. They also lowered the price of their games from $3490 to $2990.
 
More info about Leisure Time: they also failed to deliver games on time. Coast to Coast Locators (the company they recommended to customers) also failed to show up when promised (one customer had to pay for a hotel room for the rep and his girlfriend). Their games were cheap with particle board cabinets. One Moon Lander unit allowed players to get free games by jiggling the joystick.
 
The most interesting tidbit was the article's claim that the Leisure Time Electronics games were made by none other than Centuri. They even quote Allied/Centuri exec Ivan Rothstein as saying that Leisure Time was "...a reputable company" and that the games should have "no problem" earning $80-100 a week. He also said that Allied/Centuri had been doing business with Leisure Time for 8 years.
 
I have never heard this before and it seems a bit hard to believe.
One possiblity is that this occured just before Allied Leisure was renamed Centuri.
Allied supposedly showed 3 games at the 1979 AMOA show: Lunar Invasion, Space Bug, and Star Shooter. Could these be the ones they sold to Leisure Time?
Little is known about them. Play Meter descibed Space Bug as a game where you pushed boxes into storage bins.
 
Finally, a few interesting pictures:
 
 
From 1981. The woman in the picture is Anwar Sadat's wife. She's standing in front of a pinball machine. 'll let you all take a guess as to what she's doing.
 
 
The Project Support Engineering production line, circa December 1975. Maneater has to be one of the great video game cabinets of all time and I thought it was cool seing a line of them.
 
 
 
 A picture from the floor of the $50,000 tournament fiasco of 1981.
 
 
A coin-op chess game displayed at the 1982 IMA show (a huge German show).

 
 A Champion Baeball (Sega) parlor in Japan.
Some sources report that the game was as popular there as Space Invaders. An exaggeration but it did have dedicated game parlors.


Chuck E. Cheese and Jasper Jowls taking a break before the opening of the second Pizza Tie Theatre location in San Jose.


Not a video game. Just a coin-op football game that I thought was very cool. From the October, 1975 issue of Vending Times.

The ultimate Pac-Man collectible??
This Pac-Man-shaped rock was displayed by Midway at the 1981 AMOA show. It was done up like a museum display with appropriately stuffy text explaining its history etc.



The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 1

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I was going to wait and post this later after I head back from a few more Exidy employees I've contacted,  but I decide to go ahead and start it now. I'll update it if I get more info (or include the info in the book).


Today's post actually covers Ramtek, not Exidy. You'll see why if you read it



PART 1

While PSE and Meadows were both located in Sunnyvale, neither company would make any video games after 1978. Another Sunnyvale company, Exidy, was a different story entirely. At its height, Exidy was third only to Atari and Bally/Midway among U.S. video game producers and created a handful of hits that are among the minor classics of the era. The roots of the company, however, extend to another short-lived Sunnyvale competitor – Ramtek.



Ramtek



            Like Atari, Ramtek was located in Sunnyvale but unlike Atari, it didn’t start out as a video game company. Founded in 1971 by brothers Chuck and Mel McEwan and three other aerospace engineers (with funding from Exxon Enterprises), Ramtek manufactured graphic displays and imaging hardware, primarily for the medical industry. In its early years the company grew via "bootstrapping" - borrowing money from anyone it could and plowing all profits back into manufacturing.




With the introduction of Pong, Ramtek jumped on the lucrative videogame bandwagon. Ramtek, in fact, may have gotten a look at the game before any of Atari's other competitors. Al Alcorn reports that not long after he'd placed the prototype Pong for test at Andy Capp's Tavern he noticed a group of  "customers" who came in every morning at 9 to play the game. This struck him as odd since most bars were empty at that early hour. When he asked owner Bill Gattis about it, Gattis told him they were engineers from Ramtek[1]. Nolan Bushnell claims that one of the owners of the bar was actually Ramtek's financial Vice President[2].

     It should be no surprise, then, that Ramtek started with Pong clones like Volly, Hockey, and Soccer (all 1973). The games had their share of issues. Volly, for instance, came in a lovely round-topped cocktail cabinet but there was a small problem – the game was too large to fit through the doors of most locations. A bit more sophisticated was 1974’s Baseball (with cabinets built by Tempest Products, who also built cabinets for Atari). Wipe Out (January 1974) was a 2 or 4 player game similar to Atari’s Quadrapong but with a twist in the form of a special “frustration bumper” that would cause the ball to bounce in a random direction.



By 1974, the company had $6 million in sales, had manufactured more than 10,000 video games and was looking to expand its facilities. Howell Ivy was one of Ramtek’s chief game designers. Before coming to Ramtek, Ivy spend 7 1/2 years in the Air Force, working on missile instrumentation at their Satellite Test Center. Ivy’s first game for Ramtek was Clean Sweep (June 1974) a pinball-like game he had started designing in 1973 in which the player controlled a paddle to direct a ball towards a field of dots. The object was to eliminate all of the dots while not letting the ball get past you. Some see the game as a predecessor of sorts to Atari’s 1976 hit Breakout but the gameplay was actually quite different. The “bricks” filled almost the entire screen and the ball eliminated every dot in its path rather than bouncing off them. Ivy also worked on a number of other games at Ramtek, including Trivia (1975), a quiz game with questions loaded in via interchangeable 8-track cartridges, and Barricade (1976), a version of Gremlin’s much-copied Blockade. Gremlin, in fact, brought suit against Ramtek in January of 1977 over the similarities of the names of the two games and Ramtek agreed to use the name Brickyard if they continued to make the game (they didn’t).


At a March 1976 distributors meeting (with special guest comedian Pat Paulsen), Ramtek announced that it had sold 20,000 games in its first three years and was going to split its game and computer displays divisions into separate companies. In November of 1976 disaster struck - or so it seemed at first. Back in 1974 Ramtek was set to launch a new line of color monitors but needed to raise $1.4 million to do so. By November of 1976 they had finally struck a deal giving them the funds they needed. Then, the night before Chuck McEwan was scheduled to fly back east to close the deal, Ramtek's $7 million manufacturing plant burned down. They had allowed their insurance policy to lapse just a month before. In truth, however, the fire proved to be a turning point for the company. An emergency meeting was called with the company's bankers, who provided enough funding to keep Ramtek afloat and the episode caused the company's employees to pull together into a community[3].


Ramtek had already started producing more sophisticated video games such as Sea Battle (April 1976), which featured multi-player ship-to-ship combat where players could “blow away islands” and “hide in coves” while trying to destroy the opposing vessels and avoid deadly mines. Star Cruiser (September 1977) was a kind of Spacewars without the central sun that featured controls usually seen in driving games – a U-shaped steering wheel and a gas pedal. Ramtek’s most popular game was probably M-79 Ambush (1977), which featured a gun attachment modeled after the army’s M-79 grenade launcher. In Replay’s year-end survey of the best games of 1977 M-79 Ambush was among the 15 video games listed. Two of Ramtek’s final arcade game releases were Dark Invader (a non-video space-themed game in which the player looked through a porthole to view the playfield, which made use of a laser, a spinning mirror, and fluorescent targets to create a stroboscopic effect), released in August of 1978, and GT Roadster (a non-video projection film driving game released in December). After 1978, Ramtek stopped producing video games entirely, though they did continue to manufacture the non-video game Boom Ball. The game was similar to Skee Ball but instead of rolling the balls, the player shot them out of a cannon. Boom Ball proved extremely popular and Ramtek continued producing it until mid-1980 when they sold it, along with their entire games division to Mel McEwan (cofounder of the company and manager of the division). The problem was that the division was losing money, and apparently had been for some time. In its 1980 annual report, Ramtek reported that they'd lost $971,000 in 1979 from "discontinued operations" and had posted smaller losses in 1977 and 1978. Most, if not all of this, was probably from their games division. Overall, the company had turned a profit but in 1979 profits had declined to just $283,000 from a high of $1.3 million the year before. After buying the games division, Mel McEwan created a company called Meltec and continued to produce Boom Ball.


After selling the games division, Ramtek returned full time to the fields it knew best – medical imaging and CAD/CAM. 1980 saw sales of $25 million with plans to begin manufacturing PC monitors, but as far as video games went, the company was finished.

            In terms of video game history, however, Ramtek’s main contribution came not from its games, but from three  of its employees. Harold R. “Pete” Kaufmann was an early partner at Ramtek who left in 1973 with plans of forming his own company with the sole purpose of creating video games. Designer John Metzler followed and in 1975, designer Howell Ivy decided to move on as well and he joined Kaufmann at his newly formed venture.



 




[1] Al Alcorn interview, Retro Gamer #88

[2]Interview, Play Meter, June-July 1975.

[3] The dates given for the fire come from Malone The Big Score p.300. The December 24, 1975 issue of Computerworld reports that a fire on the morning of 20th "had rendered 10,000 square feet of manufacturing space  unusable." This may have been a separate fire or Malone may have got his dates wrong.

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 2

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       Today's post is bascially a repost of my December post on Death Race with the addition of some info on the early years of Exidy. I hate to repost material, but you can't very well have an ultimate history of Exidy without talkign about Death Race.
 
 
 
 

Exidy founder Pete Kaufmann

 
            Pete Kaufmann founded Exidy (an abbreviation for Excellence In Dynamics) in Palo Alto in 1973 (former Ampex employee Samuel Raymond Hawes was involved with the company's founding, though his exact role is unclear). Exidy’s first game was Hockey/Tennis, released in early 1974 (though Larry Hutcherson remembers that it was called Thumper Bumper), a Pong clone that used painted overlays to achieve a color effect. Next came TV Pinball (originally titled The Sting and marketed on the West Coast only under that title), a game similar in play to Ramtek’s Clean Sweep with the addition of nine pockets at which the player could shoot. Exidy also produced a cocktail table version of the game (Table Pinball) as well as a Pong variant called Table Foosballer. It is not known who designed these early games, though John Metzler, who followed Kaufmann from Ramtek, is a likely candidate.

