Coin Op Weekly Earnings

December 29, 2012, 8:03 pm

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Back in the day, most of the coin-op industry mags published annual opeartor surveys. One of the things they reported on was the average weekly earnings of different types of coin-op games.

I am still trying to collect a complete set of these surveys from the years 1971 to 1984 and have a ways to go. Play Meter published its first issue in December of 1974 but didn't publish its first opeartor survey until 1976.
Replay started in October of 1975 but also didn't publish a survey until 1976 (though they did list a few 1975 numbers in their 1976 survey).
Vending Times was around in 1971 but the first issues I have are from 1974. They didn't publish weekly earnings numbers, however, until 1977 (other than for vending machines).
CashBox was also around in 1971 and probably had the earliest industry surveys.
The first one I have is this one from 1973.

 

 

For comparison, here are some numbers from a couple of key years.
First, 1978 (the year before Space Invaders revolutionized the industry):

Average Weekly Earnings - 1978

Vending Times:
Pinball: $48, Pool Tables: $41, Video Games: $36, Shuffle Alleys/Bowlers: $35, Kiddie Rides: $28, Wall Games/Other: $27, Soccer Tables: $20, Arcade Games: $18
Note, for reference, the top earning types of vending machines were cigarette machines ($64) and canned soda machines ($54)
Soccer tables is the same as foosball, "arcade games" includes any coin-op games not included in the other categories

Play Meter:
Pins: $62, Pool Tables: $53, Jukes: $52, Video Games/Arcade Games: $50, Foosball: $41, Wallgames: $34, Shuffleboards: $32
Note that Cocktail video games were not included in the above figures (they generally earned much less than uprights), "Air Cushion Games" were also listed as NA

Replay:
Pinball: $51.50, Pool Table: $44.25, Upright Video Games: $43.75, Jukebox (taverns): $37.50, Jukebox (restaurants): $34.25, Shuffle Alleys: $32.75, Jukebox (Off Street Locations): $29.75, Soccer: $28.25, Wall Games: $24.75, Cocktail Video Games: $24.50, Shuffleboard $24, Air Cushion: $20
Note that in 1976 Replay published figures for both street locations and arcades. I believe that the 1978 numbers are only for street locations

Overall you can see that at the end of 1978, video games were popular but weren't the top earning games. They still trailed behind pinball and pool tables.

That would change starting in 1979 once Space Invaders hit. Unfortunately, I don't have all the numbers from the golden age.

Here are the 1981 numbers from Vending Times:
Video Games: $85, Pool Tables: $52, Pinball: $45, Shuffle Alleys/Bowlers: $35, Arcde Games: $30, Soccer Tables: $24

Of course, average weekly earnings doesn't give a complete picture of popularity.

VT also listed the number of machines on location in 1981:
Pinball: 1,250,000
Video Games: 1,100,000
Pool Tables: 185,000
Soccer Tables: 18,000
Shuffle Alleys: 7,500
Arcade Games: 3,500

For comparison there were 808,600 cigarette machines and 800,000 canned soda machines.

I plan on getting all the numbers from 1971-1984 and will include them in an appendix in the book.

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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 5

January 2, 2013, 8:53 pm

≫ Next: The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 6

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War of the Worlds

 
           

In early 1982, Cinematronics released War of the Worlds, a conversion kit for StarCastle. The game had originally been designed by programmer Rob Patton in 1979.

[Rob Patton] One night we all went out to see the new movie Alien. The next day we were thinking about game themes and I threw out the idea that we could draw decent Martians on legs and Tim (Skelly)  volunteered to draw some sketches.

Tim Skelly remembers that the game was partially based on an idea he had for a Space Invadersinspired game

[Tim Skelly] My idea…was to do something like Space Invaders." To take advantage
of the vector display, I wanted to have the enemies attack towards the player
and scale up, rather than drop on top of you -- the classic top-down/POV
switcheroo. I think the War of the
Worlds theme came from wanting the player to shoot the legs out from under
the attackers. This suggested the walking tripods of H. G. Wells. I had a bear
of a time drawing a three-legged walk cycle that still worked at each stage.
Just doing a three-legged walk cycle was bad enough! I also distinctly remember
suggesting to Jim Pierce that we might want to do a copyright search on the name.
Jim, of course, could not care less[1].
 

The game featured a battle against a series of enemies based on the three-legged, tower-like ships in the film of the same name. While Tim Skelly created the game art, a new artist handled the cabinet art. Frank Brunner was unable to provide art for the game (Skelly recalls that he didn't like working on "tech stuff"). Instead, Rick Bryant, another comic book artist was hired to create cabinet art (he later did the cabinet art for Tailgunner, Star Castle, and Armor Attack). Rob Patton left before the game was completed and went to Hughes Aircraft, where he worked on projects involving spy satellites. War of the Worlds fared poorly during testing and was shelved indefinitely.

In late 1981, Cinematronics was riding high but there were problems. Black and white games were becoming increasingly passé and Cinematronics monochrome vector system was looking increasingly dated. Creating an entirely new hardware system would be expensive and time consuming so instead, the company decided to update its vector system to handle color. They had considered releasing Solar Quest in color but dropped the idea when they were unable to obtain enough color monitors. They did, however, produce a color version of War of the Worlds. As it had previously, the game tested poorly at the 1982 AMOA show and was dropped. Reportedly, only about a dozen units were ever produced (possibly including just two in color). One problem may have been that the system did not have the horsepower to generate enough enemies to make the game interesting or challenging.

            By this time, Tim Skelly had left Cinematronics to work on Gremlin's (and the industry's) first color vector game. Gremlin had lured him away by promising him royalties on the games he created. Wanting to remain loyal to Cinematronics, Skelly offered to stay with them for a smaller royalty figure than that offered by Gremlin, but they refused.

Tim Skelly

 

Outpost and Boxing Bugs

            In any event, Cinematronics eventually entered the color vector arena. The first Cinematronics color vector game that is known for certain to have released was 1981’s Boxing Bugs, which had actually started out as a Scott Boden game named Outpost.

 

[Scott Boden] Outpost was a game that had a center warrior with a cannon and gun defending a 'outpost'. I temporarily left Cinematronics (I think I did that 3 times, young and overconfident), and when I came back Jack Ritter took over the project. His 'cute' game concept tuned it into Boxing Bugs.        

 

Jack Ritter had come to Cinematronics after stints at NCR and Burroughs. He had entered the computer field after some early experiences with the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 70s.

 

[Jack Ritter] I Went to San Francisco, and lived in North Beach. I lived off of welfare. (It was the late 60's). I survived off of the payments: $52 per week!I lived in a house with various female student strippers, who for some reason liked to walk around the house naked. I didn't protest. One of them was Lorraine, of "Sweet Lorraine" fame (a song by Country Joe and the Fish). Anyway, after nine months of, as they say, Sex, Drugs, & Rock N' Roll (an accurate characterization, actually), I got bored.

Ritter’s interest in video games had come when he got his first look at Tim Skelly’s Star Castle and became an instant fan. When he came to Cinematronics, his first task was to create a new game based on Boden’s Outpost. The game was called Boxing Bugs.

.

In Boxing Bugs, the player was represented by an arm-like cannon with a boxing glove at one end that sat in the center of the screen surrounded by an octagonal wall. A paddle control rotated the cannon. Pushing one button caused the boxing glove to spring outward and pushing another allowed the player to shoot out of the opposite end. A third button served as a “panic button” which the player could use a limited number of times to pushed away everything touching one of the walls. Outside the walls were a number of bombs. Enemy bugs would appear from the edges of the screen and try to position the bombs next to walls to open a hole that they could use to blow up the player himself. The most notable feature of Boxing Bugs was that it used a real color vector system – though it ended up being the only game produced on the system.

 

[Jack Ritter] Boxing Bugs was a real color vector game - no overlays. It was the first and only color vector game released for that system. They stopped doing games for that platform after Boxing Bugs. [It’s] too bad; they could have milked the old gal for at least 2 more games. Instead, they put their hopes into a next-generation color vector system, designed in-house. It used a display list architecture, with no double buffering capability, so you got screen glitches if you tried to push its performance. It performed flakily in the field with its 1st game, and thus, the system got a reputation as a lemon.

 

        In mid-1982 Boxing Bugs was licensed to Dynamo Corp of Grand Prairie, TX. Even earlier (in 1980), Cinematronics had licensed its vector system to Rock-Ola who produced a handful of vector games (in addition to cocktail versions of Armor Attack and Star Castle for distribution in Europe.

 

Boxing Bugs screenshot

 

Jack the Giant Killer and Naughty Boy

Jack the Giant Killer in production

 

1982 also saw Cinematronics release its first licensed games. First up was Jack the Giant Killer, licensed from Hara Industries. The game put the player in the role of Jack in a multi-stage platform game that involved climbing a beanstalk then navigating clouds and ladders to reach the giant and steal his treasure (and, ultimately, the princess). Cinematronics tried a number of things, including 3 x 5 tip cards and a contest with a one-ounce golden egg as a prize, to promote the game. A second version called Treasure Hunt was produced that prevented the player from falling of the vine, but it didn't help (Video Games magazine reported that it made the game worse). The game was a financial disaster for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Some called it "Jack the Company Killer". The driving force behind the Hara deal was Fred Fukumoto, who'd replaced Jim Pierce as president in December, 1981.

Fred Fukumoto (last name misspelled in caption)

By that time, Pierce and Tom Stroud, Sr. began spending less and less time at Cinematronics, leaving others to handle the day-to-day operations. Fukumoto purchased 5,000 boards for Jack the Giant Killer from Hara. Because they came with no documentation aside from schematics, Cinematronics had to reverse engineer the boards to create a programmer’s manual. The results were hardly worth the effort as Jack the Giant Killer was a resounding flop in the arcades. Rumors swirled that someone at the company had personally profited from the licensing deal, which left Cinematronics with a pile of unused boards and a financial mess on their hands. The company began casting about for ways to use the remaining inventory of boards. Naughty Boy, licensed from Jaleco, was better but no runaway success.  Many saw this as the beginning of the end for Cinematronics. Video Games magazine's  report on the 1982 Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago was brutal: "…the ghost town that is the Cinematronics booth makes absolute sense. Boxing Bugs, War of the Worlds and Jack the Giant Killer, the company's first Japanese license (from who?), look like the kiss-of-death for this once-respected, but slowly fading games firm."

 

 

Brix/Zzyzzyxx

 

The company's final 1982 was Zzyzzyxx, developed by  Advanced Microcomputer Systems, a company founded by an innovative programmer named Rick Dyer that had developed a number of handheld games.  Dyer pitched the concept of Zzyzzyxx to Cinematronics, who decided to produce it. The game had originally been titled Brix. The name was reportedly changed when someone at Cinematronics heard that kids spent more money on games starting with X or Z and the owner's wife suggested they call it Zzyzzyxx[2]. In the game, the player maneuvered through several rows of brick walls moving in alternate directions. Each wall had a number of gaps in it. Some of the gaps contained gifts while others harbored enemies. The goal was to move from one side of the screen to another avoiding enemies and collecting gifts on the way to the waiting Lola. The player (Zzyzzyxx) could also make breaks or don a helmet that allowed him to break them. Zzyzzyxx was a dud, but Dyer and Advanced Microcomputer systems had another game up their sleeves that would prove anything but.

 

       By this time, the financial situation at Cinematronics was grim. On September 17th, 1982, Cinematronics had been granted chapter 11 bankruptcy protection[3](it would go on to be the longest Chapter 11 in California history).  Jim Pierce supposedly had to sell his Rolls Royce and hock his wedding ring.  Cinematronics was a long way from done, however. Unbeknownst to Pierce, or anyone else, their savior had already arrived in the person of Rick Dyer. Zzyzzyxx had been a dud, but Dyer and Advanced Microcomputer systems had another game up their sleeves that would prove anything but.  In the meantime, the company continued turning out games and hiring new employees in a desperate effort to recapture to glory days.  

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[1] December 20, 2011 E-mail from Tim Skelly to Ionpool.net (http://www.ionpool.net/arcade/cine/warworlds_history.txt)

[2] Though the story, which sounds apocryphal, may be no more than a rumor.
[3] The reasons given were "difficulty with some foreign letters of credit coupled with slow collections from certain domestic distributors..." (Replay, Oct 1982, p.26)

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 6

January 5, 2013, 9:43 am

≫ Next: The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 7

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Not a lot of pictures in today's post, which covers a pair of unreleased games, but a lot of new information.
I have also unearthed some new info about War of the Worlds, Barrier, and engineeer Bob Hale.
I have updated parts 3 (http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of_26.html) and 5 with the new info. On with the story.

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            In May of 1982, a pair of new programmers had arrived at Cinematronics - Bob Skinner and David Dentt.  Skinner was one of the second generation of coin-op video game programmers who got their start with home computers. Actually, he got his start creating games earlier than that. He went to a grade school for gifted children where he regaled classmates by recreating the movies he had seen complete with voices and sound effects. The students would also create their own playground games and board games. Skinner soon discovered science fiction and attended some of the first ComicCon (before you had to sign up for tickets a year in advance). Life was good. Then his parents moved to what he calls a "real life Tatooine" where his love of computers and science fiction wasn't so widely shared or appreciated. He learned BASIC on an Apple I while taking classes at a Junior College (while still attending high school) then got a TRS-80 and began recreating the games he saw in San Diego malls like Starship 1 and Space Invaders. After high school he attended Coleman College in San Diego where he studied programming. Skinner, however, had little desire to follow the traditional career path of the rest of his classmates.

[Bob Skinner] They were all headed to the new fields of financial and database [software] and to use programming in their day job but what about me? I played endless Defenderand Scramble in the lunchroom and found Pac-Man exceedingly boring. A job fair popped up within days of graduation, and Cinematronics showed up. The younger (Dave) Stroud and his assistant, (who looked like Delta Burke in her prime) had a game called Jack and the Giant Killer, and I found it quite awful. I told them I could do better and I told them what I would specifically change and I spouted ideas from a place I could never control, and it interested them. I started within the month making $300 a week. Every week. Salary. To make video games. I resigned my $3.25 job at what was the world’s first Souplantation, even as they offered me a kitchen prep position with the possibility of kitchen manager. As if.

For a 20-year old gaming geek it was heaven: free video games in the cafeteria, no expenses, and getting paid to make video games. During breaks (when not playing games in the cafeteria) employees would sometimes head to the river across the street to feed marshmallows to geese with a slingshot.  Skinner called it his "endless summer". He soon found out, however, that making video games wasn’t all fun and games. It was also a lot of hard work. Rob Patton had returned to Cinematronics after his stint at Hughes and was once again putting in the 60-90 hour weeks to get his projects finished on time. Meanwhile, Skinner was enjoying life working a standard 40 hour week, not yet concerned with project schedules or delivery dates.

[Bob Skinner] Rob was genuinely nice to me but felt I didn’t understand the pressure I was setting myself up for later, or resented my endless summer. Arriving on a Monday mid-morning, Rob had clearly worked the weekend. Rob said. “I don’t know how some people expect their games to get done. Maybe they expect that elves are coming in in the middle of the night and working on them. I was here and I didn’t see any.”

Skinner was taken aback but began working harder to try to earn the respect of his colleagues. Before long he was too was working the long hours so common in the industry.

 Cutter

Rob Patton, from http://www.turbosub.com/rob.htm

             At the time Skinner arrived, Rob Patton was working on a 16-color vector game where a player defended a weblike structure from a spider.

[Rob Patton] …a spider was adding vector segments to its web and you had to run around the web avoiding the spider but cutting the web to protect yourself and to save the items stuck on the web.

Patton was having a hard time of it and wasn't particularly happy with the game. When Q*Bert became a hit, cute games were back in. Bob Skinner suggested to Patton that he give his game a makeover.

[Bob Skinner] I pitched to Rob that his icky, girl-repellent, not exactly catalyzed game, which he was very apprehensive about, could get a cute makeover. Make the player piece the destructor, not the builder. (This is John Hughes 101) Make him a stick figure with a face with expressions. Make him get away with murder, and have the kinetic payoff of the destruction of the web through the strategic cutting of the right pieces before the Spider could fix them. Call this character “Cutter”. Somehow, this captivated Rob and answered so many questions for him. He took it upstairs. Next thing I know, I have a letter from the current boss, Al Reeder. “You are a very smart guy.” was all it said

With new energy, Patton set to work overhauling his game. The Benny Hill theme song (Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax") was available without copyright so Jeff Liedecker digitized it and added it to the game In October of 1982, however, Patton left Cinematronics and the game was never finished.

[Rob Patton] I left Cinematronics because they did the Rick Dyer Dragons’ Lair deal without any consultation with the current engineering department. I felt they should have included us in the transition planning and they kept it a complete surprise. In the final months at Cinematronics Scott Boden and I both retained an agent named Malcolm Kaufman. I interviewed in Knoxville TN with Magnavox. They offered me an excellent package but I felt their game platform was headed down and also didn’t want to move that far.

Instead, Patton went to a new company called Entertainment Sciences where he worked on the game Bouncer.

A1 Main Battle Tank Simulator/Hovercraft

Meanwhile, Cinematronics had contracted with Perceptronics (a research firm that did projects for the military), to create a 3D tank battle system for use in military training, Funded by DARPA (to the tune, reportedly, of $6 million), the A1 Main Battle Tank Simulator was to be a color vector system based on the Motorola 68000 processor. Brooke Jarrett was hired to work on the system. He was a natural choice, having previously worked for the Naval Undersea Center and the IT&T Defense Communication Division.

[Brooke Jarrett]  The idea was a tank gunner game that they could put in the barracks for the solders to play after hours that would hone their skills used on the battle fields. The day I started work, I found that the manager who hired me had left.

The 3D effect would be achieved via a split monitor with polarized mirrors so that glasses were not required. The system was bug-ridden and unable to handle the complex graphics required. The project was never completed.

[Bob Skinner]  When it failed to pass a test, and I am not sure why, the jig was up and the head count dropped by about 20 and some of the really smart guys in the other room were gone. They weren’t game people. I remember there was a lumbering “Executive” or some such top-heavy cycle stealing behemoth that didn’t address the important stuff, like clipping and hidden-line removal.

[Brooke Jarrett] The project never really took off because Cinematronics realized that even if they produced a good game, they wouldn’t necessarily get the final contract to produce it

  On the plus side, Cinematronics now had a brand new  "state of the art" color vector game development system. The 3D concept eventually made its way into an unreleased arcade video game called Hovercraft developed by Jack Ritter and Earl Stratton.

[Jack Ritter] Hovercraft was a split-screen stereoscopic game…The left half of the screen contained the left eye's image, and the right side contained the right's. A  "periscope", or system of 4 mirrors at 45-degree angles to the screen's surface, redirected the 2 images, so they appeared on top of one another. The whole mirror assembly was enclosed by a large plastic molded shell, which fit tightly around the edges of the screen, on one side, and came to a face-sized hole on the other side. This kept out ambient light, & allowed the player to put his face up against the viewing hole, which blocked out outside light, so none got picked up by the mirrors. This made the experience very immersive, as they would call it today. I found it to be extremely hypnotic, and would stand there with my face planted in the thing for hours. But I'm obviously not objective. Others were less impressed.
            In the game, your hovercraft was suspended in the air, shushing down a swerving road, which was periodically populated with various objects. There were dancing thingies you shot at, obstacles and bridges you drove around/through, and smart bombs and power-ups you scooped up. The game made it to the point of being put into a single, very obscure arcade, which was visited by very few people. It seemed to be quite popular there; at least it was every time I popped my head in…
            But there were definitely other problems. One was the "lemon" reputation of its hardware platform. In addition, it turns out that many people just don't perceive the stereopsis effect very well. The only 3D cue was ocular triangulation, so I guess some people just didn't get it. These are the same people who can look thru a View Master toy, and just feel/get nothing at all, even though their eyes are doing what they're supposed to be doing ….

The 3D effect also caused other problems

[Earl Stratton] The 3D effect was very sensitive to alignment of the monitor and mirrors, resulting in headaches [and] too much or too little perceived depth-of-field (and that varied among individuals). At one point, management considered adjustable mirrors but rejected them as too expensive and a reliability problem.

Some of the roadside objects could be shot, others had to be avoided. Objects like a crescent moon and a rocket gantry appeared on the distant horizon.

[Earl Stratton] The really fun part was shooting objects and seeing them explode into a shower of colored dots. These were drawn in three layers to give a sense  of depth to the explosion, with the layers expanding away from each other…as the dots also expanded away from each other. The vector  system was very limited to the number of lines and dots it could draw. But  it was a beautiful effect!

This page from the September, 1984 DRA Price Guide not only lists Hovercraft, but gives a release date and a price. Does this indicate that the game was actually released? (other sources agree that it wasn't)

With the financial problems Cinematronics was experiencing, they could not afford to keep too many projects going at once.

[Jack Ritter]   Another bummer for Hovercraft was the disastrous financial state of the company at that time. Sometime during Hovercraft's development, I can't remember exactly when, the company went into Chapter 11. So they had to come up with some tall cash, and fast. Along about then, Don Bluth approached Cinematronics with an offer to have them manufacture his Dragon's Lair.Or possibly the Bluth deal was there on the table from the beginning, during the chapter 11 application. Also around that time, Cinematronics got a contract to manufacture Jack The Giant Killer, as well as another 3rd party game.
            These 3 manufacturing projects got all the priority. As I recall, all other ongoing projects were summarily aborted, regardless of merit. This included HoverCraft.

Ritter left before the game was complete, leaving Stratton to work on it by himself. While the game never went into production, a single prototype was still on display in the company cafeteria when he returned to the company in 1988 after a stint in the army.

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 7

January 9, 2013, 8:01 pm

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I expect more information about Cosmic Chasm to be forthcoming. If it does, I will update this post.
The next post in this series will cover Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.

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Intrepid

Another never-released game created using the ARPA hardware was Bob Skinner's Intrepid.

[Bob Skinner] I was able to convince Tommy Stroud Jr. to let me make up a game and learn how to use the game system. My idea was called Intrepid and was basically an endless strafing run... All I had to do was make just enough progress to keep ahead of the naysayers. It was a futuristic fighter jet controlled by a four-way joystick and a gun system controlled by a trackball that you clicked down with your palm to fire…With vector graphics you could have nearly unlimited rotations about the x-y axis. You could also use a trick to rotate in the Z-X plane and appear to “bank” an airplane. With “Hand Command” the exclusive targeting system, even if you dodged a heat-seeker, and it swung around and started chasing you, you could pin-point aim behind you and shoot it off your tail….I am not sure if there was a single brand-new idea in the game. The Hand Command was simply a missile command mechanic while flying. The weaving an aircraft left and right had been used in Astro Blaster and several other space games. I convinced myself this was unique and special for color x-y. I was moving over land, up a winding path, facing fixed targets, tanks, and missile launchers, on the way to a base that in reality I would never reach…

Before Intrepidwas finished Atari released Xevious(licensed from Namco) which had similar gameplay but a much better implementation. Stroud quickly lost interest in the game and the project was cancelled.

           

Cosmic Chasm

            One day, while Skinner was working on Intrepid, Jim Pierce arrived at work with another new toy. This one, however, was a bit more sophisticated than Mattel's handheld football game. It was a vector-based home game system called the Vectrex. Designed by John Ross, Mike Purvis, Tom Sloper at Steve Marking of Western Technologies/Smith Engineering the Vectrex was an all-in-one system with a tiny 9 x 11" CRT and a small library of games that would be released by GCE in December, 1982. Pierce inked a deal with GCE giving them rights to produced licensed versions of Cinematronics' vector classics like Rip Off, Armor Attack, and Star Castle. In return (besides the licensing money) Cinematronics got the rights to produce coin-op versions of any Vectrex game. They picked Cosmic Chasm. The original programmer was Mike Gomez - a former technician working on his first video game.

[Bob Skinner] Mike had been a tester, and knew how to use a fluke meter and an oscilloscope, but couldn’t have been much of a programmer or give me any reason to worry about. But it was clear that Mike was pretty quickly shifting some images on his screen, and they started to be interactive, and damn if he hadn’t gotten to that point sooner than I did a few months back. It might have had something to do with my endless summer ethic and his single-mindedness, but Mike was getting traction, and help from the other lifers. Within a week of the Xevious “giant thunder-steal”, a meeting had taken place to seal my game’s fate. Jim Pierce came down to announce that Mike and I were joining forces to finish Cosmic Chasm. We had three months to complete the game for the arcade. There was likely some overtone of the dire consequences to the company if we didn’t succeed, but for me the main consequence was that I had just had an invention torn from my clutch, had been joined at the hip with someone I didn’t respect, and for a product I didn’t initially believe in.  Mike said “it’s going to be great”

Before the game was finished, Gomez quit to work for a new company called Simutrek on the laserdisc game Cube Quest, leaving Skinner to finish programming the game.

In the game,the player attempted to pilot a ship to the center of a reactor, then destroy it and escape. Dave Scott redesigned the graphics from the Vectrex original.

[Bob Skinner] Dave designed different colored squiggles of bowties, spiky squares and what not for the enemies. The ugly drill at the front of the ship that had one purpose, to deactivate the doors? Gone. The subterranean aspect? Gone. The varied map? Gone. In their place was a tinker-toy space station with pods connected by tubes. The map and radar would remain at the top of the screen, then the scoreboard, then the current room. The jagged rooms cut from rock were replaced by an outer hexagon as this was now the minimalist walls of a station. The doors on the wall would correspond to the exits that were shown on the map. So it was still Cosmic, but it was no longer a Chasm in the subterranean sense. If in space no one can hear you scream, perhaps they won’t nitpick on terminology either.

 

Another change came courtesy of Jim Pierce.

[Bob Skinner] One thing about owning the company – you get to have your ideas implemented. If they are good ideas, most everyone wins, but implemented they will be. Jim had outlined design elements for the arcade version among these few tenets was that the enemy ships would be narrower than the width of the gun ports. I put that aside as not making sense, why would you design a weapon that when aimed at an enemy misses him on both sides... I implemented it my way. When Jim saw it, he reminded me: “The enemy ships must be smaller than the width of the guns”. This time I verbalized my argument. Jim repeated the sentence, adding some emphasis on "must" and "smaller". On this third invocation, I bit down on my tongue. I changed the code. I came to appreciate the difference. It was what made the shield mechanic so fun.

. Cosmic Chasm was field-tested at the Yellow Brick Road arcade in the Universal Town Center,  where it made almost $400 in a weekend. Skinner was told that Cinematronics had 3,000 orders for the game. In the end, however, most of the orders were cancelled and only about 50-400 coin-op units were shipped. A flop in the arcade, Cosmic Chasm would be the only game released for the new system as well as the last vector game that Cinematronics would produce.

Flop or not, Bob Skinner feels that it was one of the company's best efforts.

[Bob Skinner] I don’t believe to this day that any game had every given the player that much rotational control and firepower. You could fire a slow bullet on this horizontal line, or one on this 45 degree angle in other games, and then hope you aimed perfectly or that your bullet would reload. But here, the more you shot at close range, the faster you could shoot. Twisting the shaft encoder, and rattling the fire with the index and middle finger you could shoot up to 480 RPM, and at very fine angles. This more than made up for the fact that you had to twist…While there was no limit to ammo, there was some energy expended by the shields, which grew dim by some 256 levels of grey to depict the depletion. I was selling adrenaline. People where fully engaged firing, killing dozens of enemies, trying to concentrate fire into their entry point into the room, timing the waves, blasting the gate, and leaving the room, noting the size of the central core.

Phil Sorger and Bob Skinner, 1987

With the failure of Cosmic Chasm and the cancelling of Hovercraft and Intrepid Cinematronics, which had built its reputation on vector graphics games, exited the vector field entirely, sold its system, and turned to releasing raster games. By 1983, the name Cinematronics was a fading memory of days gone by that most arcaders thought had disappeared forever.

            They couldn't have been more wrong. Before the year's end Rick Dyer and Advanced Microcomputer Systems would provide the company with its biggest hit ever and almost single-handedly reverse the coin-op video game industry's downward spiral.

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 8

January 13, 2013, 5:23 pm

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As 1983 dawned, the situation at Cinematronics was grim. Mired in the middle of a bankruptcy proceeding and saddled with a host of games that weren't selling, it looked to many like the company was on its last legs. In truth, however, they were about to launch their biggest hit ever - a game that would almost single handedly stave off the collaspse of the entire arcade video game industry (at least for a few months). The game was Dragon's Lair.
     Dragon's Lair wasn't the first laserdisc video game released. That honor probably goes to Quarter Horse in 1981. It wasn't even the first laserdisc video game prcontingoduced for arcades. Sega's Astron Belt was on display at the JAA show in September of 1982 and the AMOA in November. Dragon's Lair was, however, the most popular and actually beat Astron Belt to market.

Sidebar - The Laserdisc

            The laserdisc was jointly developed by MCA and Phillips and was demonstrated publicly in 1972. Ideas for using laserdisc technology in video games appeared early on. In 1977, Ralph Baer wrote about the possibility in the journal IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. The laserdisc first appeared in stores on a limited basis in December, 1978. The discs were considered overly expensive and were largely ignored by all but a devoted core of videophiles. 1981 saw the appearance of RCA's CED videodisc, a much less expensive product that used grooved vinyl discs instead of laserdiscs. While the CED eventually failed, its low price offered enough competition that laserdisc manufacturers began to look for other ways to promote their product. MCA, Magnavox, and Pioneer soon joined forces to create Optical Programming Associates (OPA), who created some of the first "interactive discs". Among them was The First National Kidisc offering a number of activities for children and How to Watch Pro Football, whichfeatured a "game" in which "players" were asked to guess the upcoming play. Another popular consumer laserdisc "game" consisted of a series of interactive murder mysteries developed by VPI/Vidmax called Mysterydisc that included the titles Murder, Anyone (1982) and Many Roads to Murder (1983). With the success of consumer laser disc products, it was perhaps inevitable that the technology would turn up in video games and with Quarterhorse and Astron Belt it finally did.

Dragon's Lair

While Astron Belt attracted a host of curious onlookers during the AMOA, the game still contained a number of hardware and software bugs that delayed its U.S. release until the fall of 1983 (it was released earlier in Japan). In what some consider a foolish decision, Sega decided to introduce the game at the 1982 show despite the fact that it wasn't ready. As a result, competitors got an up-close look at the product, giving them a chance to try to duplicate the technology. One of these competitors was Rick Dyer, who had formed a company called Advanced Microcomputer Systems with the idea of creating a game with interaction and graphics similar to that used in Astron Belt.
 

[Rick Dyer] They showed it, and as a matter of fact, I think that was a huge mistake for them because we were working on the Dragon’s Lair project and at that point we realized that we were in a horse race and we had to be first – and we were. When they showed that, it definitely lit a fire under us because we knew that if we were second we were dead – or at least we believed that at the time.

Rushing back to headquarters, Dyer's team went on to create the first arcade laserdisc game actually released in the U.S. - a game that would almost single-handedly revive the nation's video game fervor and become the one of the most popular coin-op video games in the industry's history.

Rick Dyer

            Since his childhood in California, Rick Dyer had a penchant for creating whimsical technological devices.  As a youngster, he had developed a talking cuckoo clock that spouted famous quotes on the hour. Later he added a computer to his car that amazed his dates when it called them by name. Despite his lack of a degree, Dyer managed to land a job as an engineer at Hughes Electronics where he continued his entertaining creations. He developed an electronic horseracing game that never made it past the prototype stage but nonetheless managed to come to the attention of toymaker Mattel. When Dyer finally did get his degree, from California Polytechnic University, the company hired him and set him to work creating toys - a job for which he seemed perfectly suited. Dyer created numerous products during his years at Mattel, including work on the Intellivision. In his spare time, he developed the AES system, which consisted of LCD screens that would be mounted on the back of airplane seats to provide entertainment to airborne travelers. Eventually Dyer left Mattel and decided to strike out on his own.
 

[Rick Dyer] I was working at Mattel and basically the former president of Mattel had formed his own group. One of their people called me and asked me if I’d mind doing some moonlight development work on some of their projects and I said “sure”. After about a year it got to the point where I had to make a choice. So I went on the outside and formed my own company and we went on to develop at least half of all the handheld games that were sold in the early 80s – Pong, Pac-Man, Spiders, Turtles, Stargate, Defender– you never heard of our company but we were the ones who did the work. We weren’t smart enough to ask for royalties or anything like that we just did it on a contract basis. We took the profits from that and used it to develop a project that ended up becoming known as Dragon’s Lair.

Entex Turtles, designed and programmed by Rick Dyer and AMS

While Dyer's work at Mattel had been rewarding, what he really wanted to do was to create a fantasy-based game that would make use of realistic animation for its graphics. The idea was inspired by Dyer's love of fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings as well as computer-based fantasy games like Crowther and Wood's classic Adventure. Dyer wanted to go far beyond Adventure, however, to create a much more absorbing game that would suck the player into a realistic world of sword and sorcery. After leaving Mattel, Dyer formed Advanced Microcomputer Systems and in 1979 set about making his dream a reality. His first effort The Electronic Book, was crude but ingenious.

[Rick Dyer] That was what I called our toilet-paper version – it was a roll of cash register paper. The computer would fast-forward and rewind the paper to the picture that it wanted then it would stop. There was a piece of smoked Plexiglas in front of it and there was a light bulb behind the cash register paper that turned on. So all of the sudden the picture and the text would appear and you’d read it and make your decision then it would fast-forward or rewind the paper to the next picture. We added a cassette deck that had random access capability too so it would forward or reverse to the soundtrack that went with that still picture. It was pretty Rube Goldberg stuff.

Closeup from Toilet Paper version of The Electronic Book

Another early version (either the filmstrip version of a video tape version)

"Toilet Paper" version of The Electronic Book

Dyer and company soon switched to strips of film and began to develop The Electronic Book into a fantasy game called Secrets of the Lost Woods(though some say the game was called Shadoan at this point). When the use of film strips didn’t provide the interactivity they needed, the team switched to the fairly new technology of video cassettes and created circuitry that would advance or rewind the tape to the appropriate spot based on the player's actions. The technology, however, was just too slow. It could take tens of seconds, if not minutes, to reach the appropriate spot on the tape and it was almost impossible to start the animation at the precise point you wanted. When the laserdisc was created, it solved both of these problems. A laserdisc player could locate any given point on a disc in milliseconds and could start playing from the same exact spot time after time. At first, Dyer and his team simply used the laserdisc to display still images but they eventually switched to animation. They only needed to find someone to provide it. When Dyer saw a new Disney film called The Secret of Nimh, he knew he'd found what he was looking for and made contact with the man behind the film's animation - Don Bluth.