 
     During these early years, one of the company's most pressing needs was staff, Pete Kauffman turned to whatever source he could to recruit new workers. At the time, the company had only a dozen or so employees and all of them had to work whenever and wherever they could in order to get games ready for sale. Before his stint at Ramtek, Howell Ivy (who would join Exidy in 1975) had worked at the Air Force Satellite Test Center, which provided Exidy with a number of technicians. Chicago Coin's Director of European Sales, Paul Jacobs, signed on to head up Exidy’s marketing department in 1976. Jacobs started his coin-op career riding shotgun on his father's American Coin Machine route in the 1960s. In 1967 he went into sales for his United, Inc., a distribution company also owned by his father. After graduating with a degree in political science he became sales manager and then president of United until it was bought by jukebox giant Wurlitzer. Jacobs had also worked for Rowe and after leaving Exidy would go on to work for a more than a dozen coin-op companies in his forty-year career. Artist Michael Cooper-Hart met Kauffman at a Christmas party in 1975. At the time, Cooper-Hart was teaching design and fine arts at De Anza College in Cupertino. When Kauffman asked him if he was interested in working for a new company named Exidy, Cooper-Hart refused. He considered himself and artist and artists simply didn’t do commercial work. Kauffman’s powers of persuasion (and Cooper-Hart’s anemic bank account) eventually overcame his reservations and he signed on as a consultant at Exidy, where he would design many of the company’s classic game cabinets and go on to become Director of Design (though at some point Cooper-Hart also worked at Atari's Cyan Engineering think tank on a video phone). When he first arrived, however, he was taken aback when he got a look at a new game the company was producing – a driving game called Death Race.



Death Race            



       Released in April, 1976, Death Race was not Exidy’s first driving game – that honor goes to 1975’s Destruction Derby, itself a game unlike the host of other driving games on the market. While it had standard driving controls, the gameplay was anything but. Rather than a simple racing game Destruction Derby was a video version of the demolition derby in which a group of cars competed in an arena and tried to bash each other into pieces of useless wreckage. The last car that remained drivable was dubbed the “winner”.

d

Initially produced by Exidy,the demand for Destruction Derbywas so great that they licensed it to the floundering Chicago Coin who produced the game as Demolition Derby.As part of the deal, Exidy halted production of the game to avoid competing with their new licensee, but in the end, it didn’t matter. At the time, Chicago Coin was already in the midst of the financial woes that would lead to bankruptcy in 1976 and when they were unable to make their royalty payments, Exidy was left holding the bag. While Exidy may not have seen much in the way of profit from the Demolition/Destruction Derby deal, the experience did result in a couple of very profitable decisions. First, seeing the sales success of the Chicago Coin title, Exidy decided that they would no longer license games to other companies. The second decision proved even more profitable.


While Chicago Coin was marketing Destruction Derby, Exidy found themselves in an awkward position. Unable to produce their own version of the game and not receiving any money from licensing it, they decided to come up with a similar concept game instead. The task was given to newcomer Howell Ivy, his first assignment for the company[1]. It appears that the game was initially called Death Race 98 since flyers and photos with that title appeared in early 1976. A month or so later flyers began appearing with the Death Race title instead. The game Ivy came up with would launch the first (though certainly not the last) national controversy in the fledgling video game industry.





This flyer and announcement for "Death Race 98" appeared in the April, 1976 issue of Play Meter. In May of 1975 Replay and Vending Times referred to the game as merely "Death Race". From this evidence, it appears that "Death Race 98" was an early name for the game.




The goal of the game was fairly simple, if somewhat gruesome –rather than trying to destroy each other’s cars, the players would score points by running over fleeing stick figures called "gremlins". A score of 1-3 points earned the player the rank of Skeleton Chaser; 4-10 points Bone Cracker; 11-20 Gremlin Hunter; and for more than 20 points, a player was dubbed Expert Driver (though real-world pedestrians might not agree with this assessment).






Adding to the game’s morbid theme was its equally gruesome cabinet art, created by Pat “Sleepy” Peak. Among the images was a grim reaper standing before two open graves beckoning toward a pair of drivers. The sound effects also added a chilling touch - when the player hit a gremlin, it emitted a tiny electronic scream and was replaced by a cross. The gameplay bore a suspicious resemblance to the 1975 film DeathRace 2000, and most sources report that the game was directly inspired by the movie, though sources at Exidy (including designer Howell Ivy) insist this wasn’t the case. Released in 1976, Death Race[2]created a firestorm of controversy.




[Paul Jacobs] Death Racedid cause quite a stir, but not until an Associated Press reporter ran a story in Seattle. She had been in a shopping mall and noticed a line of kids extending out the door of the arcade in the mall. She was curious and went to see what was happening and found out they were all waiting in line to play Death Race. She watched them play and then she concluded that this was a horrible game that showed humans being run over by cars and said the sound when hit resembled a "shrieking child". Well, every paper in the country picked up the story and that started the controversy. The funny thing is that Death Race was just a "filler" game until our next attraction, Car Polo, was ready for production. It was a modification of Destruction Derby using cars versus skeletons rather than cars versus cars. It required very little development time. We had only released 200 games, but after the notoriety, we ended up making around 3000 (including PCB sales overseas). Articles about the game were in all major newspapers, plus Newsweek, Playboy, National Enquirer, National Observer. Midnight, the German magazine Stern, and many more. Nationally syndicated columnist Bob Greene devoted a column to the game. I was interviewed and featured on the NBC television news magazine show "Weekend" with Lloyd Dobbins and then excerpts were shown the following week on the Today show and the Tonight show. The interview was then featured in a PBS television documentary called "Decades" as an important news event for the year 1977. I did live interviews for many U.S. radio stations and also both CBC (Canada) and BBC (England). It was a story that just wouldn't die, and Exidy laughed all the way to the bank.





Photo of Death Race from the August 1976 Play Meter.

That's Paul Jacobs in front.



In the AP article (written by Wendy Walker), Jacobs is quoted as saying "If people get a kick out of running down pedestrians, you have to let them do it". Another quote came courtesy of Dr. Byrde Meeks, a psychologist who'd worked at San Quentin:"A game like that appeals to the morbidity in a person. That type of preoccupation with violence was common in the prisoners I dealt with. They would have loved the game"[3].


The article that started it all.

This one is from the July 3, 1976 Daily Oregonian.


If Exidy thought things would blow over after the AP story, they soon found otherwise as more articles began to appear in the following months. In response, Exidy further emphasized the fact that the game was a harmless diversion and that they'd been careful to avoid depicting actual pedestrians[4]."We have one of the best artists in the business." said GM Phil Brooks "If we wanted to have cars running over pedestrians we could have done it to curl your hair." As for the "scream" the game emitted when you ran over a gremlin - that was just a beep. "We could have had screeching of tires, moans, and screams for eight bucks extra. But we wouldn't build a game like that. We're human beings too."[5]


Another AP article on the game.

From the 12/24/76 Times Picayune (New Orleans)



The hysteria exhibited in some of the articles was almost comical. A Tucson Daily Citizen article was titled "If You've Got Time to Kill…Game Goal: Road Carnage". A photograph of a young girl playing the game bore the caption "Death race or death wish?" and asked if the game was a harmless fad or "…will chasing down pedestrians on a TV screen now encourage her to cut pedestrians down on real highways later?" The article quotes one arcade manager, who compares the game to Gun Fight, a game whose violence he feels is harmless: "…but that's the tradition of the Great American West, having a shootout, a duel, in the street. But deliberately running people down - that isn't an American tradition at all" (guess he's never driven in Boston) Another operator explained "When you leave a game room, you don't go out with a gun in your pocket and shoot your neighbor down. But you do go back to your car and start driving again."[6]


Middltown (NY) Times Herald Register, 10/31/76



Complaints about the game’s violent, grisly theme eventually reached the pages of the National Enquirer and Midnight and the game was even featured in more serious forums such as NBC’s Weekend television show where a psychiatrist decried the game’s supposed promotion of violence. Even the National Safety Council got in on the act, calling the game “sick” and“morbid”.A Newsweekarticle on the game was titled Sick, Sick, Sick” (echoing the National Safety Council).


Over the years, a number of rumors about the controversy caused byDeath Race have appeared, among them: that a bomb threat was called into Exidy headquarters by someone upset with the game and that the game was banned outright in some countries resulting in some foreign operators serving jail time.


[Paul Jacobs] I do not know of any country that banned the game (all markets that we sold to around the world accepted it), but I do believe that a Japanese distributor was briefly jailed for selling it. But I'm not so sure it was necessarily for selling the game itself or that he did not follow proper import procedures (pay appropriate import duties, etc.)


As it often the case, the controversy over the game only served to boost sales. As company founder Pete Kaufmann puts it“nobody wanted to buy it, but everybody kept ordering it”. Programmer Ed Valleau recalls that after an initial run of about 1,000 units, Death Race had to be brought back into production twice and another 1,000 units were produced. Production had just wound down when the AP article hit and the ensuing brouhaha necessitated another run. Paul Jacobs recalls that about 2,000 uprights were built plus an additional 1,000 PCBs for sale overseas. While its sales were tame by Atari or Midway’s standards, it did provide Exidy with its first real hit yet as well as a steady source of income. In 1975, total sales were about $250,000. In 1976, they increased to $3,000,000. In 1977, Exidy produced a sequel to the game called Super Death Chase, a modified version of the original designed by Arlen Grainger that featured skeletons in place of “gremlins” (perhaps in an effort to avoid the controversy that had plagued its predecessor), a randomly appearing ghost and a 36-inch-wide cabinet. The game was shown at the 1977 AMOA show, but apparently never made it into full production and only a few units were built.

Super Death Chase - from Play Meter, November, 1977

Below - Play Meter's review of Super Death Chase

(January, 1978)







[1]Though some sources indicate he’d also designed Destruction Derby.

[2] Some report that the game was called Pedestrian in early stages of development, but this seems unlikely given that the “gremlins” were never intended to represent people. Jacobs claims it never went by Pedestrian.

[3]"Death Race" Is New Game in Poolrooms, AP, July 1976

[4]While some sources claim that the idea of calling the enemies "gremlins" was concocted only after the controversy erupted, this does not appear to be the case (though they may have done so to avoid future controversy). The AP article itself quotes a relieved director of the Seattle Center arcade, "those are gremlins that you run down. You're not supposed to think they're people".