Bluth had decided to become an animator after seeing Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at the age of six. After graduating from high school in 1955, he took his portfolio to the Disney studios and was hired as an "in-betweener" - an animator who drew frames between those drawn by other animators. His first work was on the classic Sleeping Beauty. Bluth continued to work at Disney during the summers as he got his degree in English from Brigham Young University. Upon graduating, he formed a live theater group in Santa Monica with his brother. After three years he returned to animation, taking a job as a layout artist at Filmation Studios. In 1971, he returned to Disney, where he was eventually promoted to producer/director on films like Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers (1977), and Pete's Dragon (1977). Bluth, however, wasn't entirely happy with the work Disney was doing. Since his first stint at the company Walt Disney had died and Bluth found that things had changed. The animators were cutting corners. Fine details, like the animating of shadows, had been abandoned. Bluth and coworker Gary Goldman began asking Disney's management why and were told that it was done to save money. In March, 1975, Bluth, Goldman, and John Pomeroy had started working (in Bluth's garage) on a short called Banjo, the Woodpile Cat that they hoped would revive the classic Disney style of animation the studio seemed to have abandoned. The short film took over four years to complete. Working on Banjo enabled Bluth and friends to obtain financing for a film of their own and in September, 1979 (on Bluth's birthday) they left (followed the next day by 11 other animators). Together they produced The Secret of NIMH, which was released in 1982. It told the story of a mouse that joins forces with a group of genetically-mutated, intelligent rats to save her family from destruction by a tractor. The film was a financial failure (in part because United Artists was sold to MGM, who spent little money distributing the film) and Bluth was unable to secure funding for his next project. To make things worse, a bitter animation strike hit the film industry in August of 1982, bringing Bluth’s other animation projects to a halt. Out of work, Bluth was approached by Rick Dyer and he quickly agreed to work with Dyer in his plans for an interactive arcade game.

Needing someone to manufacture the game, Dyer turned to a coin-op manufacturing company and client of Advanced Microcomputer Systems – El Cajon’s Cinematronics.
 

[Rick Dyer] I called up Don Bluth and Gary Goldman and once I’d gotten the commitment from them to do the animation then we contracted one of the publishers we were doing contract work for – Cinematronics – and showed them what we were doing and their reaction was immediate that definitely they wanted in.. They saw that it was probably going to be a pretty big thing.

The relationship between Cinematronics and Advanced Microcomputer Systems had started when AMS developed 1982’s Zzyzzyxx, a game which did little to reverse Cinematronics rapid decline. With hopes that this new technology could change the company’s fortunes, Dyer, Bluth, and Cinematronics formed a partnership called Starcom and set to work completing their game. While Dyer and Bluth were the driving creative forces, behind Dragon’s Lair, they had plenty of help. Victor Penman was the main designer and, together with Darlene Waddington and Marty Folger, had written the game's script. On the animation side, Bluth had a crew of seventy to help him complete the 50,000 drawings used in the game's 27 minutes of animation Chief among them were Bluth's Disney co-workers Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy. Voice acting was provided by Michael Rye (announcer), Dan Molina (Dirk), and Vera Lanpher (Daphne) and music came courtesy of Chris Stone.

Given the declining fortunes of Cinematronics and Bluth Group, it should come as no surprise that the biggest problem the design team had was obtaining the funding necessary to continue development. Early on, Bluth and Goldman were able to arrange for a $300,000 loan that enabled his group to produce a five-minute test version of the game for the AOE show in Chicago in March of 1983 that featured about five rooms. The game was a smash and Cinematronics had $10 million in orders before the show was done. The only problem was that they couldn't afford to manufacture them. A short time later, the company would receive a financial boost from another of Advanced Microcomputer Systems’ clients - Coleco (AMS had designed a light pen scanner for the Colecovision, among other products).
 

[Rick Dyer] There were lots of major hiccups and problems that we had. We didn’t have enough money for the project. That was at a time when videogame development was $150,000-175,000 and we were at hundreds of thousands of dollars and of course Dragon’s Lair ultimately ended up costing well over $1 million. At the time everybody in the industry was saying “How can you ever make your money back on something like that”. Another one of our clients was Coleco – we were also working on the Colecovision for Coleco so when we got a certain way down on the project we brought Al Kahn in who was the head of Coleco and they ultimately licensed the home laserdisc rights which gave us enough money to finish the project.

           

     Coleco offered $2 million for the home rights to Dragon’s Lair paying $1 million paid up front with the other $1 million contingent on the coin-op version of the game being completed by early July. The teams quickly began spending every free hour working on the game. Dyer actually didn't know just how bad things were at Cinematronics at the time.
 

[Rick Dyer] Jim Pierce sold his Rolls Royce and hocked his $35,000 wedding ring and in the course of development on Dragon’s Lair they notified us that they were going into Chapter 11. I didn’t even know what Chapter 11 was.

Financial problems weren’t the only difficulties the design team faced.

[Rick Dyer] [Another problem was] that we had theoretically been designing the game but we’d never actually been able to field test it. The original game design was that as long as you did the right thing it would search to the next scene and when you did the wrong thing it would just play through to the death scene. That was a disaster because the laserdisc search time was way too long and what we discovered when we finally did get to field test it was that the players didn’t want to play it – it wasn’t fun. So we ended up having to throw probably 30% of the animation on the cutting-room floor and redo huge amounts of the game design and animation which was very costly in time in money. Of course, the second time we got it right and the rest is history

Holding their breath and crossing their fingers, Cinematronics and Dyer put the unit out for a second field test and hoped for the best. They didn't have long to wait.

[Rick Dyer] We did our first true field test. We set up a machine in San Diego and one up in L.A. (our development company at the time was based in L.A. across from Cal Poly – Pomona). It was at the El Monte Golfland was where it was tested up here and the same test was going on simultaneously down in El Cajon. Our producer who was overseeing the test called me up and said “You’ve got to come out here.”

And I said “What are talking about, I’ve got a full schedule, I’ve got all these appointments…”

He said “You’ve GOT to come out here now!”

“What’s the matter? Is there something wrong?”

“No but you’ve got to come out here now.”

I’d never heard him talk to me like that before so it really distressed me, I thought “Something’s wrong and he won’t tell me what it is.” So I told my assistant to clear the calendar because I had to go to El Monte Golfland. She asked why and I said “I don’t know”. I got in the car and drove out there. When I got there, the first thing I saw was that there were people jammed around the entrance. When I worked my way inside, we had a top monitor and it was like flies being drawn to the light. There must have been 150 people just mesmerized standing there watching Dragon’s Lairand when I worked my way up to the game there was a continuous row of quarters all the way across the monitor and Golfland had erected velvet ropes for the lines that form. I said “Oh my God!” I immediately went to a pay phone to call Jim Pierce down at Cinematronics and he picked up the phone and before I could say a thing he said, “Yes Rick, the same thing is happening here.” And that’s when we knew that this wasn’t just going to be another videogame.

With a successful field test complete, the game was ready to go. Finally, after four years of effort and approximately $3 million, Dragon’s Lair was released on July 1, 1983. The final $1 million from Coleco was crucial. Without it Cinematronics could not have afforded to manufacture the game. Given the expense of producing the game, the continuing decline in the video game market, and the high cost (over $4,000) of the finished product, some were understandably concerned that the game would be a colossal failure, despite its sensational field test. In addition, the game would cost 50 cents to play instead of the traditional quarter - a move that had failed when tried on games such as Centipede and Missile Command[1]. The game was an absolute smash. The game reached #1 on the Replay charts in September and remained there for two more months. In its first eight months of release, the game sucked in $32 million worth of quarters and machines were said to be pulling in $1,400 a week – well over 10 times what the average machine made at the time[2]. Gamers in Iowa were reported to have taped $5 bills, instead of the usual quarters, to machines in order to reserve a spot on the game. The game could probably have made even more money had Cinematronics been able to meet early demand. While initial orders were placed for 10,000 units, the company only had enough machines on hand to ship 5,300 by September, the peak of the game's popularity. At one point, Dyer felt that he could have sold 135,000 units, if only he had been able to build them. While the game was a hit with players, it was equally as successful with spectators, with many arcades installing a second, overhead monitor placing seats around the machine for viewers. Sometimes this success was too much of a good thing. While spectators were crowded into video arcades to watch the latest Dragon’s Lair champion go to work, they weren't dropping quarters into any other game. As a result, at least one operator turned off the machine temporarily in the afternoon so that customers would spend money on other games while they waited for Dragon’s Lairto be turned back on. Soon Dragon’s Lairrelated merchandise was appearing everywhere. The game's characters appeared on lunch boxes, stickers, board games, and just about everything else. Not since Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had the industry seen such a marketing bonanza. The game was even featured on ABC's hit series That's Incredible, which featured an on-air Dragon’s Lair contest. Dirk and company even got their own series. Ruby Spears productions produced a Dragon’s Laircartoon that aired on ABC for one season before leaving the air in 1985. Bluth also started work on a Dragon’s Lairmovie, to be called Dragon’s Lair: The Legend, but he was never able to secure financing. Movie or not, Dragon’s Lair had become the surprise hit of 1983. Videogames, which had been declared dead, were suddenly alive again.

Dragon’s Lairfeatured the exploits of a bungling knight named Dirk the Daring - a kind of inept everyman with delusions of grandeur that Gary Goldman described as "a C student trying to get As". Dirk's goal was to rescue a beautiful (if empty-headed) princess named Daphne from the enchanted castle of the evil wizard Modred. Based loosely on Marilyn Monroe, Daphne's name had been inspired by Don Bluth's cat but her body came from a much less wholesome source. When Gary Goldman was forced to throw out his five-year collection of Playboys, he gave them Bluth and suggested that they might be a good place to find a model for a voluptuous princess. Perhaps those Playboys served as inspiration of another kind.

[Brooke Jarrett] I heard many stories from “upstairs” about the goings on of management. One was that the original video used to sell the backers on…Dragon’s Lair…had a small subliminal bonus for the viewers. Every third frame had Princess Daphne in the nude. Just to make her more interesting

Daphne had a voice - though just barely - limited to occasional squeaks of "Save Me!" and a few lines of breathy dialogue at the game's conclusion. Dirk, on the other hand, never said a word. The designers tried a number of voices but when they were unable to find one that would make him sound sympathetic, they decided to keep him silent (which only added to his go-lucky dimwit image). While Dirk spoke no actual words, he did emit the occasional yelp or scream (supplied by the game's editor Dan Molina).

While Dyer, Bluth, and company were at work on the game, Jim Pierce had created a contingency team at Cinematronics as a fallback in case Dyer was unable to deliver. In the end, the team only provided some support functionality (plus some resentment for not allowing them to take a more active role in the game's development). Bob Skinner, for instance, created a software patch to fix an issue caused by a new piece of hardware that had been added to save $20 on production (the part caused interrupts - signals that indicated a hardware of software task needed immediate attention - to occur at 32hz instead of the frame rate of 30 hz).

The game's controls consisted simply of a joystick and an action button. As the game unfolded, the player would have to make the occasional choice to direct Dirk's onscreen actions. The player might have to dodge left to avoid a fireball, or swing his sword to sever the tentacles of a squid-like beast.  While the castle contained 42 rooms, the player only had to visit about two dozen to complete the game. The castle housed an array of opponents, including Blank Knights, Giddy Goons, and the Lizard King. The game's finale featured a battle against the mighty dragon Singe. After slaying the beast, Dirk rescued the fair Daphne. As Dirk lifted his princess into his arms, she whispered sweet nothings into his ear, causing him to break into a wide grin. Player speculation on what, exactly, she said to elicit such a reaction was rampant (not to mention bawdy).

The phenomenal success of Dragon’s Lair failed to pull Cinematronics out of bankruptcy. One problem was that the games, while popular, were a maintenance nightmare. The first 4,000 units used the Pioneer PR-7820 laser disc player - a unit notorious for its unreliability. Pioneer itself only made 25,000 7820s, most of which were used for training GM auto dealers. Cinematronics purchased 5,000 and another 5,000 were used by Pioneer for parts to repair malfunctioning units. Pioneer received so many complaints about the model that they actually discontinued it before Dragon’s Lair was released. Even units that checked out fine in the factory were often damaged in shipment and soon after the game was released[3], Cinematronics was swamped with service calls from angry operators.

[Ed Anderson] Even though Pioneer had the industrial units, you couldn’t stabilize a laser and ship it across country – you couldn’t move it across the room actually. Every time they shipped it there was something wrong with it. They tried every kind of packaging you can imagine to try to make the laser components immovable they just couldn’t do it. That was what happened to Cinematronics. They spent so much money on that stuff and they couldn’t ship it. So at the end I moved a whole warehouse of their Pioneer industrial laser players so they could make a little bit of money before they went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, Pioneer had come out with a replacement for the 7820 called the LD-V1000, which was an improvement but still unreliable. While some operators were annoyed by malfunctioning Dragon’s Lair machines, others were upset that players who were able to complete the game would often tie up machines for 6-10 minutes. In addition, players who had watched someone else play the game to completion often had little desire to play it themselves.

Space Ace

 

Meanwhile, the arcade-going public was eagerly awaiting Cinematronics' follow up to Dragon’s Lair. Once again, Ricky Dyer and Don Bluth were the guiding forces and this time, they were given $2 million to create a game. The result was a kind of outer-space version of Dragon’s Lair called Space Ace, a game that offered a number of additions over its predecessor but failed to come close to matching its success. Space Ace featured a more complex plot (written by Shannon Donnelly) than Dragon’s Lair and included a number of scenes with dialogue (something Dragon’s Lair was almost entirely lacking). In the game, the brawny hero Space Ace ("defender of truth, justice, and the planet Earth") is reduced to a sniveling teenage twerp named Dexter by the "Infanto Ray", the creation of his arch-nemesis Borf. who then captures his girlfriend Kimberly (Kimmy) and vows to use the ray on the entire population of planet Earth. The rest of the game involves Dexter's attempts to save his girlfriend and thwart Borf's nefarious plan. One novel feature of the game was the "Energize" button. If the player did well enough, the screen would glow red at certain points in the game and he could then push the energize button to temporarily return Dexter to his normal, less-annoying (or was that more annoying?) state. The player could also elect not to energize, which often led to a different animation sequence, usually easier though worth fewer points.  Space Ace allowed the player to select from three skill levels - Space Cadet, Space Captain, or Space Ace. The higher skill levels featured footage not available in the lower ones and the reason was financial. One of the problems with Dragon’s Lair had been that, once a player had finished the game, there was little reason to play it again. Space Ace's skill levels were one (not very successful) attempt to avoid that problem.

To create the game's spaceship sequences, the designers first filmed models of the vehicles, which were then incorporated into animation cells and recolored. A special tunnel was built for filming the game's dogfight sequences. While the animation was similar to that of Dragon’s Lair, the sounds were somewhat improved. The game had 35 separate tracks for sound effects compared to 14 for Dragon’s Lair. To save money, the designers chose to do the character voices themselves rather than relying on professional actors. Animators Jeff Etter, Will Finn, and Lorna Pomeroy supplied the voices of Ace, Dexter, and Kimmy respectively while Don Bluth himself provided the voice of Borf. In response to complaints that the slow access time of Dragon’s Lair had detracted from gameplay, the staff at Rick Dyer's production company (which was now called RDI Video Systems) developed a system that could access information 50% faster. Dyer's group was the only one to have undergone a name change. After discovering that the name Starcom was already taken by another company, Dyer changed the name of his joint venture to Magicom. Released in late 1983, Space Ace was a disappointment. It didpoorly in the arcades and pulled in only $13 million in sales for Magicom. Debuting on the Replay charts in May of 1984 at a disappointing 11th place, the game had disappeared by the end of the year.

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[1] Allied Leisure's electromechanical game F-114 was shipped with a factory pre-set of 50-cent play in 1975.

[2] Some sources claim this figure is 80 times the average machine take, but this seems far too high. The “10 times” figure is probably a bit low..

[3] Though Dyer claimed that only 1% of units experienced problems.

Video Game Related Deaths

January 18, 2013, 6:58 pm

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This is a subject that I broached in an earlier post but thought I'd cover a bit more fully.
What was the first coin-op video game-related death?
Most sources point to Peter Bukowski, who died of a heart attack at Friar Tuck's game room in Calumet City, IL on April 3, 1982 after playing Berzerk . Many sources, in fact, list this as the only known case of a coin-op video-game related death  Actually, there was at least one video-game related death long before Bukowski's and another that, if true, is far more tragic. Below I will discuss four alleged arcade video game-related deaths.

Charley Currie (December 3, 1974)

. The March, 1975 issue of Play Meter reports that Charley Currie, an operator from Ontario was electrocuted on December 3rd, 1974 while playing a "TV game" he'd just installed. He put it next to another (non video) game and neither of them were grounded. He was killed instantly when he touched the other game.