[5]New York Times, December, 1976

[6]Tucson Daily Citizen, January 14, 1977

Video Game Mythbusters?? - The Malfunctioning Pong

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One of the most oft-told stories from the annals of video game history involves the first Pong game and its legendary "malfunction". You've probably all heard this one. Ted Dabney and Al Alcorn put their prototype Pong game on location at Andy Capp's Tavern. Some time later (from the next day to about two weeks, depending on the account, though the latter seems to be the more accurate timing) the bar's owner, Bill Gattis, calls Alcorn and tells him to come and fix his "malfunctioning" machine. A worried Alcorn hurries over to Andy Capp's to take a look and when he opens up the machine he breaks into a broad grin as he sees the source of the problem. The coinbox is so full that quarters have backed up all the way to the coin slot.

The story is told in just about every history of video games out there and with good reason - it's a great story. But did it actually happen?



I was recently reading an article on the history of Gottlieb in the November, 1978 issue of Loose Change magazine (a magazine aimed at slot machine collectors) when I came across the following passage about the early pinball game Bingo (quick summary - Bingo was released in 1931 by the Bingo Novelty Company. That summer, they sold the rights to Gottlieb. Gottlieb later renamed the game Bingo Ball and followed it up with Baffle Ball). On to the story…


"The following story is one of many of this type that were often told about BINGO. The tale usually tells of a man, during the depression, who invested his last dollars in a BINGO machine. Friday afternoon, after installing the machine in a bar owned by a friend, the man returned to his dingy hotel room to contemplate how he could come by funds enough to provide food that would last until the end of the week. It was to be Friday of the coming week he was to return to his friend's bar, empty the BINGO game of pennies and split the week's take. To his dismay, Saturday night about midnight, an acquaintance of his friend began pounding hard enough to knock the rickety hotel room door off of its rusty hinges and informed him that his coin operated machine was malfunctioning. Down hearted at the thought that his last dollars had been wasted on a device that would break down on its second night of operation, the man accompanied the messenger back to the bar. Upon opening his BINGO game the man was elated to discover that the machine's malfunction was due to the fact that machine was so glutted with pennies that it simply would not accept another coin!"


Sound familiar? Of course, the fact that this story has many close similarities to the Pong story doesn't meant the either or both of them didn't actually happen. Such an event could have occurred more than once.


But there's more. In the book All Your Base Are Belong To Us, former Nolan Bushnell assistant Loni Reeder claims that someone from Atari went to Andy Capp's and stuffed the coin box.


Whether the claim is true or not, I can't say. Personally, it doesn't really ring true with me. First of all, how exactly did they do this. Did they break in at night? Did they have a key? It seems hard to believe they could have done it during business hours without Gattis noticing (unless the machine was in a back room and out of sight). Or maybe Gattis was in on it? (if so, who was the target audience). And what did they hope to accomplish? If it was a publicity stunt, who would have known about it? Was there some kind of coin-op grapevine that would have spread the word throughout the city?


As far as I can recall, the incident is not reported in Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg's Atari Inc. Business is Fun - and Reeder was their editor - which leads me to believe that either they had knowledge that the story (the box-stuffing story, that is, not the original story) was false or that they couldn't find a second source to back it up.


I don't think either the Bingo story or Reeder's claim is enough to render the original story "BUSTED". Al Alcorn seems pretty insistent that it happened (I don't recall if any other witness has ever confirmed his story or not or if he was the only one there - besides Gattis - and I don't think anyone's tracked him down).


Finally, here are a few photos I found interesting, plus a couple of un-TAFA'd games

 

First up is this picture of Bill Nutting standing next to a Computer Space machine. This photo is circa 1979 when Nutting was working for A-1 Supply (courtesy Loose Change magazine):

 

Here's a couple of others from Loose Change.

First, the C.A. Robinson showroom in 1977 (C.A. Robinson was one of the country's largest distributors):

 
 
And the same showroom in 1943
 
 
 
Here's an interesting sign from the 1982 ATE show in London (the Amusement Trade Exposition was one of the largest coin-op shows in the world at the time). Copyright laws in Great Britain wren't as defined as they were in the U.S. This sign is from Competitive Video's booth.
 
 
 
 
 
I think this game actually is on TAFA.
Zaccaria's Sea Battle at the 1980 Milan Fair (another Euro coin-op show).
 
Speaking of the Milan Fair, here's Bacchilega's (an Italian manufacturer) Dino Ferrari, from the 1981 Milan Fair (Augusto Alberici also designed Imola Grand Prix).
 
 
 
The following screenshots are from Chameleon and Amazon - two games made for a 1984 "system game" called Select-A-Game made by Breshnahan Technologies of Denton, TX. I don't know if the system ever made it into production. There was also a third game for the system called Airport and they planned to release more.
 
 
Finally, to end on another Atari note, here's a shot from the first Atari Adventure, opened in November, 1983 in the Northwest Plaza mall in St. Louis. Atari Adventure was a combination arcade and computer learning center.
 
 
 



Pong Legend Confirmed

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I wasn't planning on doing a post today, but I came across some new Pong-related info that I wanted to share. Last time, I discussed one of the many legends about the game (though I think it was actually a true story). This time, I'm going to talk about another one that is perhaps lesser known. One of the stories about Pong is that after they put it on location at Andy Capp's Al Alcorn noticed that a certain group of gentlemen were arriving at the bar early in the morning to play the game. Alcorn thought this was strange, since they were practically the only customers (who goes to a bar at 9 AM?). When he asked Bill Gattis about it, Gattis told him that they were engineers from Ramtek. In an interview, Nolan Bushnell claimed that one of the bar's owners was Ramtek's VP of finance.


            Well, today I not only confirmed that Nolan's memory was right on the money but I even got a name. The May, 1977 issue of RePlayhad an article on Ramtek that included a number of tidbits that I found interesting (thoughI may be the only one).



First up is this:


"But its founder Chuck McEwan is proud to note that if it weren't for the input of capital earnings from their early video game days, the slow and costly development of Ramtek's graphic equipment (familiar from operating rooms to the NASA Space Center) may never have made it at all."



Hmm. So it looks like at least some equipment as NASA was funded by video game profits. (and yes, NASA did use Ramtek displays, as this link demonstrates: http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A19830025000)


Moving on, we have this:

"A friend [of Chuck McEwan] Tom Adams (now the firm's finance vice president) had a small interest in a Northern California club called Andy Capp [sic] ... which just happened to have one of Atari's early 'Pong' games. McEwan and Adams were fascinated by the machine, as they were by the amount of play it en joyed. As an electronic engineer, McEwan thought his Ramtek Corp. could make a device like that, and the rest is history".



 

So now we have a name to go with the Alcorn/Bushnell story - Tom Adams. And he was a part owner of the bar and Ramtek's VP of finance, just like Nolan said (of course, I think that Bushnell interview was done in 1975, so you'd think he'd get it right).


 

McEwan even defends himself against the claim that he copied Pong:

"Remember now, I knew Nolan Bushnell personally and he knew we were going into this venture right from the start. Ramtek didn't "steal" Pong…it was completely designed as its own game, meaning we didn't buy a Pong and knock it off part by part. Ramtek's Volly, which was our first piece, was a Volly, not a Pong as happened to Atari in so many other instances. It was video tennis and because we were already TV-computer oriented, it was a good game and we sold a heck of a lot of them."



There were a few other interesting bits of info in the article (such as McEwan's claims that Baseball was the first video game with animated characters and Clean Sweep the first to offer a free game - both of which I doubt). I've added the info to my earlier post about Ramtek.


Finally a few pictures.

 

Here's Chuck McEwan







 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And here's the Ramtek plant
 
 
Finally, here's the Ramtek production line (in this case, turning out the non-video piece Horoscope)
 
 
 
 

 


 


 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 3

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Exidy's new  plant - 1976

Robot Bowl
 

 
Death Race was followed by a number of less morbid games. Alley Rally (July, 1976) was a 1 or 2-player racing game in the mold of Atari's Sprint 2 in which the player raced around a figure-8 track while avoiding four drone cards that moved in an unpredictable manner. The game was apparently too tame for kids who’d cut their teeth onits more violent predecessor[1]. Attack (September, 1976) was a two-player jet vs. ship combat game. 1977 saw the release of the hit Robot Bowl, perhaps the most popular of the many video versions of bowling that appeared during the late '70s. One or two players could compete in 10 frames of video bowling. Two buttons allowed them to move their “robot” left and right and another rolled the ball. After the ball was released, the player could make it hook left or right. Strikes were greeted with a “yea” and gutter balls with a “boo!” In two-player games, one frame at would be a “beer frame” (a suggestion of the many league bowlers at Exidy) in which a waitress was chased across the screen by a ball-wielding bowler. At the time Exidy was working on the game, Sunnyvale rivals Meadows Games was hard at work on a bowling game of their own (Meadows Lanes) and Exidy had to work hard to beat them to market. Robot Bowl also featured an interesting cabinet design, though the innovation was a result of necessity being the mother of invention




[Michael Cooper-Hart] Howell had come up with Robot Bowlwhich was a fun game to do. It had a beer frame in it where the waitress comes across with a beer on a tray. We needed to get into production quickly. We had bought a company called Fun Games and they had a bunch of inventory over in Oakland. They had these cabinets, which cost us maybe a third of what we would normally pay. The problem was they were for a driving game and they had a hole in the middle of the front panel for a gas pedal with no pedal in it. So I brought this cabinet back over, I think there were 300 of them over there. I set it down and said to Hal “Why don’t we make the hole the ball return”. So we just silk-screened above the hole “Ball Return” and we were in production a week later.


Robot Bowl featured, once again, the work of Howell Ivy who, during Exidy’s early years, was one of the leading forces among a small group of designers. Ivy would go on to produce a number of minor classics of the 1970s but his name is rarely listed among the ranks of the great coin-op designers.



Exidy manufacturing area - circa early 1976

            Perhaps most importantly, Robot Bowl had another feature that previous Exidy games had lacked – a microprocessor. At the time, the use of microprocessors in video games was still somewhat innovative and Exidy’s designers were unsure that they would work. To prove it, Ivy had to purchase a MOS Technologies 6502 out of his own pocket. Ivy had been masterful when it came to creating hardware-based, TTL games, often creating new game variants (such as the unreleased Spiders From Space[2]) within a few weeks or even days of starting. With the rise of the microprocessor, however, game design began to change from a hardware to a software-oriented process.