Play Meter, March, 1975

Unknown (ca 1979-80)

Here's one I debated even including given its sad nature. I'd rather not reveal the source on this one, save to say that it is from someone who should know. According to this source, Exidy's Fire One resulted in one of the most tragic deaths in arcade history. The game's cabinet reportedly originally featured a rounded front bottom edge. A child in an arcade was hanging from the controls one day when the machine tipped over and crushed him or her to death. I believe the cabinet was redesigned afterwards (though the game may have already been out of production). I haven't found any corroboration for this story. Then again, if it happened, it's probably not the kind of thing a company would want to make known. If true, my heart goes out to the victim's family as well as the game desginers and Exidy employees.

Jeff Dailey(January, 1981)

In January of 1981 19-year-old Jeff Daily/Dailey is said to have dropped dead after racking up a high score of 16,660 points on Berzerk but details are sketchy and it may be nothing more than an urban legend (note the 666 in the score, though this could be a coincidence).
I am unsure of the original source of this story. Wikiepedia attributes it to the game's entry at arcadehistory.com, which doesn't list a source (a post on Snopes.com claims the story [or maybe it was just the Bukowski one] appeared in Russel DeMaria's High Score but the excerpt on Amazon, which includes the Berzerk section, doesn't mention it).
.
I have found no contemporary account of this alleged incident. A search of ths Social Security Death Index shows that a Jeffrey Alan Dailey, age 19 died in late May of 1981. This Dailey, however, died in Virginia from injuries sustained in an automobile accident (as per his obituary in the May 30, 1981 Newport News Daily Press).
Personally, I find the whole story doubtful.

Peter Bukowski (April 3, 1982)

This is by far the most well-known video game related death. On Saturday, April 3 1982 18-year-old Peter Bukowski arrived at Friar Tuck’s Game Room in Calumet City, IL for an evening of video games. After playing Berzerk for 15 minutes, Bukowski turned to drop a quarter in another game and suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. Though an autopsy revealed two-week old scar tissue on the teenager's heart, news reports supposedlly appeared blaming the excitement and stress caused by Berzerkfor causing the attack (though this refer to the Kiesling artcile below).

Unlike the Dailey incident, this one is supported by media accounts. The most well-known is probably Stephen Kiesling's artcile Death of a Video Gamer in the October, 1982 issue of Video Games (http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/death.html), which reports that Bukowski (misspelled "Burkowski") was an "A student" and came in with a friend around 8:30 PM and played the game, getting his name on the high score board at least twice. It also reported that "...camera crews descended on Friar Tuck's..." and that owner Tom Blankly didn't like the publicity. The article speculates on whether the stress of video games could have caused the incident.

In addition tothe Video Games account, the story also appeared in local papers in the Calumet City, area (see below).

Elyria (OH) Chronicle-Telegram, April 27, 1982

Rockford (IL) Register, April 29, 1982

Retrogamer #47 ran an article on The Making of Berzerk in which designer Alan McNeil addressed these rumors in a sidebar:

"But one player did die while playing the game (Alan refutes reports that claim two died). 'The unfortunate fellow was obese and had run upstairs to play the game', Alan explains: 'The legend is he set a high score and died, but the owner of the arcade said he didn’t finish the game – he was out of breath from the moment he arrived until he dropped. The legend is way better than reality: the excitement of playing a game killing a player after setting a high score...'"

Some have speculated that McNeil was actually talking about the Dailey incident (probably because the Video Games article said Bukowski was "apparentlly healthy" not obsese) but the Bukowski story is much more well known and is supported by contemporary sources so if one one of the stories is true, it's clearly the Bukowski story.

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 9

January 22, 2013, 7:12 pm

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            Dragon's Lair had been a huge hit in 1983 - in many ways one of the biggest the industry had ever seen. Many saw laserdisc games as the savior of a dying industry. In the end, however, this proved not to be the case when the games faded almost as quickly as they rose. There were a number of reasons. For one, the hardware was error prone and buggy. In the January 1985 issue of Electronic Games, Ron Gelatin, CEO of Just Games, who managed arcades in the northeast, put it as follows:

[Ron Gelatin] "…the original Dragon's Lair was made with a three-year-old, discontinued Pioneer player. The company did in all the operators by doing that, because Pioneer had no parts, no back up, and it was a piece of garbage player."

In addition to being unreliable, the hardware was also expensive. Jim Pierce speculates that, despite their success, Cinematronics probably lost money overall on Dragon's Lair and Space Ace combined. As with the industry in general, a glut of poor titles also spelled doom for laserdisc games. After the runaway success of Dragon's Lair it seemed that many companies just wanted to get a laserdisc game - any laserdisc game - in arcades as quickly as possible with little concern for quality. Ultimately, however, the biggest factor in the laserdisc games' rapid fall may have been that the games, even the best of them,  just weren't that good. Once the novelty of the technology wore off, players were generally left with little more than a memory test with little skill involved and once you finished a game, there was little reason to play it again.

Scion and Freeze

            When the laserdisc bubble burst, Cinematronics found itself in a familiar position treading the waters of bankruptcy. Even worse was that the vector game market the company had ridden to success was dead and buried. If the company was to survive, they needed to find a new hit - and fast. Eventually they began to develop a new raster-graphics-based hardware development system. In the meantime they released a pair of games on older systems.

Scion  was a Xevious-like game licensed from Seibu Denshi while Freezewas an original concept game designed by Bob Skinner. The concept sounded like a can't-miss proposal (at least to management) - a game that combine play elements of two Williams classics.

 

[Bob Skinner] I sewed the Joustmechanic of “pumping” the thrust mechanism with the Defender mechanic of flipping left and right, with a flamethrower from somewhere, and an economy of fuel for the jetpack and flamethrower

 

 

 

The game featured a character named Manfred (because Skinner's favorite song was "Blinded By the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band) who flew about a frozen multi-platform playfield with a jetpack using a flamethrower to melt stalagmites and ice-frozen doors while collecting refueling crystals and avoiding cave bats. One original aspect of the game was if the player stood still, they slowly froze to death, making Freeze one of the rare games in which you could die just by standing still.

 

 

            Despite its innovative elements, the final game wasn't nearly as exciting as it had sounded during the sales pitch. With a little more work, things might have been different.

[Bob Skinner] Dan Viescas was the art director, and I messed up a good deal of his art. I practically coined the derogatory term "programmer art".…Better art, a richer design with more interesting levels, more tuning of the mechanics, and that’s a great game.

Another issue may have been the game's hardware.

[Bob Skinner] The hardware was the recycled Naughty Boy boards from one of the earlier marketing debacles! Thinking green! So the run was limited from the start due to the supply of boards. I think there were 2000. I basically took the challenge to invent a game and do my first raster game on two-year-old hardware described in horrendous Japlish, and complete it in a few months. I worked basically breaking only for sleep and food, and not often. My addiction to the work would have been a serious problem if I didn’t live alone.

Released in late 1984, both Scion and Freeze fared poorly and the situation at Cinematronics looked worse than ever. A new hardware system, however, was in the works - a raster-based system dubbed Cinemat. Designed around dual Z-80 microprocessors (along with dual sound chips), the Cinemat system was designed to allow operators to replace software and control panels while keeping the existing hardware when upgrading to a new game. Leading the Cinemat design effort was Alex McKay one of a number of former Gremlin/Sega employees who came to Cinematronics after Sega closed down the San Diego-based Gremlin operations. Others included artist Dan Viescas, and programmers Helene Gomez, Steve Hostetler, and Medo Moreno. While McKay did an admirable job with the hardware, he had to make due with a limited timeline and even more limited funding. While McKay developed the hardware, Dan Viescas and Medo Moreno were working on a 8-bit graphics development system based on the one they'd used as Sega/Gremlin (in later years, Cinematronics/Leland would use Amigas then IBM PCs for graphics development).

Cerberus and Express Delivery

 

            The first game developed on the new system was Cerberus, a top-down free-scrolling game in which the player collected pods and placed them on the arms of a floating space station while fighting off enemy escorts, tugs, and destroyers. The game ended when all the pods were stolen. The game was programmed by Steve Hostetler and Phil Sorger.

[Phil Sorger] I coded it with Steve Hostetler. I also did all the sounds…what I remember most was Steve worked on the Player ship and scoring [while] I programmed the enemy ships and planetary ring. It was cool building weapons and counters to weapons, me vs Steve. It wasn't much of a game, but considering we built a brand new game from scratch on new hardware and faced down a "colored pixel" patent lawsuit…it was quite an accomplishment.

The games graphics were created by art director Dan Viescas and newcomer Dana Christianson (part of a new policy of assigning two programmers and two artists to each game). Christianson had attended the Kansas City Art Institute. He came to San Diego where he found few opportunities for an art school graduate (artists generally worked as fine artists or magazine illustrators). After working in a print shop, Christianson began taking computer programming classes at a community college, eventually earning an associates degree. Not finding programming to his liking, he turned instead to computer graphics. In December of 1983 he had decided to head to New York when he got a note from Dan Viescas that Cinematronics was hiring artists. In addition to creating the graphics for the explosions in Cerberus, he also created the game's logo plex (marquee) and cabinet art. While the new graphics system was being created, programmers sometimes resorted to somewhat low-tech methods to add the graphics to the game.

[Phil Sorger] Cerberus was done with colored markers and graph paper, and I hand-transferred the values (I had a key: red=1, dark red=2, etc) using a line editor, and later emacs.

 The second game developed on the Cinemat hardware was Express Delivery, a game in which the player tried to "…maneuver his car around traffic jams, police cars, fire trucks, and other obstacles while scoring large bonuses for arriving at the destination before the time limit is up."  Neither game caught fire in the arcades

Mayhem 2002 and Power Play

       The next two Cinemat games would feature slightly more original game play. Mayhem 2002 was a video game version of the 1975 sci-fi film Rollerball, starring James Caan as an aging athlete in the titular game, a bloody, futuristic version of roller derby involving motorcycles in which a team of armor-clad skaters scored points by stuffing a steel ball into a goal. Programming was by David Dentt, Phil Sorger, and Bob Skinner (Sorger and Skinner became fast friends and worked together on a number of games) with graphics from Tom Carroll and Dana Christianson.

[David Dentt] At that time in particular, we were having some sort of contest where two teams were trying to develop a game each. I actually started on the other team, but liked the Mayhem game idea better, and ended up going to it.

After considering a number of names (such as "Shattersport") the team settled on Mayhem 2002. Creating art for the game proved troublesome, in part because the limitations of the hardware system only allowed for a limited number of sprites on the screen at one time. At one point, Cinematronics was on the verge of cancelling the game when Dana Christianson worked 72 hours straight over a weekend and the game was released. Once again, however, it proved not to be the hit Cinematronics desperately needed. Part of the reason was likely the aforementioned hardware limitations, which allowed for only one player per "team" on the screen at a time and left little room for additional graphical elements other than the players and the ball (it was also easy to defeat the enemy A.I. once you figured out the trick).

            Power Play was a top-down soccer game with similar graphics to Mayhem 2002. Like Mayhem 2002, Power Playonly featured a single user-controlled player per team (though each team also featured a computer-controlled goalie). Phil Sorger and Bob Skinner handled the programming (reusing much of the code from Mayhem 2002). To create the game's graphics Dana Christianson filmed Sorger kicking a soccer ball against the side of the Cinematronics building. While Bob Skinner remembers that Mayhem 2002 was designed before Power Play, Phil Sorger recalls that it was the other way around.

 

[Phil Sorger] …in PowerPlay, if we didn't get the animation working along with the motion properly, the avatar appeared to "skate" instead of "run". Moving without animating, sliding around the screen, but still steering around. We used this as the genesis for Mayhem, added shoulder pads, cool sound effects, and some tricky ricochets and strategy to make a fun game.

While it may or may not have been developed first, PowerPlay was released in September 1985, four months after Mayhem 202 It didn't do much better than its predecessor (though it was reportedly popular on college campuses).

Striker

Oddly enough, given its lack of success, PowerPlay led to another game that many at Cinematronics recall as one of the best they ever played - a four-player cocktail version of the game called Striker.

[Phil Sorger]  Strikerwas a total bastard of a project. We took two cabinets and stood them side by side. We had the same game graphics running on both monitors, except one was upside down. The gameplay was similar to PowerPlay, but with 4 player control, much, much better ball handling, more interesting wall collisions and funner characters.... We re-colored the sprites on the fly (which we thought was really slick back then) and allowed the players to punch and kick each other without consequence. This naughty ultra-violence was later copied in Quarterback, and continued all the way through NFL Blitz. We used simple geometry and simultaneous equation solving to extrapolate pass directions and speeds. This gave teams a lot of control over the action. The goalies were the only NPCs and were fun to mess with. They would start off poor and learn over time, so the first few goals were scored quickly, but after the score became 5-5 or so, it took a well-designed play to beat the keeper. It was also fun but difficult to push the goalie back into his own goal, or countering by smashing the other team if they hassled your goalie. Later, we converted it into a cocktail table game, that players would sit on both sides of. As fun as it was, this game never shipped.

While neither Mayhem 2002 nor PowerPlay had been a hit, Cinematronics wasn't done with the sports theme yet. Almost the entire development staff had been at work on another sports-themed game that Jim Pierce hoped would finally pull the company out of the doldrums and save them from bankruptcy. A baseball game called World Series: the Season.

Play Meter Operator/Industry Surveys

January 26, 2013, 12:26 pm

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I don't know how much interest there is in this kind of information but the various industry trade magazines published yearly operator/industry surveys with a number of statistics on the coin-op industry.

I was recently reviewing the surveys from Play Meter and thought I'd publish some of the stats I found most interesting. Play Meter published its first survey in 1976.

First up - average weekly earnings per machine by machine type:

	1976	1977	1978	1979	1980	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985	1986
Video Games	40	44	50	64	102	140	109	70	53	57	57
Jukeboxes	49	46	52	54	50	55	51	50	40	47	55
Pinball	35	44	62	65	63	66	55	38	41	52	51
Pool Tables	41	41	53	57	66	67	63	58	60	58	61
Foosball	39	39	41	31	20	28	31	*	26	*	*
Shufleboards	23	29	32	41?	*	*	*	*	30	31	*
Wallgames	*	33	34	29	25	26	28	*	*	*	*
Cocktail Tables	*	*	*	49	*	115	97	*	*	*	*
Air Cushion Games	*	*	*	27	34	40	39	*	*	*	*
Arcade Games	26	*	*		33	36	46	*	59	55	55
Shuffle Alleys	30	29	32	41	28	31	48	*	36	*	*
Counter Games	*	*	*	*	*	37	49	*	52	57	*

A few other categories  that weren't reported regularly:

Ball Bowlers: 1976-$25
Video Phonographs: 1984-$176
Laser Disc Video games: 1984-$120
Bar Roll-Up Games: 1984-$98
Electronic Dart Games: 1984-$55, 1985-$57, 1986-$44
Kiddie Rides: 1982-$37, 1984-$50, 1985-$21, 1986-$33

Total Machines On Location

Video Games

1980: 540,000
1981: 780,000
1982: 1,375,000
1983: 1,491,359
1984: 1,095,361

Total Coin-Op Machines (includes coin-op games, kiddie rides, and jukeboxes)

1982: 1,793,000
1983: 1,876,389
1984: 1,652,324
1985: 1,500,741
1986: 1,450000

Total Coin-Op Industry Dollar Volume (in billions)

1980: 7.15
1981: 8.2
1982: 8.9
1983: 6.4
1984: 4.5
1985: 4.5
1986: 4.0

Operators' Preferred Video Game Manufacturer

1977: Atari (59%), Bally/Midway (31%), Other (10%)
1978: Atari (69%), Bally/Midway (27%), Exidy (1%), Other (3%)
1979: Bally/Midway (49%), Atari (47%), Other (4%)
1980: Atari (54%), Bally/Midway (43%), Other (3%)

Arcade Video Game Market Share

1981: Atari (30%), Bally/Midway (26%), Williams (12%), Stern (8%), Centuri (6%), Cinematronics (5%), Sega/Gremlin (4%), Taito/Taito America (2%), Exidy (2%), Other (5%)

1982: Bally/Midway (33%), Atari (23%), Williams (11%), Nintendo (10%),  Taito/Taito Ameria (6%), Sega/Gremlin (6%), Stern (3%), Centuri (3%), Cinematronics (2%), Exidy (1%), Other (3%)

1983: Bally/Midway (25%), Atari (19%), Williams (12%), Nintendo (9%), Sega/Gremlin (6%), Gottlieb (6%), Taito/Taito America (5%), Centuri (4%), Stern (3%), Universal (2%), Rock-Ola (1%), Data East (1%), Other (7%)

1984 (Dedicated): Bally/Midway (21%), Atari (19%), Nintendo (19%), Konami/Centuri (7%), Gottlieb (7%), Cinematronics (6%), Williams (5%), Taito/Taito America (4%), Merit (3%), Coin-It (2%), Stern (1%), Exidy (1%), Universal (1%), Data East (1%), Konami/Interlogic (1%), Other (4%)

1984 (Conversion Kits): Universal (18%), Taito/Taito America (14%), Nintendo (13%), Bally/Midway (10%), Konami/Centuri (7%), Konami/Intelogic (7%), Atari (5%), Crown Vending (4%), Data East (3%), Stern (2%), Centuri (2%), Magic/Eagle (2%), SNK (2%), Cinematronics (1%),
Other (9%)

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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 10

February 1, 2013, 9:02 pm

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Today's post covers one of my favorite Cinematronics games - World Series: The Season. A game that I consider one of the best, if not the best, arcade baseball games ever. Sadly, it seems to be almost forgotten today. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it came out in that brief period after the crash of 1983/84 and before of games like Gauntlet and Hang On spurred an arcade comeback.