Marquee from the unreleased Spiders From Space
 
 
Circus



 



1977 also saw the release of another Howell Ivy creation that would go on to be Exidy’s biggest hit of the decade (easily eclipsing Death Race) and one of the classics of the pre-Space Invadersera. Circus was co-designed by Ivy and Edward Valleau and inspired by the Atari smash hit Breakout. Three rows of balloons (colored blue, green, and yellow via cellophane tape overlay) moved across the top of the screen.  Gameplay was simple - break all the balloons. Rather than a ball and paddle, however, Circusfeatured a teeter-totter with a clown at one end. Two platforms jutted from each side of the screen and at the start of a game, a second clown would leap from one of the platforms and plummet towards the ground. The player would then try to position the empty end of the teeter-totter under the clown, propelling his counterpart upwards toward the waiting balloons. Hitting the teeter-totter near the end generated maximum momentum and, as in Breakout, if the player shot a clown through a gap in the balloons, it would bounce around breaking balloons while the player racked up point after point. Bursting all of the blue balloons in the top row awarded a bonus and beating the game’s high score awarded a free game. Circus was also billed as the first video game to include music created through software, rather than via a built-in 8-track tape cartridge.
    
Introduced at the 1977 AMOA show, Circus was a smash hit. It became Exidy’s biggest seller and established them as a major player in the video market. At its peak, 100 units were being sold every day as the production run topped 13,000. Some sources state that as many as 20,000 were built. Exidy was still a relatively small company. Their plant didn't have enough space to store completed Circus units and a number of them had to be kept in the parking lot outside (Exidy hired a guard to keep watch over them). The game was also licensed to Bally/Midway who released their own version called Clowns[3].Perhaps the best-know version of the game was Circus Atari for the Atari 2600. As with Death Race, a follow-up game (Trapeze) failed to match the success of the original.

      Storage wasn't the only problem Exidy had in the early years. Parts shortages were another. Exidy couldn't afford to shut down production and wait for the parts to arrive so instead they built them without the needed part and stored them until it arrived. At one point they were waiting for a shipment of power supplies and had to stack the nearly completed games on top of one another on their sides to make room for more.


            While Exidy’s other early efforts may not have matched Circus in terms of success, a number of them surpassed it in technical innovation. Car Polo (1977) was one such game. Like Destruction Derby and Death Race, Car Polo was a driving game with a unique twist. The players used cars to push a ball towards the opponent’s goal (like polo with cars replacing the horses). Car Polo most distinctive feature, however, was that it was Exidy’s first true color game (previous games had achieved color via tinted overlays) and one of the industry's earliest games to compbine color and a microprocessor.
  


The most offbeat 1977 effort was Score– a game that ads referred to as “The Love Machine”. Oddly, the game was actually another extension of the Destruction Derby concept with the cars replaced by bar patrons. Set in a singles bar, the object of the game was to “score” with as many members of the opposite sex as possible. When the onscreen Lothario made contact with the object of his (or her) affections, a heart appeared on screen. A cocktail version of the game came in a heart-shaped cabinet.  For those who weren’t satisfied with the mere thrill of conquest, Exidy also built an optional dispenser that could be attached to the game belching out tokens in response to high “score”s. Despite the innovative concept, amorous bar patrons understandably preferred the real thing and the game failed to catch fire.



            With the success of hits like Death Race, Robot Bowl, and Circus, Exidy was steadily becoming a major player in the U.S. videogame market. One reason for this success may have been the company’s open game design process. Anyone could submit game ideas (Michael Cooper-Hart had even created a series of blank storyboards that they could fill in) and even people on the production lines made suggestions. Periodically these ideas were gathered and the design staff would head of to Pajaro Dunes (a favorite haunt of Atari’s designers) or some other location for 2-3 days of intense discussion and planning. At the end, various game ideas would be listed and the design staff would vote on them, then Pete Kauffman would make the final decision as to which games would be produced.




[1] Some sources indicate that Exidy released a game called Alley Death Derbythat consisted of Alley Rally cabinets modified to accept Death Race boards, but sources at Exidy deny that such a game ever existed. The source of this rumor appears to have been a posting on the rec.games.video.arcade.collecting newsgroup.

[2]Since Exidy was a relatively small manufacturer, they couldn’t afford to scrap many games once they’d been developed, so  “unreleased” games like Spiders From Space were rare

[3] Reportedly, a legal dispute arose between the companies over the game.

 

 

Brides of Chuck E. - Pizza Time Theatre's Forgottten Imitators

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Today's post is mostly pictures.
Everyone has heard of Pizza Time Theatre and its mascot Chuck E. Cheese. Most people know that the chain spawned a number of imitators that combined food (often pizza), arcade games, and costumed or robotic characters. Some of the imitators, like Dave and Busters (thought they ommited the characters), everyone's heard of.  Today's post is about some you may not have heard of (and one that you have).

First off, here's an interesting photo from June, 1976.
Note that at this point, the idea was in its early stages (the first Pizza Time Theatre wouldn't open until 1977) and the character (and restaurant, I believe) was called "The Big Cheese" (it was also known as Rick Rat's Pizza at one point).


Here's the one you've all heard of.
Showbiz Pizza Palace (and its relation to and dealings with Pizza Time Theatre) merits a post of its own. For now, here are some of their characters.

The "big cheese" at Showbiz was Billy Bob Brockali (named for founder Robert Brock).


Here are some more Show Biz characters.
I believe the one in the upper left is Rolfe DeWolfe, who delivered stand-up comedy with a puppet named Earl Schmerle. The house band was the Rock Afire Explosion, featuring Fats (the King Kong of the piano), Duke Larue on drums, Beach Bear on guitar, mouse vocalist Mini Mozzarella and Looney Bird - a heckler that popped up out of a stump.




P.J. Pizzazz was Sega's answer to Pizza Time Theatre. The first location opened in West Covina, CA in June of 1980.


 P.J.'s mascot was a robot named P.J.




Bullwinkle Family Food 'N Fun opened its first location in Santa Clara in 1983. Characters included the various characters from the Jay Ward and Peter Piech cartoons (Bullwinkle, Rocky, Dudley Do Right, Tennessee Tuxedo, Underdog etc.). The idea for the chain came from Paul Frees (the voice of Boris Badenov). Bill Scott (the voice of Bullwinkle) and June Foray (the voice of Rocky) went back into the studio to record dialogue for the robotic characters.

 

John Phillip Tuba's was a Florida chain.

Sgt. Singer's Pizza Circus was founded by Craig Singer (president of the Nickels and Dimes arcade chain) in Pasadena, TX in 1984.
Characters included Dolly Porker, P.T. Barum (a bear), Sgt. Singer (a tiger), Pete and Repete (an elephant and a mouse), and Ponce de Lion.


I don't know about you, but this one is just plain creepy to me.
Sammy Sands was the mascot of a chain called Gadgets.



Tom Foolery was Bally's answer to Pizza Time Theatre but with a difference. This chain was aimed at adults with a full service restaurant and no characters. It started when Bally acquired a chain of restaurants called Barnaby's Family Inns in 1981.


Zapp's took the adult concept even further. A creation of Nolan Bushnell, Zapp's was a kind of combination singles bar and arcade. The first one opened in 1983 in Cupertino (in a converted Pizza Time Theatre). In addition to the food and games, Zapp's featured two dance floors, MTV, an "excuse booth", video tape monitors in the bathroom (Chippendales for the ladies, the choice of a topless bar or sexy aerobics for the gents), and the "tunnel of love" where singles coudl sit with member of the opposite sex while they got "zapped"




Finally, a few more.












The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 4

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By 1978 Exidy had become one of the leading video game makers on the west coast and continued to churn out games at a rapid pace. 1978’s Football and Rip Cord were standard variations of games already on the market. Football was a soccer game using trackball controls (which Exidy called "palm balls"). Rip Cord was a takeoff on Atari's Sky Diver. The player controlled a sky diver who parachuted from a plane, guiding him to a series of landing pads on cliffs or a central island while avoiding the blades of a squadron of helicopters. The most distinctive (though not unique, sine a similar idea had been used in Sky Diver) feature was the game's controls, which included a triangular ring the player pulled to deploy their parachute. Rip Cord debuted at the 1978 AMOA show in November. Exidy's really standout game, however, was another game that debuted at the same show - a game that was anything but standard and that would result in one of Exidy’s lasting contributions to video game history. Star Fire was an extraordinarily innovative game that featured a number of significant firsts[1]. The game, however, was not designed at Exidy.

 

Arlen Grainger, programmer for Rip Cord

 
Star Fire



Ted Michon graduated from Cal Tech in Spring of 1975, intending to return the following year to get a second degree. What was supposed to be a summer job at Glendale’s Comtal turned into a full-time project designing a “Digital Vidicon Scanner System” that allowed the CIA to reduce the time it took to digitize spy satellite photographs from 3 hours to one minute. By the time Michon finished his project, Comtal was on the verge of extinction and Michon was let go. Looking for a new way to pay the bills, he came across an ad for an electrical engineer opening for a company called Digital Games. Michon took the job, only to watch most of the design staff leave after a dispute between the two owners leaving him as one of the few engineers. Michon's most significant work at Digital Games was the "3-D" driving game Night Racer (which was based on the German game Nurburgring, which Michon had seen on  a trip to Germany to fix an issue with Digital's Air Combat game). While Michon's stay at Digital (which was renamed Micronetics by the time Night Racer was released) was chaotic, he did find a new career as a video game designer.
After leaving Digital Games/Micronetics, Michon decided to start his own independent video game design company, which he called Techni-Cal. Before leaving, he had contacted Midway’s Hank Ross and negotiated a contract to develop games for Midway. After borrowing money from his family, Michon soon had Techni-Cal up and running and turned his mind toward designing new video games.
In the early months, his main problem was a lack of engineering staff. A solution came when a pair of old Cal Tech friends contacted him about a contract they had to design a terminal for C. Itoh Electronics. The pair may have been good engineers, but they were poor businessmen and were going broke. Michon decided to join forces with them and they renamed their new company Technical Magic Inc. In late 1977, Technical Magic would begin work on a new video game as well.
After thoroughly enjoying the 1977 mega-hit Star Wars, Michon decided he wanted to create a video game based on the movie. By this time microprocessors were becoming increasingly common in video games. Michon, a hardware specialist, decided he needed a programmer and hired friend David Rolfe who had recently graduated from college. In addition to a microprocessor, the game Rolfe was to design would be a color game – a combination that had rarely been used at that point (though Exidy’s Car Polo had used a 6502 processor). 

 


[David Rolfe] Ted had developed a system with a Z-80 processor running at about 2.5 megahertz. This was going to be the first arcade game system that had a color monitor and was controlled by a microprocessor. I think before then both microprocessors and color were pretty rare ... Color monitors were hideously expensive. Ted found the first one that was slightly less than hideously expensive and developed some hardware trying to cut the costs to the bone and yet have some ability to manipulate a bitmap.


            The game Rolfe developed was a first-person shooter in which the player squared off against invading TIE fighter-like enemies. While the game’s enemies and title graphics clearly borrowed from Star Wars, Michon had not bothered to obtain licensing from the movie’s producers, believing he’d either have time to do so later or would be able to change the game enough to avoid infringement.
Star Fire was primarily the work of three people. Michon designed the hardware, Rolfe handled the programming, and Michon’s then-girlfriend (and now wife) Susan Olsen created much of the game’s art. While Michon’s development system was innovative, it was also rather primitive by later standards. The game made use of what was called a “bit-mapped” display in which each pixel on the screen was “mapped” to a location in memory that stored the color values for the pixel. The more memory that was available, the more colors you could produce but more memory was also more expensive and there were also technical limitations, so designers often had to get the most mileage out of limited hardware resources. In addition, bit-mapped displays presented a number of inherent challenges.


[David Rolfe] With a bitmap you can put up anything you want but it’s hard to maintain your background because you’re drawing on top of it so if you’re moving an object across your background, then when you move the object out of the way you have to redraw your background, unlike something with sprites or moving objects where you set up a background and the thing is just painted in front of or behind it. So it was a relatively primitive system but you could design the games to work with the limitations as quickly as possible.


Because of limited resources, Ted was designing madly to have as few bits to show as much information as possible so we wanted the appearance of full color and yet we cheated as much as possible since we didn’t really have to have lots of bits per pixel. So it ended up being like 1.6 bits per pixel or some relatively compressed amount of data for a relatively large number of colors and we did have to struggle with that to move things around.


Each bit map byte described the state of a horizontal row of 8 pixels, and within that byte only two colors were available, corresponding to the bits being on or off. This limited the ability to draw arbitrary pictures…The bytes were painted from left to right so it means that if one pixel was directly above the other you could create arbitrary colors but moving left to right it was tricky business. One thing could bleed over onto another because if you have one item that is red and white and the next which is red and blue and they cross each other then there’s going to be bytes in the middle that want to have 3 different colors on them and they couldn’t technically. So it was sort of tricky to allow for complete free motion of pictures that you were moving around on the screen because they tended to step on each other and to some extent you could design the game around lines such that that wouldn’t happen and to some extent they were just going to step on each other and that was that.


Another technical challenge was creating the game’s 3D effects in which the enemies got larger as they got nearer to the player’s ship.


[David Rolfe] Anything we did 3D was a complete cheat. There was a set of 32 different pictures so [you] had some sense of how far away it was.  I looked up in the table do I want picture #1 or picture #20. We didn’t have the processing power to calculate that kind of stuff.


Star Fire appeared in the Disney film "Midnight Madness" and yes, that's Eddie "Mr. Potato Head" Deezen of Wargames fame on the left.


Michon’s original intention was to sell the game to Midway but they didn't like the gameplay, even after Michon and his team made a number of requested changes. Midway president Hank Ross even suggested adding a witch on a bicycle that you could shoot. The team dutifully complied. When you shot the witch, the words "A Witch" appeared on the screen. Despite the changes, Midway ultimately ended passed and the rights to the game’s hardware and software reverted to Michon, who began looking for another buyer. They found one in Exidy.
The gameplay of the finished product was relatively straightforward. The player controlled a star fighter and used his lasers to destroy a host of incoming alien invaders. Realism was enhanced by the game’s first person perspective and color graphics, a targeting computer that could “lock on” to enemy ships, lasers that could overheat if used too much, and a limited fuel supply that could be increased by inserting more quarters. The witch was replaced by an Exidy spaceship and the words "A Witch " were chanted to "Got Us". While these features were all innovative, it was two others that really set the game apart.
The first had come when David Rolfe suggested that what players wanted out of a game was to go down in history. Realizing that the game’s processor and RAM would allow them to store data, the team decided that they would let the 20 highest scoring players enter and save their initials. The only problem was how they would actually enter them. After puzzling over the issue for some time, they hit upon idea of using the game controls themselves.

[David Rolfe] That was probably the best idea of my life…In retrospect it all seems obvious but at the time the notion of actually putting in your initials and having the game remember them was sort of a big deal. The concept of a high score table was very novel. The concept of a computer was very novel – that something could be so smart that it could remember who you were.  That was the dawn of the era of smart stuff. In the 1960s, everything was dumb and for what it's worth I think video games played a role in teaching people in our culture that machines were no longer dumb.


Another interesting feature was that if you entered the initials of one of the designers after achieving a high score, you were presented with an appropriate greeting. With the game almost finished, Technical Magic still needed to find a buyer. They soon turned to Exidy, who decided to produce the game, and who even added what became the game’s other major innovation in the form of a cabinet designed by Michael Cooper-Hart.



[Michael Cooper-Hart] Star Fire was the first time I packaged a game in an enclosed cockpit…I put an 8” speaker under the seat, the equivalent of what a subwoofer would be today. That was very daring because the operators and distributors were really scared that people would go in there and do naughty things or vandalize the game and in fact that never happened. After that there was a whole genre [of cockpit games]. The next one I did was Tailgunner, which was kind of an art nouveau [concept].


Star Fire was hailed as the first “total environment” game. Games where the player sat down were nothing new, cocktail table games had been around since the heyday of the Pong clones. Other games, like Atari’s Hi-Way (April 1975)and Night Driver featured a built-in chair that the player could sit in. Star Fire, however, took things to a new level by adding walls and a roof to completely enclose the player in the game cabinet. The new, wedge-shaped cabinet design of Star Fire (which came to be called a “cockpit” cabinet) looked like the latest creation of the NASA labs and took the gaming experience one-step closer to realism. In addition to its innovations, Star Fire also proved quite popular and Replay listed it as the seventh most popular video game of 1979 in its year-end issue.

 
 
 Even more realistic was Rolling Star Fire , a version that included a “rolling chassis” (a cabinet that used hydraulics to move in response to the player's actions) and improved game play. A protytope version was show at the 1981 AMOA show but it does not appear to have been released. At least not in the U.S. Sigma licensed the game from Exidy and showed it the Japan Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo in 1982[2]. Dave Rolfe recalls[3]that a game called Star Fire II was also created, possibly for the export market, though it was really just a slightly modified version of the original (it may have been the same game as Rolling Star Fire).
 
 


[1]Numerous sources have listed Star Fire as not only Exidy’s first color game, but the first color coin-op video game period. Documentation, however, indicates that Car Polo was released some months prior to Star Fire.  As for other companies, many of them produced true color games prior to Star Fire.

[2] The December 15, 1982 issue of Play Meter reports that "Sigma showed Ponpoko…and Rolling Starfireagain this year", indicating that they may have shown it the year before.

[3] In an interview in Atari2600 Connection.
 
 
Bonus Pictures
 
Since we mentioned Wargames, here's a picture of Ally Sheedy at the Video Invasion arcade in Toronto for a Wargames promo
 
 
Here's a shot of the interor of a Funway Freeway arcade, showing their trademark street sign motif

 
 
Someone one another board requested I post this - a photo of the rare Sega vector game Battle Star from a distributor showing
 
 
 

 Finally, here's one I found VERY interesting. This was shown at the 1975 MOA show in October - the same show where Gunfight (the first microprocessor video game) and Spirit of '76 (the first microprocessor pin) debuted. It's from a company called California Online Computer Systems. It's a video game "system" for sale to arcades that consisted of a central, programmable computer and several remote terminals. According to the main article, it cost $35,000 (more than the figure mentioned in the caption). I'd love to find out more about this one. It would have arguably been one of the first "system" games and was released right around the time personal computers were starting to take off (the Altair came out in 1975 too). This picture is from the November, 1975 Play Meter.
 
 

The Video Game Industry Year by Year: 1976-1977

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1976


            In 1976 the industry finally left the ball-and-paddle game behind. While a good number of such games were produced (around 1/3 of new titles) they were a distinct minority. Driving games and shooting games proved especially popular. Of the 11 video games named in Replay's year-end operator survey, 5 were driving games and 4 were shooting games (the exceptions were Atari's Breakout and Ramtek's Trivia).At the AMOA in November, a number of innovative new games were introduced including Death Race, Blockade, and Night Driver. Replay gave Blockade a "best of show" award. Midway sold 7,000 units of Wheels, 8,600 of Gun Fight and 10,000 Sea Wolfs. Atari sold 11-15,000 Breakouts. On the other hand, there were still plenty of old Pong clones on location and many operators remained leery of video games after having been once bitten. An article in the January, 1977 issue of Play Meter by operator Gene Beley sums up this opinion nicely.



[Gene Beley] I can still remember Bob PortaIe…showing me the first Pong game by Atari. When he told me the price of over $1300, I looked inside at the Hitachi TV set, and joked, 'For that price, I at least ought to get a Sony.' But when we discovered that the cash boxes overflowed in the Pongs, we overlooked the Hitachi and the other adolescent pimples …(such as giving free games when it was kicked or received a charge of static electricity). The industry rejoiced. Nolan Bushnell became the Messiah. And, better yet, before the payments were even completed on the Pongs for all of the operators' locations, along roared Gran Trak 10 and its twin, Gran Trak 20. No operator could afford to be without such equipment. As a result, an abnormally large amount of equipment was purchased on credit, frequently with no down payments, during this boom period…Manufacturers were throwing new video games into distributors showrooms faster than Billy Jean King could hit tennis balls over the net. Many of those games that are now skeletons in the closets of manufacturers looked great enough to try and buyFortunately, because the video games were still a public novelty, times were good, the payments got paid, and, if a particular video game began turning sour, we hustled it back to the distributor, and got a fair trade-in price on the latest TV game…Operators began to realize they really weren't making money on these games. The location was getting the feast. And everyone else in the distribution chain. But the operator began to ponder the predicament by the end of 1975…several veteran operators on the West Coast faded quietly out of the business, along with the video machines that were creating a graveyard. In 1976 distributors began being highly selective in which video games that they would even accept for trade-ins. By the end of 1976, it was almost impossible to sell any video game but a Gran Trak 10, 20, or Indy 800 to a Los Angeles distributor, though the same distributor may have sold the same game six months before


 

As successful as video games were, however, pinball games may have been even more so. At least 5 games introduced during the year sold 10,000 copies or more led by Bally's Captain Fantastic with over 16,000. The legalization of pinball in New York City and Canada helped but pinball sales were up everywhere.In Replay's list of the 10 top earning coin-op games during the year, pinball games held down the #3 (Bally's Wizard from 1975) and #9 (Captain Fantastic) spots. Replay reported that 41% of games on location in 1976 were pinball games, accounting for 49% of operator income.