First, however, I have updated a number of past installments in this series with new information from Bob Skinner, Dennis Halverson, and Brooke Jarrett, including new info about Cosmic Chasm and the DARPA tank simulator project plus a couple of fun stories/rumors about subliminal messages in Dragon's Lair and employees feeding marshmallows to geese with slingshots.

The parts that had the most changes were parts 3,6, and 7

http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of_26.html
http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of_5.html
http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-ultimate-so-far-history-of_9.html:

On to Part 10

 

 

            So far, Cinematronics' attempts to follow up on the success of Dragon's Lair and Space Acehad met with dismal failure. Scion, Freeze, Cerberus, Express Delivery, Mayhem 2002, and Power Play had gone nowhere and the situation had gone from grim to borderline disaster. But Jim Pierce had an ace up his sleeve. He had long wanted to create a video version of baseball and in 1985 he would finally get his chance with World Series: The Season- a game that would give the company its first hit since the laser disc days. It almost didn't happen however.

            The game was a team effort with most of the design staff contributing in one way or another. Spearheading the effort was programmer Medo Moreno, who had come to Cinematronics in January of 1985, after a stint at Gremlin/Sega where he worked on games like Carnival and Eliminator.  A Strat-O-Matic baseball fanatic, Moreno was a natural choice to lead the programming effort.  Moreno started working on the game in February but the idea had come about before he got there. Joining him on the project were David Dentt, Dan Viescas,  Jerry Huber, Dana Christianson, Phil Sorger, Steve Hostetler (and, eventually, many others). 

 

 

            The game was developed on the relatively new Cinemat system. The team experimented briefly with digitized graphics but the poor resolution and limited color capabilities of the Cinemat hardware made that impractical. Instead, artists turned to a crude but effective means of creating the game's graphics. Using standard SLR cameras the trooped out to the company parking lot and took photos of one another going through the motions of batting and pitching.  

[Dana Christianson] We didn't have scanners, we didn't have digital cameras. We did all the animation with a camera with a motor drive [using] slide film and we projected those up on graph paper [then] we basically took a black sharpie on the graph paper and did outlines of all the characters. But there were hundreds of animations so we would hand these piles of graph paper to these women in the engineering group where they were burning EPROMs and have them hand enter [the data from] these sheets of graph paper. Then they'd have to burn the EPROMs. So to see animation we'd have to wait until the EPROMS were burned  and then I'd see all the flaws and I'd have to go back and reedit it on graph paper - it was absolutely Neanderthal.

Eventually someone created a graphics tool and the artists no longer had to rely on assembly line workers hand entering the data.

With the company banking on World Series to pull them out of the doldrums, many of the designers worked almost nonstop on the game. Medo Moreno and Dana Christianson practically lived in the Cinematronics building for 9 months working from 10 in the morning until at least midnight. Both of them had sleeping bags and would often stay the night (living at work was hardly unknown at Cinematronics.  Sound designer Dave Cartt had a house in the mountains an hour away and would drive in on Mondays and stay for a week, living out of a camper on the back of his truck and showering at a nearby gym). Before long, almost everyone in began to pitch in on the game. Then disaster struck. The company was still in Chapter 11 (as they had been off and on since 1982) and Jim Pierce found himself unable to make payroll. A number of employees were laid off and it looked like the end of the line for Cinematronics. Wanting to see the project through to the end, some employees agreed to work on the game for several weeks without pay (some were asked to do so while others apparently volunteered).

[Dana Christianson] Because they were in Chapter 11, we needed to get baseball done for that show - it was make or break for Cinematronics. Jerry Huber and I worked for 6 weeks, maybe 2 months, for no money…Some of the women from work brought us groceries - not only was our job eventually at stake but there was a spirit of - it was like we were at war we were trying to survive so everybody joined in.

[Jerry Huber] Jim Pierce pulled me into his office and asked me to help finish off the game. The plan was to get the game out ASAP, sell enough units to raise the money reserves and then hire everyone back. Long story short… we did it. Everyone got rehired and the company lived to fight another day. I was totally broke at that time… so working without pay was tough. But the thing that I remember the most about that time was that the people that were still employed all chipped in and bought me groceries so I wouldn't starve to death. How awesome is that?

[Bob Skinner] I only remember going without pay for 30-60 days. We had a meeting where JP basically said. “I need your keys.” He explained he could not make payroll, because the product wasn’t finished or ready to sell. So we all said we would work for free. Weighing risk/reward, we all felt good about it. This was a real gung-ho time as everyone was in survivor mode and wanted to be thought of as valuable to the effort.

[Phil Sorger] At one point Jim Pierce said he would have to lay me off (among others) and not be able to ship World Series. When I told him I believed in the company, the game and him and would work for free (just health insurance) I saw him get very emotional and thank me personally. He later repaid me once the game was a "home run".

Thanks to a superhuman effort by the design team, World Series: The Season was ready in time for the 1985 AMOA show in October. Then, just when it seemed like things were finally looking up, disaster struck yet again. In the middle of the show, a police officer came in with an injunction and forced Cinematronics to turn off their games.

[Dana Christianson] We went and [the game] made a huge, huge splash. I think it was the first or second day when the police came in and forced us to turn all of our cabinets toward the wall of our booth because somebody had filed a suit against Cinematronics for stealing an idea.

The problem was a lawsuit filed by Roland Colton of Electronics Sports Research. According to Colton, he had met with Jim Pierce in May of 1984 to discuss his idea for a baseball game and the possibility of Cinematronics manufacturing the game. According to Colton (details can be found at  http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/916/916.F2d.1444.89-55297.89-55296.html) Pierce had signed a confidentiality agreement and only then did he explain the game's "secret design" to Pierce. Pierce eventually turned down the game only to release it on their own (without paying Colton a dime).. Whether this meeting occurred and what exactly Colton's idea was is unknown. Medo Moreno recalls that the initial concept involved a player coming to bat in certain pre-determined game situations. The design staff had been unaware of the Colton situation and was surprised (if not panicked) when the games had to be turned to the wall. In any event, the injunction was eventually lifted (though the legal case stretched at least into 1989) and Cinematronics was able to begin selling their game. Dana Christianson speculates that the controversy may even have helped in the end.

   

         When it finally became available, World Series proved to be the hit that Cinematronics so desperately needed. The game reached #2 on the Replay charts and #4 on Play Meter. The controversy may have helped but it was the gameplay that really made the game a success. World Series was one of the best arcade baseball games ever created. In the game, the player alternately controlled a batter and a pitcher in a semi-first person simulation of the national pastime. The player could face off against a computer opponent or another player. While the game included a number of excellent features, two stand out. First was the controls - which included a pair of tiny spring-loaded joysticks the player used to control the batter and pitcher. The player could use the stick to precisely position the bat or (by means of a white aiming dot) the location of the pitch. In addition, the farther the player pulled the stick back, the harder they swung (or threw).  While the joystick in many ways made the game, it was prone to break.

  

[Phil Sorger] I remember I used to bring handfuls of steel springs to trade shows and give them out to distributors and operators. The spring-loaded analog stick (usually the baseball bat one) would break springs from time to time, and they liked the springs much more than pens or other typical booth giveaways.

 

            The second key feature was that the game kept track of the player's stats. When the player started the game, they entered their initials and birthdate and the game tracked a host of pitching and batting stats over time. The game's "high score" board was a statistical leader board that could be sorted on a variety of different stats. For the stats obsessed baseball fan (and is there any other kind?), it was pure heaven. I personally remember logging in with multiple birthdays so that I could make the leader boards in  multiple categories (if you were "leading the league" in batting average, you didn't want to risk losing your top spot).

 

One idea that didn't go over so well was to allow the player to store their stats on a "stat key" and take them from location to location.

[Phil Sorger] I showed [Jim Pierce] once that I could make a "key" that players could insert into the games that would store the players' stats so they could play the same game on another cabinet and have their information transferred. The key was really just an EEPROM but it worked more like magic. He bankrolled the idea, we tested it in a few arcades, but the keyhole got used more often for chewing gum than account transfer, but he never blamed me for having a boneheaded idea. Hey, it might have worked...

The idea was that operators could sell the keys or give them away as promotions. While some operators liked the idea, they didn't want to support selling the keys (or cleaning the gunk out of the keyholes).

Overall, however, World Series was a hit (it was later redone as Baseball: The Season II) and got Cinematronics (temporarily at least) back in the black, even allowing them to rehire some of the employees they'd had to let go (though some had had enough and never returned).  The game remains one of the best coin-op baseball simulations ever made, even if few now remember it.

[Phil Sorger] I was in a pizza place in Florida one evening, and I was bummed to see an old World Series with the power turned off in the corner. I asked the guy working there why it wasn't turned on and he said it was broken. I asked him for the keys and in a few minutes had the game up and running again. The door switch was broken (the power turns off when you take the back off) so that was the first thing. Also, the EEPROM was dead, but there was a bookkeeping/diagnostics option, accessible via the service button/menu system, that could be used to reset it. I realigned the monitor, reseated the background EPROMs (one was loose) and checked everything out. I played a couple games on free play with the family, before returning it to 1coin/credit mode. So I got to play my old game AND they gave us free pizza..

 

 

More Un-TAFA'd/KLOV'd games

February 6, 2013, 5:40 pm

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Another utilitarian (read boring) post today.
I recently bought the 1986 summer catalog issues of Replay and they had a number of games that were either not on Arcade Flyers, not in KLOV, or not in either one.

Here are the ones that were listed.
Most are gambling or trivia games and there's probably little interest in those among collectors, but someone could still enter them in KLOV. Most (if not all) were likely released in 1985 and 1986.

Updates/Odds and Ends

February 9, 2013, 10:26 pm

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I have found more information on two posts I made earlier.
Both posts have been updated with the new info, but I'll give a summary here.

Simutron Tournament Center

First is this post on the Simutron Tournament Center:
http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-simutron-tournament-center-ultimate.html

I found two articles in Play Meter about the project. It even made the cover of the April 1, 1983 issue.

You can read the details in the previous post, but among the new things I discovered:

• The company that came up with the initial idea and funded the project was Simutron, Inc. (incorporated in Escondido on November 24, 1981)
• Perceptronics was originally to deliver the final product on June 30, 1982 - well before Astron Belt or Dragon's Lair (recall that the first Simutron game used laser disc technology).
• Other Torunament Centers were slated to be opened and players from different locations would be able to play one another live.
• A library of games was planned and would be delivered over phone lines.
• The project was cancelled around October of 1983.
• A demo scheduled for May 1, 1982 had been delayed. A year later negotiations to salvage the project broke down.
• Simutron claims the delays were because Perceptronics didn't have the technology they claimed to have. Perceptronics says it was due to changes in scope.
• Perceptronics launched a suit against Simutron for $150,000 (they had been paid $315,000).
• Simutron countersued for $48 million charging breach of contract and fraud (and claiming that Perceptronics had violated a non-compete agreement by working on NFL Football)

Here's another version of the above photo showing mutliple players playing at once:

 

Atari Tournament Fiasco
http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-atari-50000-centipede-fiasco.html

The Febuary 1, 1982 issue of Play Meter had another very long article on this torunament that revealed a number of additional details. Again, the full details are in the post, but here are new facts I added.

• Tournament Soccer Inc actually sold the other games in the tournament (besides Centipede): Tournament Soccer, Tournament Mark Darts, Tournament Eight Ball, and Tournament Table Hockey. The last three were manufactured by Arachnid, U.S. Billiards, and Sutra.
• Lee Peppard claimst that each of these companies agreed to pay him $20,000 and didn't. At least two of them claim they never promised anything.
• Peppard claims that Atari wrote him a $40,000 purchase order to pay for the decorator. Atari says he refused the order and they told him to rip it up.
• Peppard claims that the original contract called for Atari to pay hi $240,000 but this was reduced to $100,000 when he was forced to renegotiate.
• Atari paid him the $100,000 but Peppard appartenly thought that their final $20,000 payment was actually "confidence money" and that the final payment would come in the form of 184 blank checks for prize money.
• Peppard claim that Atari failed to help him market the tournament kits. He was projected to sell 5,000 at $5 but only sold 600.
• An unapproved (by Atari) ad gave them impression that they were cosponsoring the entire event (rather than just the video game portion). Here is the ad:

 

Finally, here are a few other interesting photos I came across in Play Meter:

First is one from the August 15, 1981 issue. It doesn't name the programmer but surely that's Dona Bailey working on Centipede (look at the screen shot). I don't know if I've seen a photo of her before.

Speaking of the Simutron Tournament Center, here's a similar idea from the Starcade arcade in Disneyland's Tomorrowland. I don't know when the photo was taken (the arcade was there when Tomorrowland opened in 1977). One interesting fact in the article from which this was taken is that the first video game at Disneyland was Atari's  Indy 800.

A photo of Exidy's Vertigo. I've seen this one before but don't remember where.

Lastly. Here are some more photos of games that either are not in TAFA/Arcade History or that are listed but don't have cabinet photos

From SamyRa

From New Technology Computer Inventions It appears that this was not a game but rather a cabinet with 30 existing games



PGD's Progressive Music Trivia

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 11

February 15, 2013, 7:59 pm

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With World SeriesCinematronics had finally found a winner and was seemingly (yet again) on the road to financial recovery. Yet again, it was not to be so.  In May of 1986 Cinematronics released another sports game as a follow-up to World Series. The idea had come not from the designers but from a company sales rep.

[Dana Christianson] …we had a meeting at Jim Pierce's house to talk about what kind of games we were going to do in the future…the thing that a lot of us wanted to do was a skateboarding game…and I remember sitting in a meeting with a sales guy - sitting in JP's office and he said "You know, I don't think u guys have your finger on the pulse of what the player's want"

Instead of skateboarding, the sale rep wanted them to do a video version of that hippest of sports - bowling.  Like World Series, Alley Master allowed the player to store their stats from game to game.

[David Dentt] - Alley master….[was at one time] called Up your Alley. A name I came up with. I liked the multiple interpretations of it. The game also had the data chips that World Series had. When we took the early version of this game to the Chicago show, we had a special chip we could stick in the slot during attract mode, and it would make the sounds of a turkey gobble

Cinematronics executive Ken Anderson and engineer Alex McKay (creator of the Cinemat system) in front of Alley Master (courtesy Play Meter)

The gobble sound made it into the final version of the game when the player scores three consecutive strikes (known as a "turkey" in bowling parlance). While the game did appear briefly on Replay's popularity charts it only peaked at #20 - a far cry from the success of World Series

 

            Danger Zone fared a bit better. A shooting game in which the player manned a gun to defend a desert base from incoming missiles, helicopters, fighters, and other enemies the game feature a cabinet in which the entire top half swiveled with the screen scrolling in response.

[Dan Viescas] . Jim Pierce wanted a shooting game were the player could move the gun like you would in a gun ship. Jim came to me and asked me to design the cabinet so I did. It won Video Game Cabinet design of the year in Replay magazine.

As with World Series, Danger Zone was an "all-hands-on-deck" effort with most of the programmers, engineers, and artists pitching in. Thegame just barely made it into Replay's top ten, though it did top the new game charts twice, indicating that it probably wasn't widely distributed. The game did appear in an exhibit at the Smithsonian.

Contrary to what the caption says, Bob Loney was the designer of Danger Zone. I don't think he was ever a member of the USNVGT.

            Redline Racer continued Cinematronics string of sports games. A multi-player racing game with 16 different tracks, the game never really caught fire in the arcades. More significantly it served as the basis for a later car racing hit - Ivan Stewart's Super Off-road. Leading the design effort was newcomer John Morgan, who'd arrived at Cinematronics after working at Taito America, where he'd designed Zookeeper. Morgan reportedly had an ego but also the ability to back it up. He drew some resentment by finagling a then outrageous (at least for Cinematronics) $40,000 salary. Morgan would go on to design the company's Cinemat II system.

            One game that may never have made it into full production was  Info-Mania/Reflex - an attempt to enter the countertop game market.

[David Dentt] …at some point it was decided that we should do a bar top trivia game. So we came up with Info-Mania. When we were ready to go with it, someone in the Ivory Tower decided it should be a two-in-one game. So in a week I did a second game that was called Reflex. You pressed the buttons to match the ones indicated on the screen.

The idea for a trivia game had come from the same sales rep that suggested a bowling game.

[Dana Christianson]  He was some guy that you'd picture in some dive bar with red naugahyde booths, smoking cigarettes…he had a view of the operators of what he thought he could sell but he tot did not und the players…that was at the time when You Don't Know Jack was popular - he thought "Yeah, I can do that"...he may have come from selling horoscope and love meters at bars.

During the Cinemat years the design process had evolved somewhat from the days when a single programmer handled all the tasks. Teams generally included two programmers and two artists. Most of the programmers and designers loved their work..