While microprocessor games had been introduced at the 1975 MOA show. Most pinball and video games produced during 1976 didn't use them as manufacturers were still scrambling to incorporate the new technology. While pinball and video games got most of the attention, electro-mechanical arcade games weren't dead. Atari/Namco's F-1, Sega's Plinker's Canyon (a rifle gallery), and Americoin's Junkyard(a crane game) also received best of show honors.



One sign of the growing importance of pinball and video games came in November when the MOA (Music Operators of America) changed its name to AMOA (Amusement and Music Operators of America) - though part of the reason for the change was that the rival IAAPA was trying to lure arcade operators away from the MOA. Another major trend during the year was the continued explosion in the number of arcades. In Replay's operator  survey, 92% of operators said they had a major arcade (defined as a location with 20 or more games) on their route. For the first time, Replay conducted a separate poll of arcade owners and operators and found that 24% of them had opened within the previous year. The most common locations for arcades were, in order, shopping malls, bowling alleys, strip centers, and colleges. Many in the industry thought that arcades (at least the "family fun center" variety often found in malls) might offer a solution to the industry's image problems. Replay reported that "In 1976, arcades entered 'phase two' of their revolution from center city sleaze to plushly-decorated salons populated with all-American folks from 'central casting.'   



            On the negative front, a few video game manufacturers closed their doors during the year, including Digital Games, Innovative Coin Corporation, and Electromotion. In December, the venerable Chicago Coin's assets were purchased by Sam and Gary Stern. Exidy's Death Race caused the industry's first national controversy. Other stories affecting the coin-op industry in general included the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City and the signing of the Copyright Revision Bill in October. Jukebox operators would have to pay a royalty of $8 per machine, which would increase to $25 in 1982, and $50 in 1984. While many hailed the bill as bringing a truce to the decades-long war between jukebox operators and song writers, many operators were unhappy. For the first time, they would be required to pay royalties on their equipment. Many felt that they were being double taxed since they had already paid royalties when they bought the records. In addition, the bill required operators to provide a list of locations where they placed their machines, which many felt was a violation of privacy. Many also felt that the MOA had not done a good job representing their interests (in later years, when the royalty per machine was raised to $63, many operators stopped carrying jukeboxes altogether). 1976 also marked the beginning of the corporate era in coin-op video games as Columbia  acquired Gottlieb and Warner bought Atari (though whether this was  a good thing or a bad one depends on your point of view).



With the introduction of the General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip the home video game industry exploded in 1976, with over 75 companies making ball-and-paddle games. Coleco introduced the Telstar and sold a million units. Fairchild introduced its cartridge-based Channel F and Mattel introduced its handheld Auto Race.



Statistics:

# of Different Video Games Released: ca 100


 


# of arcade video games sold (according to Creative Strategies, Inc.): 54,000



Top Games


Replay: 1. Sea Wolf (Midway), 2.Gun Fight (Midway), 3.Wheels (Midway), 4. Indy 800 (Atari), 5. Breakout (Atari), 6. Indy 4 (Atari), 7. BiPlane (Fun Games)



Other Significant Games: Death Race (Exidy), Blockade (Gremlin), Night Driver (Atari)



Entering Video Game Industry (major manufacturers only)


Bailey International, Cal Omega (?), Electrocoin, Fascination Ltd, Gametech, Gremlin Industries, Innovative Coin Corp, Sidam (?), Subelectro, United Games, World Wide Video Enterprises


 


Exiting Industry (major manufacturers only)


Bailey International, Digital Games, Edcoe (?), Electra Games, Electromotion, Fascination Ltd, Fun Games, Gametech, Innovative Coin Corp, World Wide Video Enterprises (?)


 


Top machine types, average weekly earnings:


Replay (street locations): Pool Tables $44, Flipper Pins $41, Jukebox (taverns) $41, Upright Video Games $36


Replay (arcades): Group Games (e.g. Indy 800) $310, Driving Games $46, Video Games $42, Flipper Games $38, Skee-Ball $38


Play Meter: Jukeboxes  $49, Pool Tables $41, Video Games $40



Percentage of Game Distribution (RePlay, September, 1976)Street Locations: Flippers 41%, TV Games 30%, Driving 14%, Rifles 6%Arcades: Flippers 34%, TV Games 18%, Rifles 17%, Novelties 13%

Percentage of Game Income (RePlay, September, 1976)


Street Locations: Flippers 49%, TV Games 21%, Driving 16%


Arcades: Flippers 37%, TV Games 21%, Rifles 14%, Group Games 9%



If you could operate just one machine type, what would it be? (Replay)


1.    Pinball, 2. Jukebox, 3. Pool Table, 4. TV Game



Most popular game types (Replay)Taverns: 1. Flipper Games, 2. Pool Tables, 3. Shuffle Alleys, 4. Soccer TablesRestaurants: 1. Flipper Games, 2. Video (upright), 3. Soccer Tables

1977



            Play Meter called 1977 a "transition" year in coin-op. The transition they were talking about was from electro-mechanical to solid state technology. By the end of 1977 most pinball manufacturers were producing solid state pins while most video game manufacturers were switching to microprocessors. Ball-and-paddle games were finally a thing of the past with only a handful being produced (at least on the coin-op front). Some saw the coin-op video market as flat. In June Play Meter noted that while pinball and juke sales were soaring, video games "seem to be slipping". Elsewhere in the issue, Joe Robbins of Empire Distributing said that "Certainly the video games have peaked and are in a plateau." RePlay's spring survey noted that it was the third consecutive one in which video games as a group were labeled "trouble".  At the AMOA show the two most popular video games were Space Wars by Cinematronics and Circus by Exidy.
Replay had a different name for 1977. They called it the "Year of the Electronic Pinball". Solid state pinballs were an instant hit with operators, who found them easier to service. Of the top 20 coin-op games in Replay's operator survey, 8 were pins including the #1 overall game, Evel Knievel, which sold 14,000 copies for Bally. September's Eight Ball (also by Bally) did even better with 20,320 sold. Even Atari got into the pinball game. Gottlieb, on the other hand, once the leading producer, was slow to climb on the solid state bandwagon and lost its #1 position to Williams and Bally. Another significant event, at least symbolically, was the legalization of pinball in Chicago, the birthplace of the modern pinball industry.
On the home front, things started well enough with the introduction of the RCA Studio II followed by the Coleco Telstar Arcade. Mattel hit it big with the handheld Auto Race and Football. The big news, however, was the released of the Atari VCS for Christmas. Ultimately, however, Christmas 1977 turned out to be bad news as the video home game industry underwent its first crash. The market was glutted with ball-and-paddle games. As demand rose for programmable consoles, dedicated unites were dumped at bargain basement prices, causing a backlash the affected the consoles. Handheld games also siphoned off customers. RCA and Fairchild both exited the market permanently while Coleco dropped the Telstar to concentrate on portable games. 
Statistics:

# of Different Video Games Released: ca 100


Top Games


Replay: 1. Sea Wolf (Midway), 2. Sprint 2 (Atari), 3. Breakout (Atari), 4. Drag Race (Atari), 5. Starship 1 (Atari), 6. Double Play (Midway), 7. Night Driver (Atari), 8. Bazooka (PSE), 9. Robot Bowl (Exidy), 10. 280 Zzzap (Midway)



Play Meter: 1. Sea Wolf, 2. Sprint 2, 3. Breakout, 4. LeMans (Atari), 5. Gun Fight (Midway), 6. Night Driver, 7. Death Race (Exidy), 8. Tornado Baseball (Midway), 9. 280 Zzzap, 10. (tie) Blockade (Gremlin) and Indy 4



Entering Video Game Industry (major manufacturers only)

A-1 Supply, Amutech
Exiting Industry (major manufacturers only)


Electrocoin, Nutting Associates, Project Support Engineering (PSE)



Top machine types, average weekly earnings:


Replay (street locations): Pool Tables $60, Upright Video Games $54, Jukebox (tavern) $54, Flipper Pins $51


Play Meter: Jukeboxes $46, Pinball $44, Video Games $44


Vending Times (no figures for jukeboxes): Pinball $43, Pool Tables $40, Video Games $37[1]



% of total equipment, by type (Play Meter)Pinball 33%, Phonographs 25%, Arcade Games (including Video games) 15%

# of new machines bought per operator, by type (Play Meter)


Pinball 13, Video Games 9, Phonographs 5, Foosball 5



Preferred Video Game Manufacturer (Play Meter)


Atari 59%, Bally/Midway 31%, Others 10%



If you could operate just one machine type, what would it be? (Replay)1.    Pinball, 2. Pool Tables, 3. Jukeboxes, 4. Soccer Tables, 5. TV Games


Most popular game types (Replay)


Taverns: 1. Pool Tables, 2. Flipper Games, 3. TV Games


Restaurants: 1. Video (upright and cocktail) 2. Flipper Games





[1]For comparison cigarette machines (the most popular type of vending machine and the one type usually carried by music and game operators) earned a an average of $60 per week in 1977 and $64 per week in 1978. The one type of machine not included in the above figures is the slot machine. A 1977 Forbesreport examined the earnings 23 Bally slot machines in a single casino over an 18-day period and showed that they were grossing almost $1,350 a week (after paying out)


Bonus Pictures

 






An interesting non-video game from the 1978 AMOA show - Sega's Grand Prix IV





Some months back I posted about the game Meteors. Here's a photo from its debut at the 1981 AOE show.



Here's a rare Moppet game - Big Paw's Cave - from the 1983 AMOA show
 
 
A better picture of the cab


Did you know that there was a sixth Moppet game in the works? (from Vending Times, February, 1984)



The Video Game Trailer from Elcon Industries (IIRC founder Andre Dubel tolde me they only sold one). Atari tried a similar concept.






The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 5

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Other Products





Not all of Exidy’s efforts during these years were video games, however. The company also branched out into other areas. A number of games were the result of Pete Kauffman’s love of games from the penny arcade era. 1975’s Old Time Basketballwas one attempt to re-capture that era. The game was a throwback to Chicago Coin’s mechanical Basketball Champ(1947) and Pro Basketball (1961), but it fared poorly against the video and pinball games popular at the time with around 1,000 units produced. Exidy would later release Whirly Bucket and Tidal Wave(a pair of roll-up games similar to Skee-Ball), a half-size craps table, and a line of player pianos.

 
Supposedly, this is Exidy's craps table, but I haven't confirmed this
 
The Sorcerer



 


Perhaps the company’s most ambitious effort came in April of 1978 at the PERCOMP convention in Long Beach, California with the debut of the Exidy Sorcererpersonal computer. With the release of the Sorcerer[1], Exidy became (probably) the second major coin-op company, after Gremlin, to make a personal computer (Atari would join them in 1979 with the 400 and 800). At the time, the major players in the low-cost home computer market were the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET.

      In November, 1977 Exidy had formed a Data Products division in Sunnyvale and appointed Paul Terrell as marketing manager. By 1977 Terrell was already a seasoned veteran in the incipient computer industry. In December of 1975 he had founded The Byte Shop (named for the recently introduced Byte magazine) in Menlo Park, California - one of the earliest consumer computer stores. The Byte Shop started as one of the first retailers for the MITS Altair 8800, but lost its dealership status for violating the company's exclusivity agreement. Terrell didn't mind. He was selling all the machines he could get from companies like IMSAI and Processor Technology. The store even sold its own Byte Shop-branded computer called the Byt-8. Since most of these early computers required assembly, Terrell offered "kit insurance"  - for an extra $50, Terrell guaranteed he would help solve any issues that arose with the machines. Within a month of opening his store, Terrell was approached by others wanting to open Byte Shops of their own and the chain began to expand. In July 1976 Business Week profiled that chain and soon inquiries began pouring in by the thousands from potential investors. Terrell was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club where he met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who told him about their new company, Apple Computer. Terrell gave Jobs his business card and told him to keep in touch. The next day, a barefoot Jobs walked into The Byte Shop and told Terrell he was keeping in touch and tried to sell him some Apple I circuit boards. Terrell wasn't interested in boards. Instead, he wanted fully-assembled computers and was willing to pay $500 a piece for them on delivery. Terrell gave the pair a purchase order for 50 Apple I's on net 30 days credit. The Byte Shop had just become the world's first Apple retailer. Now Wozniak and Jobs had just 30 days to deliver 50 machines. With Terrell's guarantee in hand, they were able to obtain the parts they needed from suppliers who otherwise might not have given them the time of day. Apple delivered the 50 machines on the 29th day. Terrell (who felt that computers should work out of the box) added keyboards and monitors before selling them.  According to some accounts Terrell's idea had one other far-reaching effect on Apple. Jobs and Wozniak (the account goes) had previously seen their computers as being primarily of interest to hobbyists who would want to customize them. When Terrell began selling fully-functioning computers, the two finally saw the light. The Apple II would have a built in keyboard and come with a case and a monitor. By the time Terrell sold the Byte Shop in November of 1977, he had 74 stores in 15 states and Japan and valued his operation at $4 million.



Shortly thereafter, Terrell went to work for Exidy. It was Terrell, in fact, who had talked Pete Kauffman and Howell Ivy into launching the Sorcerer in the first place Terrell had been impressed with the colorful graphics he saw in Exidy's arcade games and felt that they would be the ideal company to design a personal computer with improved graphics capabilities. He also  gave the computer its name. Since computers were like magic to many people, Terrell suggested calling the computer the Sorcerer.
Hoping to compete in a tough marketplace, Exidy decided to combine the graphics capabilities of the Commodore PET with the flexibility of the TRS-80. They also included a few features of their own – the most highly touted of which was the Rom Pac, an 8-track cartridge containing the BASIC language interpreter. The Pac, which plugged into a port on the side of the computer, allowed users to load BASIC quickly instead of waiting the five or more minutes it took to load an application from a cassette tape (the standard method of data storage at the time). Exidy promised additional cartridges in the near future. The Sorcerer also contained ports for a printer, a cassette player, and a monitor (it could also be connected to a TV set). The unit shipped with a 4 MHz Z-80 CPU and 8k of RAM (expandable to 32K) the target price was $895. Upon its launch in April of 1978 orders poured in and Exidy found itself with a 4,000 unit backlog. Pete Kaufmann had high hopes for the Sorcerer - very high. In late 1978 he announced that he expected the data products division to account for 40% of Exidy's business in 1979. While initial reviews were quite favorable, only time would tell if the Sorcerer would make it in the dog-eat-dog world of home computers.


[1] In the August 1997 Computer Shopper, John Dvorak claimed that the Sorcerer was designed by Tulip Computers of the Netherlands “as part of a project to bring computer literacy to the country”.


Bonus Pictures

A Nichibutsu coin-op Go game from the 1982 ATE show in London.


Wall-mounted video games from the 1982 IMA show in Germany.

 
 
 
I mentioned this one in an earlier post. Here's a screenshot from the third game in Breshnahan Technologies' game system - Airport
 

 

Nintendo's production line.

 


 

For-Play Manufacturing

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Here's a question for you. What was the second mass-produced coin-op video game ever made (after Computer Space)? Most would answer Pong, but that isn't the one I'm thinking of. And no, I'm not talking about Galaxy Game; that wasn't mass produced. The game I'm thinking of is Star Trek by Burbank's For-Play Manufacturing, released (allegedly) in September of 1972, a full two months before Pong's official release (though prototype versions of Pong had been in the field for some time prior [since August, if memory serves[). Star Trek was supposedly a straight clone of Computer Space. The game featured an upright cabinet and a crude joystick control device. It also featured a logo and cabinet art that looked suspiciously like they came from a certain NBC television series. According to legend For-Play had never bothered to get the rights to the TV series Star Trek so when the producers found out about the game, production came to a rapid halt[1]. Unfortunately, little is known about the game and even less about the company that made it. Even the release date is unconfirmed. I think I first came across the date in Bill Kurtz's Arcade Treasures. I think he even listed the date as September 29, 1972 but if so, I'm not sure where he got it. The flyer on TAFA has a date of September 19, 1972 stamped on it but I don't know if that's a release date or not. For-Play is one of those companies that I'd LOVE to know more about. As the second major third major video game manufacturer (Atari was incorporated before they were) and the first clone maker (or at least the first known one) there's bound to be a story there. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down much info on the company and the principals are likely not around anymore to ask. I did manage to find some info on their founder and there's certainly a story there but I know next to nothing about For-Play itself. Here is what little I do know.



 


Incorporated in Sunnyvale on July 20, 1972 (a month after Atari) For-Play Manufacturers Corporation was founded by Henry Leyser, along with Mickey Greenman and Bill Lewis. Leyser was born in Berlin in 1922 to a Jewish family. He studied medicine until the Nazis came to power and banned Jews from public school. Leyser then attended the Berlin Hebrew University until April of 1939 when his parents, seeing the handwriting on the wall, fled with Henry to Shanghai, which, along with Spain, was the only location unconditionally open to Jews. On the ship to China , Henry contracted appendicitis and when the family arrived in Shanghai there were few doctors to be found. Tragically, two siblings stayed behind in Germany and never made it out alive. A brother was caught at the French border and killed and a sister died in Auschwitz. In Shanghai, the Leysers lived in a refugee camp and Henry got work as a deejay. After Pearl Harbor, however, he lost his job when the Japanese Occupation forces forced Jews into a disease-ridden area of the city that became known as the Shanghai Ghetto. With no job and little money, the Leyser's nearly starved but they somehow managed to survive. After the war, they moved to San Francisco  where Henry briefly worked as a shoe salesman before getting into the coin-op biz via a job selling shuffle alleys for Mills Sales. He then began operating his own route with pinball games, shuffle alleys, and jukeboxes. After acquiring a few more routes, he renamed his company A.C.A. Sales and Service in 1952. Three years later he merged with a company called BBC. Leyser became famous for his elaborate MOA exhibits. Salesmen would wear costumes with a different theme every day and Leyser would hire the tallest models he could find to pass out literature. In 1965, Leyser negotiated a deal with German jukebox maker NSM to begin selling their machines in the U.S.  Jukebox sales were strong at first but by the early 1970s, the market had softened considerably and Leyser was looking for a new line of business. He saw it in the fledgling video game industry. Together with Mickey Greenman (an A.C.A. sales executive and 18-year veteran of United Press International) and Bill Lewis, he formed For-Play Manufacturing. For-Play didn't last much longer after Star Trek. In 1973 they produced a pair of Pong clones - Rally (March) and Sport Center (unveiled at the MOA). They also made non-video arcade pieces like Bio Computer and a dice-themed rifle/wall game called Las Vegas Gallery. By the end of 1973 they had apparently disappeared.


 


 
 
 
 

 
Here's a photo of For-Play's booth at the 1973 MOA show:
 
 





[1] The entire story is unconfirmed. It also appears that the folks at Paramount had failed to secure copyrights to Star Trek themselves and probably had no legal way to prevent people from using the name.


 
 Bonus Pictures

Below are some more photos from the 1973 MOA show. This was the first show to really feature video games. Nutting was at the 1971 show and Atari was at the 1972 show (I don't know if For-Play was there or not) but that was about it, AFAIK.
The 1973 show had several manufacturers. Sadly, I didn't find a picture of the Atari booth.
I have to apologize for the lousy quality of the photos. I got them while perusing back issues of Cash Box at a library. All I had with me was my iPhone and the issues were bound, so I coudn't get any really good pictures.