[Phil Sorger] If you like working on really hard problems around the clock with brilliant people, you would have loved the work environment…We built a new game every 3 months or so. Seems incredible to me now, considering some games I've worked on have taken closer to 3 years…Needless to say, there was incredible freedom to innovate and create games that people would love to play, that would make lots of money.
There was almost an adversarial environment between teams, it was typical to have someone try to hack your account or game or terminal in some unexpected way, so it was a combination of defensive and retaliatory programming, in addition to the game development itself.

Working for a company in constant Chapter 11 had its challenges.

[Phil Sorger] Even with all the innovation, we still worked in a factory-like atmosphere. After writing code, it would not be uncommon for us to go "down on the floor" and help assemble the cabinets, stuff EPROMs (takes practice), align monitors, validate controls, wrench monitors, and box and band machine after machine. I liked doing that, knowing the machine would work when powered up, appreciating the liminal time between projects, working with the rest of the company (literally) who sometimes resented our crazy work hours and behavior.

In 1987, Cinematronics Chapter 11 issues would finally be solved, though not perhaps in a way that anyone expected. On March 30th, Cinematronics was purchased by Tradewest. Tradewest was headed Leland Cook (a Texas millionaire whose ever-present cowboy hat never failed to charm Japanese video game executives). Cook had gotten into the coin-op business in 1974 when he bought Cranford Vending and renamed it Master Vend. He later added a music and games route and, in 1982, an amusement sales division. The following year, Master Vend entered the distributing business. Master Vend started out distributing Konami and Interlogic games and soon became the biggest kit distributor in the state. Not bad for a company headquartered in Corsicana - a rural town of 25,000 best known for its fruitcake. Cook (along with his son Byron) did it by getting into conversion kits at a time when most distributors were reluctant to do so (making money on dedicated units was especially difficult for rural operators) Other lines carried by Master Vend included Capcom, Arachnid (electronic darts), Dynamo, and Romstar. Master Vend was the exclusive Texas distributor for Romstar and the relationship led to the formation of a new company. In February of 1986 Byron and Leland Cook, along with John Rowe of Romstar formed a manufacturing company in Corsicana called Tradewest. Tradewest's first offering was Alpha Mission, a kit licensed from Japan's SNK (Rowe had a relationship with SNK president E. Kawasaki). It was the next game, however, that put Tradewest on the coin-op video game map. In February of 1986, SNK sent Tradewest some boards for a new game called Ikari Warriorsfor testing. Tradewest agreed to license the game and John Rowe went to Japan for five days of negotiations. In the end, Tradewest decided to manufacture an upright version of the game (Dynamo actually built the games) and ended up with a #1 hit. The follow-up, Victory Road, was almost as successful.

Ken Anderson, Jim Pierce, Leland Cook, and John Rowe sealing the Tradewest deal

Tradewest also had a relationship with Cinematronics (a relationship that had reportedly started when Leland Cook got a look at World Series) - having licensed Redline Racerin late 1986. At the ACME show in New Orleans in March of 1987, Leland Cook approached Jim Pierce about the possibility of purchasing Cinematronics and making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Tradewest. Reports that other companies were going to try to outbid Cook proved false and on March 30th the deal was struck and in just 45 minutes, Cinematronics - a company that had been part of coin-op history since 1975 was no more. Cinematronics became a subsidiary of Tradewest and was renamed The Leland Corporation (they originally wanted to call it Westron but the name was in use). After almost 4 1/2 years in Chapter 11, Cinematronics was finally out of bankruptcy. There were not, however,  out of hot water. Tradewest now had to deal with large lawsuits filed by Pioneer and ESR (in addition to creditors wanting to get paid). In addition they had to deal with Major League Baseball, who had contested Cinematronics' use of the phrase "World Series" in a video game. In response, Tradewest changed the name of the game from World Series: The Season to Baseball: The Season II (they made some minor changes, including adding errors and control of fielders and runners - though some sources seem to incidate that they renamed the game Baseball: The Season and that Baseball: The Season II was a different game).

Jim Pierce (along with Ken Anderson) stayed on during a transition period. John Rowe took over the day-to-day operations at Leland (Leland and Byron Cook remained in Corsicana) but the design staff remained basically the same. Among the games released by Leland were Quarterback (perhaps the first game with "micro transactions" that allowed a player to buy items and power-ups in exchange for quarters) Ivan Stewart's Super Off-road (an off-road racing game that had started out at a dune buggy game until a group of Leland's designers and artists encountered Ivan Stewart in a sushi restaurant), and Pig Out (one of Leland's only non-sports game - an idea from an accounting department employee who suggested doing a game based on the three little pigs).

Leland lasted into the 90s before being sold to WMS in 1994. Many of the designers went on to form Blue Sky Software. Others went into different fields completely. Byron Cook is currently a Texas state legislator. And Jim Pierce? He disappeared into the mists of video game history. Rumor has it he retired to the Pacific Northwest but if so, he hasn't been heard from since.

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam - Pt. 12

February 19, 2013, 8:44 pm

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Cinematronics/Vectorbeam/Leland Errata

This is the final part of history of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam.
No narrative in this one, just some statistics/lists:

1.    A list of all known Cinematronics/Vectorbeam/Leland games, released or unreleased
2.    A summary of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam game performance on the Replay, Play Meter, and Electronic Games popularity charts
3.    A complete list of known Cinematronics/Vectorbeam/Leland designers/programmers/artists/engineers etc., along with the games they worked on.

I hope everyone has enjoyed the series or articles. I know I enjoyed putting it together but not everyone is likely to be as interested in the company as me.

There's still so much more information I wish I had and the story is still very incomplete (maybe one day I'll track down Jim Pierce, if he's still around).

Feedback/additions/corrections are much appreciated.

And for those of you who are sick and tired of Cinematronics, I will be moving on to a new topic with my next post (I plan on doing a three part series on 3 major gaming events of the 1983 that were a direct result of the Life magazine cover).

CINEMATRONICS/VECTORBEAM/LELAND GAMES

Below is a list of all Cinematronics/Vectorbeam/Leland games by year of release.

The number in parenthesis before the game indicates approximate month of release (often the month its release was announced in trade magazines).
A number with a d indicates a debut month (i.e. the month the game appeared at a trade show, which was often a few months before its release)
V = vector game, LD = laserdisc game

1975
Video Amusement Game Table

1976?
Flipper Ball

1977
(4) Embargo

1978
(2, d 10/77) Space Wars [V]
(10) Space War (Vectorbeam) [V]
(11) Scramble (Vectorbeam) [V]

1979

(3, d1) Starhawk [V]
(3) Speedfreak (Vectorbeam) [V]
(8) Barrier (Vectorbeam) [V]
(10) Sundance [V]
(10) Warrior [V]
(12, d11) Tailgunner [V]

1980

(4) Rip Off [V]
(11) Star Castle [V]

1981

(6) Armor Attack [V]
(11) Solar Quest [V]

1982

(s3) War of the Worlds [V]
(4) Boxing Bugs [V]
(4) Jack the Giant Killer (lic Hara Industries)
(6) Naughty Boy (lic Jaleco)
(d11) Zzyzzyxx/Brix (dev Advanced Microcomputer Systems)

1983
(5) Cosmic Chasm [V] (lic GCE)
(7) Dragon’s Lair (dev Advanced Microcomputer Systems) [LD]

1984

(2) Scion (lic Seibu Denshi)
(3) Space Ace [LD]
(10) Freeze
Express Delivery

1985
(5) Mayhem 2002
(9) Power Play
(10) World Series: The Season
Cerberus

1986
(5) Alley Master/Up Your Alley
(12) Danger Zone
(12) Redline Racer

1987
(6) Baseball: The Season II (Leland) (note - same game as World Series: The Season)
(7) Quarterback (Leland)
Super Baseball Double Play Home Run Derby (Leland)

1988
(2) Strike Zone Baseball (Leland)
John Elway's Team Quarterback (Leland)
All American Football (Leland)

1989
(4) Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road (Leland)

1990
(6) World Soccer Finals (Leland)
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine (Leland)

1991
(5) Attax (Leland)
Brute Force (Leland)
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat (Leland)

Unreleased Games
Oops(Vectorbeam) [V]
Clown Skeet (ca 1981)
Outpost (ca 1980-1982)
Cutter (ca 1982)
Intrepid (ca 1982)
<<unknown torpedo boat game>> (ca 1982)
<<unknown "self-generating maze" game>> (ca 1982)
Hovercraft (ca 1983)
Striker (ca 1986)
Side Gunner (ca 1987) - a retrofit for Danger Zone, it was mentioned in the April, 1987 Replay as an upcoming release
Viper (ca 1988) - released?
Asylum (ca 1991)

Others
(1980) Armor Attack - licensed to Rock-Ola for European release
(1980) Tailgunner 2 - released by "Exidy II" after Exidy bought Vectorbeam
(1980) Star Castle - licensed to Rock-Ola for European release
(7/1982) Rip Off Cocktail - licensed to Centuri


CINEMATRONICS/VECTORBEAM CHART SUMMARY

This section lists all games that appeared on the Replay, Play Meter, and Electronic Games popularity charts.
I don't want to go into the details of each chart here (I may do a separate post with a full summary of each chart. If so, I will give details there) but Replay and Play Meter charts were basically based on game earnings. Electronic Games used a readers poll.

Replay (through 12/87)

Replay charts were based on operator earnings.
The monthly charts started in April, 1980. From 1976-1979 they did a chart at the end of each year.They also did a chart in April of 1976.
I only have the charts through December of 1987. Some games were still on the charts at that point. I also don't include Leland games.
I am missing charts from around 6 issues but I believe that these issues did not include charts.

Game - Peak Position (times at #1) - Times Charted - First:Last Appearance (timespan in months between the two)

Alley Master - 20 - 2 - 12/86:2/87 (2)
Armor Attack - 10 - 3  - 7/81:10/81 (3)
Baseball: The Season II - 14 - 5 - 8/87-12/87 (3)
Danger Zone - 10 - 2- 6/87:9/87 (3)
Dragon's Lair - 1(3) - 13- 9/83:3/85 (18)
Power Play - 22 - 1 - 1/86
Rip Off - 4 - 7 - 6/80:2/81 (8)
Space Ace - 11 - 3 - 5/84:11/84 (6)
Space Wars - 1(1) - 7 - 11/78:10/80 (23)
Star Castle - 4 - 10 - 12/80:10/81 (10)
Starhawk - 5 - 7 - 11/79:12/80 (13)
Tailgunner - 7 - 8 - 4/80-2/81 (10)
World Series: The Season - 2 - 18 - 1/86:12/87 (23)

The following games did not appear on the main charts but did appear on the New Games charts (peak position on New Games charts in parenthesis):

Cosmic Chasm (2)
Mayhem 2002 (3)

Play Meter (incomplete)
Play Meter's monthly charts started in June of 1979.  In 1977 and 1978 they did a year-end chart.
Play Meter charts were also based on earnings but were more complicated since they had up to six separate charts at one time: Arcade dedicated games (AD), Street location dedicated games (SD), Arcade conversion kits (AC), Street location conversion kits (SC), Arcade laserdisc games (ALD), Street location laserdisc games (SLD)
They also had a period where they just had Arcade (A) and Street Location (S) charts.
Play Meter also came out twice a month instead of once a month for most of the early 1980s.
Once again, I only have the issues through December of 1987. I am missing the 1985 issues from March until about August and a few other issues.

For a brief period, the Play Meter charts included average weekly earnings for each game. Note that the figures below are average earnings only for the time the games appeared on the charts (i.e. during its peak popularity)

For first/last appearance I show the game's first and last appearance on any chart. For peak position, I list its peak on the chart(s) on which it had the highest peak.

Game - Peak Position (times at #1) - Times Charted - First:Last Appearance (timespan in months between the two)  - Average Weekly Earnings (Peak weekly earnings)

Alley Master - 26 - 1 - 11/15/86
Armor Attack  - 4 - 5 - 8/15/81:11/1/81 (3) - $184 ($197)
Dragon's Lair - A: 1(10), S: 1(5) - 39 - 9/15/83:3/15/86 (30)
Rip Off - 5 - 5 - 8/80:12/80 (4)
Space Ace -  A: 1(2) - 9 - 5/1/84:2/15/85 (10)
Space Wars - 1(1) - 13 - 11/78:7/80 (20)
Speedfreak - 15 - 1 - 6/79
Star Castle - 5 - 4 - 1/81:6/15/81 (5)
Starhawk - 5 - 6 - 6/79:1/80 (7)
Tailgunner - 4 - 6 - 4/80:8/80 (4)
World Series: The Season - 4 - 7 - 3/15/86:11/15/86 (8)

In addition, Play Meter had a "Provisional" chart for games that didn't have a high enough response rate to make the main charts (i.e. they weren't in many locations).  Two games made the provisional charts that didn't make the main charts.
Note that due to the low response rate, the earnings figures for these games are generally higher than those on the main chart.
Also notethat this chart generally only had 3-10 games on it.

Naughty Boy- S: 1(1) - 6 - 9/1/82:2/1/83 (5) - $217 ($260)
Solar Quest - 3 - 4 - 1/1/82:3/1/82 (2) - $193 ($250)

Electronic Games

Electronic Games charts were based on reader surveys.
Game - Peak - Times charted

Dragon's Lair - 1 (3) - 4
Space Ace - 5 - 2

CINEMATRONICS/VECTORBEAM/LELAND DESIGN CREDITS

Scott Benefiel
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Cabinet Art

Don Bluth

Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Animator
Space Ace – 1984 – Animator

Scott Boden

Star Castle –1980 – Programmer
Solar Quest – 1981 – Programmer
Clown Skeet –Unreleased
Outpost – Unreleased

Rick Bryant

Tailgunner – 1979 - Cabinet Art
Star Castle – 1980 – Cabinet Art
Armor Attack –  1981 – Cabinet Art
War of the Worlds –  1981 – Cabinet Art

Tom Carroll
Artist

Dave Cartt
?Cerberus - 1985 - Sound
?Danger Zone - 1986 - Sound
Quarterback - 1987 - Sound

Dana Christianson
Mayhem 2002 - 1985 - Art/Graphics
World Series: The Season - 1985 - Art/Graphics
Baseball: The Season II - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Danger Zone - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Strike Zone Baseball - 1988 - Lead Artist
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Art/Graphics
Asylum - Unreleased - Art/Graphics

David Dentt
Cosmic Chasm - 1983
Freeze - 1984
Cerberus - 1985 - Programmer
World Series: The Season - 1985 - Programmer
Mayhem 2002 - 1985 - Lead Programmer
Alley Master - 1986 - Lead Programmer
Danger Zone - 1986 - Programmer
Infomania/Reflex - Unrleased? - Programmer

Dave Dodd
All American Football - 1989 - Direction

Rick Dyer
Zzyzzyxx/Brix - 1982
Dragon's Lair - 1983 - Designer
Space Ace –  1984 – Designer

Mike Enright
Quarterback - 1987 - Sound
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Sound

George Fiock
Danny Sulivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Hardware

Cris Fitch
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Programmer

Keith Gabryelski
Quarterback - 1987 - Programmer

Gary Goldman
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Animator

Helene Gomez

Programmer

Mike Gomez

Cosmic Chasm – 1983

Ellis Goodson
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Additional Help

Bob Hale
hardware system -  ca 1979

Dennis Halverson

hardware system -  ca 1979

Eric Henderson
Quarterback - 1987 - Hardware
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Hardware
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Hardware
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Hardware
Brute Force - 1991 - Hardware
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Hardware

Mike Hendricks
Programmer

Steve High
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Graphics
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Graphics, Programmer

Steve Hostetler
Cerberus - 1985 - Programmer
Alley Master/Up Your Alley - 1986 - Programmer
?Danger Zone - 1986 - Programmer
Quarterback - 1987 - Programmer
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Programmer

Jerry Huber
Power Play - 1985 - Art/Graphics
World Series: The Season - 1985 - Art/Graphics
Alley Master/Up Your Alley - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Baseball: The Season II - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Danger Zone - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Redline Racer - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Quarterback - 1987 - Art/Graphics
Super Baseball Double Play Home Run Derby - 1987 - Art/Graphics
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Art/Graphics
Strike Zone Baseball - 1988 - Art/Graphics
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Art/Graphics
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Art/Graphics

Ken Hull

Cerberus - 1985
Mayhem 2002 - 1985
Danger Zone - 1986

Brooke Jarrett
Cosmic Chasm –  1983

Hwan Kim
Brute Force - 1991 - Programmer

Joe Kosic
PigOut: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Programmer
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Diagnostics

Vera Lanpher
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Voice Acting

Bob Loney
Mayhem 2002 - 1985
Danger Zone - 1986 - Lead Programmer

Kevin Lydy
Redline Racer - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Quarterback - 1987 - Art/Graphics
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Art/Graphics
All American Football - 1989 - Art/Graphics
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Art/Graphics
Brute Force - 1991 - Designer, Graphics

Mike Marsh
Quarterback - 1987 - Sound

Alex McKay
Cerberus - 1985 - Hardware
Mayhem 2002 - 1985 - Hardware
Power Play - 1985 - Hardware
Danger Zone - 1986 - Hardware
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - Hardware
Brute Force - 1991 - Hardware
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Hardware