AMUTRONICS:

 
 
ALLIED LEISURE



B.A.C. Electronics



 



 BRUNSWICK




MIDWAY


 



NUTTING ASSOCIATES


 



PMC







The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 6

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As the 1970s wound to a close, Exidy continued to expand. In early 1979 they moved to a 50,000 square foot facility in Moffet Park in Sunnyvale. Meanwhile, they were hard at work turning out Star Fireand Rip Cord units. Their next coin-op release wouldn’t come until mid-year when they released a very successful version of Gremlin’s Head Oncalled Crash. In the meantime, the company was busy promoting their Sorcerer home computer. As promised, they had released a Word Processor Pac (for the cartridge slot) and a disk drive. In 1980 the company released an updated version of the computer, the Sorcerer IIthat could be expanded to 48k of RAM. Also available were a number of peripherals, including a Compuprint printer, MECA digital tape drive, and Pennywhistle acoustic modem. Despite the peripherals and excellent reviews, Exidy had sold only 15,000 Sorcerersby February 1981. Part of the problem may have been that the Sorcerer relied on an old technology, the S-100 expansion bus that was made obsolete by new methods used by other popular computers like the Apple II (some report that the Sorcerer was actually a clone of the Sol-20, a very early pc made by Processor Technology). In other non-videogame areas, 1979 saw Exidy release a line of coin-operated player pianos.



Video games were not forgotten, however. At the 1979 AMOA, the company planned to bow five titles: Bandido, Kreepy Krawlers, Side Trak, Fire One, and an upright version of Star Fire. Perhaps Exidy's own design team was too busy with the Sorcerer since most (if not all) of these games came from outside designers. Bandidowas a western-themed shooter licensed from Nintendo (who released it as Sheriff), who had yet to establish a presence in the United States.

Fire One and Kreepy Krawlers



Fire One and Kreepy Krawlers were designed at Technical Magic by the same team that had produced Star Fire. After the deal with Midway had fallen through, programmer David Rolfe left Technical Magic to become one of the first programmers for the Mattel Intellivision. When Star Fire became a hit for Exidy, Ted Michon lured Rolfe back to begin work on a follow up that was inspired by one of Michon’s favorite games – Midway’s Sea Wolf.

 
As with Star Fire, however, Fire One would add a number of innovative gameplay elements that took the Sea Wolf concept to the new levels. Two players competed against one another simultaneously in a submarine battle, attempting to either destroy their enemy’s sub or destroy the fleet of ships they were trying to protect. The game used only a single monitor that was divided down the middle by a partition, allowing each player to see only one half of the screen. Among the many features in the game was a radar that allowed players to track the enemy fleet, a targeting computer, the ability to submerge, and the ability to sustain damage. Unfortunately, despite its innovations, Fire One failed to match the success of Star Fire. Perhaps the many features made it too complicated for the average arcade denizen to figure out.


 



[David Rolfe] It was a pretty good game for its time, but had a little bit of a learning curve perhaps. It’s very difficult being in the middle of game design - it’s hard to maintain your perspective of what it’s like to walk up and see something fresh. For what it’s worth, from my point of view I like Fire One better than Star Fire but commercially Star Fire was relatively successful and Fire Onewas not.


            According to a source at Exidy, there may have been another reason for Fire One's failure. Initially, the lower front edge of the cabinet was rounded. After the game was release, a child was hanging from the controls when the entire cabinet tipped over and crushed him or her to death. The cabinet was redesigned but a number had already shipped by that point.

            Technical Magic’s final effort for Exidy, Kreepy Krawlers, was an attempt to dash off a game quickly to meet Exidy’s demand for a new title. It was a black-and-white game in which the player stayed in the center of the screen using a variety of weapons to fend off a host of insect enemies. While David Rolfe doesn’t remember finishing the game, Exidy’s Howell Ivy recalls that about 200 units actually made it out the door. 



In November, the trend toward relying on outside developers continued when Exidy purchased elements of Vectorbeam and renamed it Exidy II. Perhaps the main reason for the purchase was that Exidy wanted to make a cockpit version of Vectorbeam’s Tailgunner. The game was released a Tailgunner IIearly in 1980 (and reportedly featured the industry's first slide-out electronics service drawer). 1980s sole in-house releases were a pair of driving/maze games – Targ and its follow-up Spectar (the names were reportedly short for "target" and "special target") – both of which put the player in control of a vehicle called the wummel facing off against enemy rammers in the crystal city. The games resulted in a pair of minor hits for the company.

While Exidy had seen a handful of modest hits in the years 1978-80, none had come close to the success of such smashes as Asteroids and Space Invaders. Despite the fact that Exidy had at one time been the third largest U.S. video game company, they had yet to produce a hit that would measure up to the success of 1977’s Circus. In 1981, Exidy decided that it wanted to challenge Atari’s dominant position at the top of the coin-op heap. A new color development system was created, new design teams were organized (an effort to secure the services of Atari’s Ed Rotberg and Howard Delman didn’t pan out), and Noah Anglin (former VP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Atari) was brought in to remake and rebuild the company. The results of these efforts were two 1981 releases that would rival Circus as the company’s bestselling game ever.



Venture
 
 

 
 Venture was perhaps the first video game with a true fantasy theme (Midway’s Wizard of Wor was more of a maze game with fantasy trappings). The player took control of an adventuring archer named Winky who made his way through a series of rooms in search of treasure. As he reached a new level, it contained a floor plan of rooms with different treasures (a damsel in distress, a pot of gold, a diamond) and hazardous challenges (goblins, spiders, moving walls etc.). While its sales didn’t match those of mega-hits like Asteroids and Pac-Man, Venture provided Exidy with a solid hit in coin-op as well as a number of home formats.


            One new feature was Venture's soundtrack. Whether true or not, the game was billed as the first to feature a soundtrack written specifically for the game. The idea had come from plant manager Ed Anderson, a child prodigy, who had started playing classical music before he was five. While his video game career had started in the Pong era (building cabinets for the original Pong), Anderson had never really put his musical talents to use before.



Pete Kauffman and Ed Anderson

 



[Ed Anderson] I’d go into an arcade and there was a space game and they had Sweet Georgia Brown playing in the background. I’d think “What is this?” “. . .So when I went to Exidy I told Pete [Kauffman] “Let me do all the music for video games” We were making player pianos at the time and he asked “Do you play?” We went in the lobby and I started playing the player piano we had in there. From then on me and Arlen Grainger did all the music (Arlen was an engineer) I started programming the music and I won an award for the music track on Venture. Those are all my songs in there.


            While Exidy may have wanted to dethrone Atari from its position on the coin-op throne, their rivalry was in many ways a friendly one. In early days, the companies would sometimes borrow parts from one another when one ran low. After Venture, Exidy created a promotional T-shirt for the game that included a dead centipede named Skippy, after Atari’s General Counsel Skip Paul. Exidy delivered several of the shirts to Atari and even gave Paul (who loved popcorn) a popcorn machine in the shape of a video game.

Exidy's sales chief Lila Zinter, in her Winky hat.
Zinter, a mainstay at Exidy, had formerly worked for Meadows Games.
            While Venture sold well, it might have sold better had Exidy not tuned the game to make it so hard. Larry Hutcherson recalls that the game was initially much easier (and more fun). In an effort to increase the coin take, however, the difficulty level was ratcheted up to the point where many found it too difficult.


Mouse Trap





Exidy's next effort marked the first appearance of probably the company's most prolific programmer. In the early 1970s, he was attending night school earning a psychology degree while working at various electronics companies during the day. In 1974 he took a job at Exidy and was soon spending so much time there that the forgot about his degree At Exidy, Hutcherson held a number of titles, including Operations Manager. He left the company in 1978 and went to work for North Star Computers, one of the early personal computer companies that sprang up in the wake of the Altair 8800. Founded by Chuck Grant and Mark Greenberg, North Star had originally made add-on products for other early PCs, including a version of BASIC for Processor Technology's Sol and a controller board that allowed microcomputers to connect to the newly introduced 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. Grant and Greenberg also sold PCs through another company called Kentucky Fried Computers[1]. In 1977, they merged KFC into North Star and began making plans for a computer of their own, the Z-80 based Horizon. Hutcherson's stint with North Star didn't last long. A year after leaving Exidy, he returned as national sales manager. In 1980, he switched to programming and game design.
 

 

[Larry Hutcherson] I had some training in high school with FORTRAN, but was not very interested in that at the time, as the technology was still very frustrating as programs had to be sent to the university to be run. At Exidy I worked for many years in the production of games, I had taken it upon myself to automate several departments using the Exidy Sorcerer computer written in Basic, when that became noticed, I was able to transfer into the game development full time in 1980.
Hutcherson's first effort was an unreleased Space Invaders-like game with hardware based on an obscure early computer called the TT9918. He then pitched an idea for a game called Gates in which the player navigated a maze that included gates he could open and close. Released in November 1981 as Mouse Trap, it proved to be one of Exidy's biggest hits of the 1980s.
Mouse Trap was Exidy’s answer to Pac-Man and was one of the better of the maze games that followed in its wake. In the game, the player took the role of a mouse, prowling the corridors of a maze collecting cheese while avoiding being eaten by a horde of pursuing cats. The maze included a series of blue, yellow, and red gates that could be opened by pressing the appropriate button. Strewn throughout the maze were bones that would transform the mouse into a dog, allowing him to turn the tables on his feline pursuers. Occasionally, one of 32 prizes would appear, netting the player anywhere from 1,000 points (for the big cheese) to 7,200 points (for the gun). Because of the colored gates, Mouse Trap players couldn’t employ patterns and had to rely on their instincts.


Opinion on the game was divided. While some found it to be one of the better Pac-Manvariants, others disliked the game intensely with its complicated controls being but one complaint. The game nonetheless provided Exidy with a hit, reaching #18 on the Replay charts. It may be even better known from its port to the ColecoVision.


            Spurred by the success of Venture and Mouse Trap, Exidy went on to release a slew of new games in 1982 (the profits from the game also enabled them to establish Exidy Ireland and begin distributing games in Europe). One of the most interesting of the new games, Vertigo, never went into production. Designed at Atari by Owen Rubin, the game had started out as Tube Chase before being licensed to Exidy who placed it in a sit down cabinet. Exidy play-tested Vertigo but eventually decided they didn’t want the game (though they didn’t forget the name).






[1] They also had a third company alled Applied Computer.

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