Medo Moreno
World Series: The Season - 1985 - Lead Programmer
Alley Master - 1986 - Support Programming
Baseball: The Season II - 1986 - Lead Programmer
Danger Zone - 1986 - Support Programming
Quarterback - 1987 - Support Programming
Super Baseball Double Play Home Run Derby - 1987 - Lead Programmer
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Direction
Strike Zone Baseball - 1988 - Lead Programmer
All American Football - 1989 - Direction
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Direction
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Direction
Brute Force - 1991 - Executive Producer
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Manager

Dan Molina
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Voice Acting

Bruce Moore
Brute Force - 1991 - Additional Software
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - Additional Help

John Morgan
Redline Racer - 1986 - Programmer
Quarterback - 1987 - Programmer
John Elway 's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Programmer
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Designer, Programmer
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Designer, Programmer

Lou Newell
Engineer  - may have worked on the 1975 Pong game and/or Flipper Ball

Sean O'Donohue
Dragon's Lair -  1983

Patton, Rob

Barrier –  1979 – Programer
War of the Worlds –  1981 – Programmer
Cutter -  Unreleased

Victor Penman

Dragon’s Lair –  1983 – Story and Design

John Pomeroy
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Animator

Sam Powell
Quarterback - 1987 - Music
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Music
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Music
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Music
Brute Force - 1991 - Music, Soundware
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Music

Jack Ritter

Boxing Bugs – 1983 – Designer
Hovercraft – Unreleased

Larry Rosenthal
Space Wars –  1977 – Designer
Scramble –  1978
Speed Freak – 1979
Tailgunner –  1979
Oops! – Unreleased

John Rowe
Quarterback - 1987 - Director
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Director
All American Football - 1988 - Direction
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Direction
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Direction
Brute Force - 1991 - Direction
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Concept

Michael Rye
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Voice Acting

Dennis Sable
Quarterback - 1987 - Hardware
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Hardware
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Hardware

Dave Scott
cabinet design
Quarterback - 1987 - Hardware
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Hardware
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Hardware
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Cabinet Design
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Additional Help

Scott Sexton
<<unreleased torpedo boat game>>

Robert Shaver

Embargo - 1977

Michelle Simon
All American Football - 1989 - Sound
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - Sound
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - Sound Software
Brute Force - 1991 - Soundware
Dann Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Sound

Tim Skelly
Rip Off –  1979 – Designer, Programmer
Starhawk –  1979 – Designer, Programmer
Sundance –  1979 – Designer, Programmer
Warrior –  1979 – Programmer
Star Castle – 1980 – Producer
Armor Attack –  1981 – Designer, Programmer
War of the Worlds – 1981 – Art
Clown Skeet – Unreleased

Bob Skinner
Cosmic Chasm – 1983 - Programmer
Dragon's Lair - 1983 - Auxiliary Programming
Express Delivery - 1984
Freeze - 1984 - Programmer
Cerberus - 1985 - Programmer
Mayhem 2002 - 1985 - Programmer
Power Play - 1985 - Programmer
Danger Zone - 1986 - Programmer
Quarterback - 1987 - Programmer
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Programmer
All American Football - 1989 - Programmer
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Programmer
Brute Force - 1991 - Designer
Intrepid- Unreleased  - Designer, Programmer
Striker - Unreleased - Programmer

Phil Sorger
Mayhem 2002 - 1985 - Programmer
Power Play - 1985 - Programmer
Danger Zone - 1986 - Programmer
Quarterback - 1987 - Programmer
John Elway's Team Quarterback - 1988 - Programmer
All American Football - 1989 - Programmer
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Programmer
Brute Force - 1991 - Programmer
Striker - Unreleased - Programmer
Viper - Unreleased? - Programmer

Chris Stone
Dragon’s Lair – 1983 – Music

Earl Stratton
Boxing Bugs - 1982
Dragon's Lair - 1983 - Auxiliary Programming
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 -- Programmer
Brute Force - 1991 - Additional Software
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Additional Help
Hovercraft – Unreleased

Dave Sullivan
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Graphics, Programmer

Dan Sunday
Scramble –  978 – Programmer

Speed Freak – 1979
Tailgunner – Vectorbeam – 1979 – Programmer

Hartono Tjitro
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Programmer

Dan Viescas
Freeze - 1984 - Art/Graphics
Cerberus - 1985 - Art/Graphics
World Series: The Season - 1985 - Art/Graphics
Alley Master/Up Your Alley - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Baseball: The Season II - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Danger Zone - 1986 - Art/Graphics
Super Baseball Double Play Home Run Derby - 1987 - Art Director
Strike Zone Baseball - 1988 - Art Director
All American Football - 1989 - Art Director
Ivan Stewart Super Off-Road - 1989 - Art Director
Pig Out: Dine Like a Swine - 1990 - Art Director
Brute Force - 1991 - Executive Producer
Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat - 1991 - Manager

Dok Whitson
Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road - 1989 - Graphics

 

Odd Coin-ops From 1987 - Plus Odds and Ends

February 23, 2013, 10:52 pm

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I recently looked through Replay's 1987 Machine Catalog - 66 pages of all manner of devices for sale to the coin-op amusement industry.
The variety of games was surprising - or maybe not so surprising since operators were looking for anything that might make money in the wake of the crash (cranes, for instance, took up 8 pages).

A few of the odder items:

Pizza Time Theate wasn't the only place offering animated mannequins.

Here are a couple of others:

The next one might seem boring (OK, it IS boring) but it does illustrate a litte-known fact.
The breakup of AT&T went into effect on January 1, 1984. One of the results of the breakup was that other companies began making private pay phones. After the video game crash, many operators actually turned to pay phones as an alternatative.
Here is just one of a number of them offered in the 1987 Machine Catalog:

Along similar lines, but probably a bit more interesting were condom dispensers. Oddly, the trade mags seemed to have no compuctions about advertising them (in earlier years, for example, they refused to mention gambling machines).
This oddball combines a condom vender with a love tester.

I assure you that it's only coincindence that I put tis one right after the Sex Tester. Did UBI have a warped sense of humor or were they just unaware of the meaning of the term "bimbo"?

Arm wrestling machines were nothing new in the coin-op biz, but they uusually involved one player against either a video opponent (as in Nintendo's Arm Wrestling) or a mechanical one.
Here's one that pitted two human opponents against one another:

This one gets my vote for weirdest of the bunch. I'm not sure exactly how it works but I don't think it used video or laserdisc footage.
Has anyone out there ever seeen (or played) one in the wild.

A few un-TAFA'd games (Face to Face is on TAFA but they don't have a photo of an actual machine):

Face to Face from SMS Manufacturing

Finally a few photos that I found interesting.

This may have been one of the largest arcades of the 1980s- 270' x 180' with over 1,000 games.
It as located at Cedar Point, the amusement park near Sandusky, OH

As a preview of my upcoming series on tournaments, here is a photo from the the New York Regionals of Atari's 1980 Space Invaders Championship. This wasn't a coin-op tournament. It was on the Atar 2600 version of the game. Over 10,000 competed in the five regionals with one winner from each region competing in the finals in New York. The winner was Bill Heieman (who later had gender reassignment surgery, became Rebecca Heineman and co-founded Interplay).

And for those who missed it, I added some photos of designers to my Cinematronics series.

Here are Kevin Lydy, Phil Sorger, Bob Skinner, and John Rowe (at least I think so, Replay and Play Meter often mislabeled photos of designers):

And here's Medo Moreno:

That's Incredible - The North American Video Game Olympics

February 26, 2013, 7:03 pm

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Today's post is the first of three on a trio of events that followed in the wake of the famous Life magazine photo shoot in November of 1982 (if you're reading this blog, I suspect you know about that one). One of the events is very well known.
The other two aren't but, in my opinion, make for far more interesting stories.

     The one you no doubt all remember is the 1983 North American Video Game Olympics  - considered by many the first national video game championship.Everybody remembers the finals on That's Incredible. The image of Ben Gold crossing the finish line isn't quite as iconic as the Life photo, but it isn't too far behind.

     Not nearly as many, however, remember the qualifying event and even fewer probably remember that the even was not the first video game tournament shown on That's Incredible. But anyway, on with the article...

That's IncredibleMs. Pac-Man Tournament

            That's Incredible was an ABC reality television show in the tradition of Ripley's Believe It or Not and NBC's Real Peoplethat aired from 1980 to 1984. Most video game fans remember the video game competition that aired on the show in February of 1983 (see below) but few remember the Ms. Pac-Manchampionship that aired the year before. Sponsored by Six Flags amusement parks, qualifying rounds were held at six Six Flags locations around the nation in the summer of 1982. Thousands competed in the tournament with finalists from each of the six regions (at the Southeast Regional in Georgia in June, there were 44 finalists) receiving $500 and a four-day trip for two to Los Angeles to compete in the televised finals, which aired on October 11th. Tim Collum of Boyd, Texas (who had won the Texas Video Game Championship in June) won the competition with a score of 123,000.



Tim Collum, winner of the That's Incredible Ms. Pac-Man tournament Seen here winning the Texas Video Game Championship in June of 1982 One of the great unknown players from the 1980s, Collum was named video game player of the year for 1983

The North American Video Game Olympics/That's Incredible Invitational

 

 

Perhaps the most famous video game competition of the golden age came in the  January 1983 "North American Video Game Olympics" -  a contest that many consider the world's first national video game championship. Once again, That's Incredible was the driving force, though the main competition took place in Ottumwa. While they hadn't been credited, Walter Day and Twin Galaxies had been involved in the That's Incredible Ms. Pac-Man tournament, providing advice on how to run the competition. When the show proved to be a hit, producer Alan Landsburg decided to do another show related to video games and director Todd Simon made another call to Day looking for ideas. As he had with Life, Day suggested bringing top players to Twin Galaxies, this time for a five-game video game "pentathlon". Simon was skeptical but when he arrived in Ottumwa to scout the location, the just-released year-in-review issue of Life magazine and all doubt vanished (some sources claim that the competition was actually announced in the Life issue). The competition was scheduled for January 8-9, 1983 and Twin Galaxies was paid $1,100 for expenses. Excited by the prospect of their national television debut, the citizens of Ottumwa chipped in. The local Radio Shack supplied a Model III computer and a technician to help create a computerized scoring system (sadly, calls for a  marching band went unanswered). Volunteer referees came from as far away as South Carolina and Maryland.  The documentary crew from the Life shoot was on hand.



The opening parade



            Day invited 21 of the top players to compete in the event. Only two failed to participate, including Billy Mitchell.  Mitchell wanted to attend but after the expense of the Life magazine trip he decided that he didn't want to spend any more money or take any more days off from school. With the temperature dipping below freezing, the festivities kicked off in Ottumwa on Saturday, January 8th with a torch-lighting ceremony and a parade down Main Street. Heading the pack was a player dressed in a Pac-Man uniform that had been donated by Bally/Midway. In place of the band there were pickup trucks with boom boxes (plans to have a convoy of dump trucks fell through). After the festivities (including, some say, a call from Ronald Regan) and parade, the main event got underway (after, that is, Day chased a gaggle of groupies out of the arcade).  Players competed on five games: Super Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Jr., Millipede, Joust, and Frogger. Each player would play three games on each machine with their highest score being recorded.  The top scorer on each game was given a 100 percent rating with the others given a score based on the percent of the top score (i.e. if the top score was 50,000, a score of 10,000 would be given a score of 20%). The final score for each player was calculated by averaging the percentage scores achieved on each game. 19-year-old Todd Walker of Milpitas, CA was the odds-on favorite. Considered the best all-around player in the world, Walker took a unique approach to video games. He found that it was easy for him to get good enough to beat 99.9% of the players in any given game. Getting good enough to beat the handful that remains, however, would take longer than it did to beat the first 99.9%. Instead, Walker preferred to move on to another game at that point. In Ottumwa, Walker  didn't disappoint He crushed the competition with a winning score of 69.58% - almost 23% ahead of second place. The top three finishers - Walker, Darren Olsen of Calgary, and Ben Gold of Dallas would be compete in the finals on That's Incredible. Joe Malasarte of Anchorage finished fourth, less than one percentage point behind Gold. Eric Ginner, winner of the 1981 Centipede fiasco, finished fifth - largely due to a bug in Frogger. The game had a "kill screen" that appeared randomly, making it impossible to finish the game. Ginner got the kill screen after scoring just 15,000 points. Steve Sanders, author of The Video Masters Guide to Donkey Kong, finished 6th.  Ms. Pac-Man champion Tim Collum finished ninth.  Finishing dead last, with a paltry 12.9% was none other than Steve Juraszek, the original video game superstar (though his critics were not surprised).



The players arrive. I believe that's Steve Sanders in the jacket.



Drawing for position

 

Final Standings

 

1.    Todd Walker (Milpitas, CA) - 69.58%

2.    Daren Olsen (Calgary) - 46.85%

3.    Ben Gold (Dallas) - 46.17%

4.    Joe Malasarte (Anchorage) - 45.32%

5.    Eric Ginner (Mountain View, CA) - 42.12%

6.    Steve Sanders (Clinton, MO) - 36.97%

7.    Steve Harris (Gladstone, MO) - 36.91%

8.    Lee Whitney (Las Vegas) - 36.87%

9.    Tim Collum (Boyd, TX) - 35.58%

10.Jeff Stueve (Dayton, OH) - 30.66%

11.Matt Brass (Helena, MT) - 29.59%

12.Mike Lepkosky (Spring, TX) - 27.92%

13.Antonio Medina (Napa, CA) - 26.21%

14.Landon Rothstein (Happauge, NY) - 25.49%

15.Tim Foland (Spring, TX) - 21.16%

16.Joe Louks (Moncks Corner, SC) - 20.16%

17.Mark Sellers (Grand Rapids, MI) - 18.87%

18.James Marino (Happague, NY) - 13.15%

19.Steve Juraszek (Mt. Prospect, IL) - 12.95%

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            The finals, which aired on February 21st, were more of a sprint than a distance race. Players had to achieve certain scores on five different games in turn: Cosmos (50,000 points), Burgertime (8,000), Millipede (90,000), Donkey Kong Jr. (30,000), and Buck Rogers (20,000). After the whistle blew, the players ran to the first game. When they reached the target score, they could move on to the next. While Walker was considered the best player, Gold took the early lead - within minutes he was 20,000 points ahead of Walker on Cosmos. Walker lost more precious time when he peppered in the wrong direction on Burgertime. Olsen briefly pulled ahead on Millipede before Gold climbed back to the top. The commentary by hosts Cathy Lee Crosby, Fran Tarkenton, and John Davidson, was unintentionally hilarious: "He piles on the pepper and sends down a bun covered with hot dogs and an egg!" "Junior caught papa and papa kicks the evil Mario temporarily out of the picture!" "Ben, the leader, just lost a life to a millipede head!"

 

 

Olsen and Gold finished the penultimate game practically simultaneously and headed for Buck Rogers neck and neck. Olsen quickly took the lead but Gold quickly caught up and was first to the 20,000 mark. He then madly sprinted the 30 feet to the "finish line" pursued by - no one, since Walker and Olsen were still blasting away. Gold, arms raised in triumph, breasted the tape, followed by Walker (who had miraculously managed to catch up) and Olsen. The three collected medals, and kisses, from Crosby (who almost gave the gold to Olsen). The event was perhaps the high water mark of video game popularity in the U.S. The low point would come shortly thereafter.

 

Much of the information in this article came from Walter Day's outstanding Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records - 1st Edition. Many of you may have skipped this one thinking it's nothign but records, but pick up a copy if you can find one.
Note - That's the FIRST edition, not the 2nd of 3rd.
The first edition had a wonderful 200+ page section on "the golden age of video games" in which Day recounts many of the stories associated with Twin Galaxies. The 2nd edition did not include this section (can't speak as to the third).

OK, this article probably didn't tell you anything you didn't already know but I think the next one will - the fascinating and tragic story of the Electronic Circus.

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The Electronic Circus

March 1, 2013, 8:57 pm

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In an earlier post, I talked about the disastrous 1981 Atari $50,000 World Championships. Today's post is about an event that may have been even a greater disaster - the Electronic Circus. In terms of total attendance, the even wasn't nearly as bad as the Atari fiasco. In terms of unrealized potential and unfilfilled dreams, however, it may have been worse.

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Jim Riley and Walter Day - note the dates on the poster

            Fresh on the heels of the national television success, Bostonian Jim Riley announced the Electronic Circus. As Walter Day recalls it, Riley (then with a company called Meeting Planners) contacted him in February of 1983 (Wikipedia says it was March). After having seen the That's Incredible segment, he'd stayed up all night thinking of a new idea - a travelling "circus" of video games with Day as the ringmaster and top players as the performers. According to an article in Video Gamesmagazine, the circus would feature live music, amusement rides, "a Disney-World-type section featuring a Captain Kidd show and more. The centerpiece would consist of three main events. The first would be the "World's Largest Video Arcade" with 500 games set on free play. Second would be the Video Circus with three rings. One ring would feature the band Video Experience "…who will perform against the high-tech ambience of the arcade… a second ring will feature the antics of favorite video games characters such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. And the third ring would present the Chimpanzee/Pac-Man Challenge, where chimps specially trained in the game will take on humanopponents[1]".  The highlight would be the third event, the "Superstar Pro Tour" in which 30 video game superstars (3 per game) would take on all comers on ten different arcade video games. In March, during Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's visit to Ottumwa, Jim Riley held court in a backroom at Twin Galaxies, filling players' heads with visions of video game grandeur. Riley even promised the players a salary, making them perhaps the first professional video game players in history

 

Riley(?), Governor Branstad(?), and Day at Twin Galaxies

 

[Jim Riley] What we're doing is taking you, the superstars in the video games business, and turning you into professionals, so that you're now playing for cash…We have a show that will generally do about $1 .5 to $2.5 million in gate receipts each weekend, and from this will come the prize money that you'll be playing for. On an average, the number one-ranked player, provided he continues to retain his number one ranking, will earn about $3,000 a week. The second-ranked player will make about $2,000 and the third-ranked player will average about S 1,000. If you stay with the show for the entire 40 weeks of its initial run, you're talking about an annual income for the  number one-ranked player of about $120,000. And, if you add to that the endorsement monies which may result from manufacturers trying to promote their product, as well as other fees, it's not difficult to imagine the potential of earning a rather substantial income

…

This doesn't mean that every week you are competing or have to reach your scores. You only have to do that when you're challenged by somebody. If this happens, they can then issue a challenge and try to knock you out of one of those three top places. If they succeed, then you're out of the show and the other player gets the opportunity to replace you.[2].

This early scheudle for the ElectronicCircus appeared in Video Games magazine

 

Players who set high scores before August 1st would get their achievement recorded in the next edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. Initial plans called for circus to kick off in Boston on June 3rd - 5th before heading on the road for a 40-week, 200-city tour. Riley also hoped that the event would begin to change the negative image that many had of arcades and video games. To that end, the players would have to agree to a strict set of guidelines covering everything from curfew to how to deal with groupies.

[Jim Riley] Hopefully, this show is going to change that and create a total family entertainment image. This is what we want to accomplish. So, when I say that our video game superstars are going to have to be a squeaky clean Brady Bunch I mean it. This is a business and you're going to have people watching you. You may not be as famous as people such as John McEnroe, because it may take us five years to get video gaming as popular as tennis. But we're going to work toward that.

Riley offered Twin Galaxies a 1/4 share of the show's revenue. For Day, it must have seemed like his dreams were finally about to come true. Video gaming was about to hit the big time. Reality had something else in store.

 

Steve Sanders at the Electronic Circus

 

      Riley appointed Steve Sanders as captain of the "U.S. National Video Game Team" and tasked him with scouring the country searching for video game talent. Sanders was chosen not for his accomplishments, but because he fit the image Riley was looking for. Riley teamed up with friend Billy Mitchell to assemble a team of players but they quickly ran into a few problems. At one point,  Mitchell called a player who had reported an obviously phony high score of 11 million on Donkey Kong and offered him $6,000 a week to join the tour, noting that with endorsements, the figure might reach $50,000. The man told Mitchell he couldn't afford the pay cut. When Mitchell asked how much money it would take to convince him to play, the man made an excuse and quickly hung up.

    
     Alarming signs soon began to appear. Once the players had signed their contracts, Riley reneged on his agreement with Twin Galaxies. In June of 1983 Riley, along with Frank Benedetto and Steve Robb, formed Superstar Productions in Boston to produce the event, dubbed the Electronic Circus. Weeks before the event, the backers ran into management problems and brought in a team of business women called Women at Work to get things back on track.

Ad for the Electronic Circus, from the Boston Herald

     In the end the event date was pushed back and the scope was cut, but it still featured rock and gospel bands (according to Steve Sanders Air Supply among them), rides, talking robots, clowns, jugglers, knife throwers, and 515 new and classic video games set on free play arranged in 8 different themed areas (Outer Galaxies, Jungle Safari, Dragon Quest etc.). A slick (and expensive) television, radio and newspaper campaign was launched and Boston mayor  Kevin White kicked off an "Electronic Circus Week" promo. Instead of performing chimps there was Congo the Gorilla from Trading Places taking on, and beating, all comers in Congo Bongo(Congo was, of course, a guy in a monkey suit and the game was actually being controlled from offstage by master player Steve Harris). Center ring was reserved for the video game competition, in which the "Electronic Circus Superstars" (the name "United States National Video Game had been dropped), captained by Sanders would square off against teams of locals challengers assembled by arcade operators in each city for prizes and Guinness world records.

Part of the revised schedule for the Electronic Circus taken from Chasing Ghosts

The superstar competition, however, had been pruned considerably. Instead of the 30 superstars originally planned,  Walter Day invited a team 8 top players (though some sources say there were more). One player who did not participate was That's Incredible champion Ben Gold. During the governor's visit to Ottumwa, Gold had been openly critical of the Electronic Circus. He was doubtful that the tour would last past three months and was concerned that the players would turn against one another in the heat of competition. Gold made his remarks within earshot of the a number of video game magazine writers. Jim Riley was furious. Here he was trying to promote his idea and raise money for the venture and some sixteen year old kid was mouthing off in front of the press. While Riley claimed he excluded Gold from the team because he didn't fit the image he wanted, the real reason was probably that Gold was too outspoken.

Riley had the players flown into Boston for the first stage of the event. When they arrived, he told them they would be making only $200 a week (after the players threatened to form a union, Riley gave in and paid them more and even agreed to pay Twin Galaxies $1,500 a week). The players would still launch a national tour after the opening week, but to 48 cities instead of 200. After what they'd witnessed so far, none of the players believed it would last that long.

The "superstars" endorsing the Wingo-O lottery from the Boston Herald

Disappointed that they would not be making the thousands they'd been promised, the players nonetheless managed to enjoy themselves. They were thrown out of the Boston Colonnade hotel for chucking M-80s out the window. They managed to get stuck between floors of an elevator and had to wait as the doors were pried open by a giant spoon. One incident involved the game Joust. During lulls in the action the players would often head to a nearby coffee shop where the food was cheap. The coffee shop also had two video games, Joust and Centipede. At the time Steve Sanders was one of the best Joust players in the country. Sanders, however, had been ridden mercilessly by the players. By that point they all knew about his phony Donkey Kong scores and that his being named team captain had nothing to do with his video game accomplishments. If he could prove himself on Joust he would be vindicated, in his own eyes as well as those of his teammates. There were just two problems - Darren Olsen and Eric Ginner, the two best Joust players on the team. At the coffee shop, Sanders decided to take them on. First, he dispatched Olsen. Then he started playing Eric Ginner. That’s where Billy Mitchell stepped in. Sitting down beside Sanders as he played, Mitchell put his plan into action

 

[Billy Mitchell] You remember the movie A Few Good Men? if you recall Tom Cruise's job as an attorney was to get under Jack Nicholson's skin and get him to come apart and explode. Well Tom Cruise ain't got nothin' on me…[Steve was] the whipping post for us players. I have this truly unique thing I can do. I can talk to you and you can hear what I say but nobody else in the room can hear…He's playing Eric...and every time something goes wrong I say "What's the matter with you…Aw come on...jeez, you're really embarrassing yourself" I had him to the point where his eyes were shifting back and forth...his palms are all sweaty his tongue's kind of clammy…I've got him all worked up…We're closing in on 2 million points and Steve is catching up…and I've got him coming apart at the seams.

Joust only displays five of the free men you have in reserve. As Sanders lost man after man, Mitchell somehow convinced him that he was on the verge of running out of men. No one else heard a word of what he was saying. Suddenly Mitchell exclaimed  "That's right, I forgot, you get 50 points every time you die. No wonder Sanders is catching up."  Sanders couldn't take it anymore. He exploded, rose from his chair, and dropped the f-bomb on Mitchell[4],  who turned to the room and asked "What's this guy's problem?" Later, when they got ready to leave, Sanders began killing of his men. He had 52 left.

            Another incident involved the game Donkey Kong. At the time, Todd Walker was probably the best player on the team besides Mitchell and Sanders (he had scored 315,000). By far the hardest board on the game is the elevator board. Players normally have to make their way slowly to the top of the board dodging fireballs and bouncing springs. Once they get to the top level, the final move run up the ladder requires precision timing. The player has to keep a close eye out for the right type of spring. The way most players reach the ladder is to run to left going underneath the ladder and the spring then to run quickly back to the right and up the ladder. If things go just right, however, the player can run directly up the ladder. If things really go right, the player can even make a "super duper jump" to the top level and then run right up the ladder. If things really, really, really go right - like once-in-a-lifetime right - the player can sprint directly from the start of the level to the end in no more time than it would take if there were no enemies at all. At the circus, Mitchell was plying the game. Just as he started the elevator level , Walker walked up and started watching. Lo and behold the stars were aligned just right and Mitchell was able to sprint to the finish record time. Walker was amazed. "Damn!" he exclaimed, wide-eyed. "Do you always do it like that?" "No" Mitchell deadpanned, "sometimes I go the fast way instead." Walker shook his head and walked away.  
 

     The event itself was anything but fun. Held at the Bayside Expo Center, the circus was scheduled to remain in Boston from July 15th-24th before taking to the road. It didn't even last a week. Superstar Productions  expected 10,000 people per day to attend but nowhere near that many showed up. Riley even pressed the players into after-hours service cruising local beaches Boston with a megaphone in a last-ditch effort to drum up business. Walter Day realized how bad things were when he walked into a magic show and heard the magician repeatedly asking for two volunteers from the audience as he stared at Day intently. When he looked around, Day realized that he was one of only two people to attend the show. The press arrived on days four and five but it was too little too late. At the end of the fifth day, Billy Mitchell was on the verge of a new Ms. Pac-Man record when one of the organizers told him he had to go as the event was closing. After he refused, the woman told him that the event was closing for good - they had run out of money and were shutting everything down and cancelling the rest of the tour (the players had been promised that no matter how poorly the tour did in Boston, they would at least continue on to their next stop in Cleveland). After just five days in Boston, the Electronic Circus was no more. When they players returned to their hotel they found that they'd been locked out of their rooms. Their possessions, on the other hand, were still locked in and the hotel refused to release them until the bill had been paid (eventually, it was).

 A spokesman blamed the failure on "financial disputes with an electrical workers union and the management of the Bayside Expo Center[3]" but the real problem was the poor attendance. The organizers estimated that only about 2,000 per day actually attended the event but some Expo Center officials said that the real figure was probably only a fourth of that. Walter Day claims that less than 5,000 people in total paid the $9 to attend the event.  

 There were a number of suggested reasons for the low attendance: high admission cost (the event cost $9 a day - equivalent to about $21 in 2012 dollars), poor location, and a record breaking heat wave. Day said that the event was "under organized, under advertised, and under financed." Then again, the poor attendance could have just been another sign of the looming video game crash. In the end Superstar Productions lost $2 million (including $1 million paid to Bally Northeast distributingfor the games, which were purchased outright) and declared bankruptcy. In terms of attendance, the event may not have been as big a bust as the Atari Centipede fiasco but in terms of promise unfulfilled, it was probably worse.

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[1]Video Games, June, 1983

[2]Video Games, July, 1983

[3]Electronic Circus Folds Its Tent, Play Meter, September 15, 1983

[4] This moment, without the story that preceded it, is recounted in Chasing Ghosts.

The US National Video Game Team and the North American Video Game Challenge/1983 Video Game Masters

March 7, 2013, 9:25 pm

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Today's post is the final in my three-part series on events that occured in the wake of the Life photo shoot. Unfotunately, I didn't have as much information on this event (save Walter Day's book) and there are a number of unanswered questions and no doubt some inaccuracies (I'm still not sure about the 2nd and 3rd State Team Tournaments, for example).

If any of the principals are out there and can provide me with corrections or more information, I'd appreciate it.

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From the 1984 Guinness Book of World Records. Scored from the 1983 Video Game Masters

            Perhaps the biggest victims, however, were the "superstar" players. Expecting a months-long tour, complete with salary, they now found themselves stranded in Boston and had to fly home at their own expense (though they had been paid for the five days the event lasted). Rather than returning home, a number of the players accompanied Walter Day back to Ottumwa. As they sat around trying to decide what to do they decided to stage an impromptu tournament. Walter Day contacted the Guinness Book of World Records, who agreed to sanction the event, which was dubbed the 1983 Video Game Masters. Walter also returned to his earlier idea. On July 25th he announced the re-formation of the U.S. National Video Game Team with five initial members:: Billy Mitchell, Steve Harris, Jay Kim, Ben Gold, and Tim McVey. It wasn't the first video game team. On October 10, 1982 the a group of students at North Missouri State University had formed a collegiate video game team (they even showed up at the famous Life magazine photo shoot).

 

 

            Day also organized the North American Video Game Challenge (now known as the 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament), the most ambitious video game tournament to date. Players from all 50 states and the Canadian provinces would be invited to a series of tournaments to fill 30 more slots on the National Video game Team. Three "State Teams Tournaments" would be held with the top ten finishers from each earning spots on the team. The results would be featured in the 1984 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. The first of the tournaments would take place during the week of August 24-28th in eight different arcades across the Midwest and West representing eight different states/regions: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, Idaho, Washington, Northern California/Northern Nevada, and Southern California. The tournament involved seven different games: Star Trek, Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom, Congo Bongo, Sinistar, Bubbles, Mario Bros., and the unreleased Atari 2600 game Spike's Peak (from K-tel/Xonox). Ten finalists from each of the 8 regions would compete in the finals on the 27th and 28th (at their home locations) with the top 10 overall finalists being invited to join the national team. Two more State Teams Tournaments were scheduled for October 28-30 and November 24-27.

 

Venues for the first State Teams Tournament:

1. Video City, Dayton, OH
2. Lake Odessa Fun Center, Lake Odessa, MI
3. Video Wizard, Villa Park, IL
4. Space City, Omah, NE
5. Mr. Deli, Coeur D'Alene, ID
6. Arnold's on the Avenue, Seattle, WA
7. Starship Video, Upland, CA
8. Video Paradise, San Jose, CA

            To kick off the tour, Day planned to take his five-member core team on the road to visit six of the eight locations where the first State Teams Tournament would take place taking on all challengers and raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation while collecting proclamations of support from Mayors and Governors to present to president Ronald Reagan. The trip would culminate with a visit to Washington D.C. where Day planned to top by the White House for a proclamation by Reagan before heading off to the Japanese embassy to challenge Japan to an international competition. Day also planned to open a Video Game Hall of Fame museum exhibit in Twin Galaxies.

            The last member of the team to arrive in Ottumwa was Ben Gold who showed up on August 11th to find the rest of the team camped out on the floor of Twin Galaxies out of money (Day had spent his last $60 on six red-and-white team t-shirts), desperate for food, and afraid to call home (lest their parents cut the trip short). That evening, their departure delayed by an interview with an AP reporter, the team set out in a rented 44-foot 1953 GMC city bus loaded with nine video games hooked up to a generator. It was a disaster from the start. The bus suffered the first of many breakdowns on the way to their first stop in Dayton, Ohio the next morning. After a delay, the bus finally started and they drove all night, arriving in Dayton at dawn where the owner of Video City arcade let them sleep in her living room. On other occasions, the team would sleep on the floor of the bus, wedged in between the video games.

After two days in Dayton, they broke down again in the arcade parking lot. A mechanic repaired the bus for free and the team headed to its next stop - tiny Lake Odessa, Michigan - then to the Video Wizard arcade in Villa Park, Illinois (a Chicago suburb). Once again the bus broke down. This time it was unable to switch gears. The bus was repaired late that evening but after three hours on the road, it broke down again in Portage, Wisconsin. When Day got out, he saw a trail of oil extending back along the road. The mechanic had failed to secure a gasket header properly and most of the oil had leaked out. A friendly cop arranged to have the bus towed into town where the players stayed for two days (missing an appointment at K-Tel offices in Minneapolis). This time the bus was beyond repair. The owner of the bus sent a car to bring the team back to Ottumwa where they packed into a hot, smelly school bus with a noisy engine and headed to Space City in Omaha where the bus was broken into and some of the players had their personal property stolen (including Ben Gold's prized log book of high scores that he'd kept since he started playing games seriously - Billy Mitchell found it in the woods). Steve Latch, the owner of Space City, offered them money to ditch the bus for a rental car. With Billy Mitchell taking the wheel, they headed for Mr. Deli in Couer D'Alene, Idaho 1,350 miles away with Mitchell driving 90 most of the way. From there it was on to Arnold's On the Avenue in Seattle. While in Seattle, the players paid a visit to Nintendo headquarters where they were treated to free handheld games and (more importantly) free food. The food was a godsend. With almost no money, the players had to scrounge free meals whenever and wherever they could. A few days later they traded the games for more food.

On their way to Starship Video in Upland, California, Mitchell as pulled over for speeding (he was going 94). Then, on Sunday, Ben Gold got violently sick. They found a clinic that was open on Sunday and Gold headed to the back while the rest of the team stayed in the waiting room. Before long Gold let out a bloodcurdling scream when the doctor game him a shot in the ass. For the rest of the day, Gold's teammates teased him mercilessly. After a quick stop at Starship Video they headed south to San Diego for a tour of Sega headquarters, During their visit, Sega learned that they'd been bought by Bally and were being shut down. While the employees wept, the team beat a hasty retreat. With that, the trip was over and the team members headed home. The tournament was won by Tim Collum (in January of 1984 he was crowned 1983 player of the year, along with Ben Gold, Billy Mitchell, Eric Ginner, and Steve Harris).

 

Local players from Video Paradise in San Jose. The first two in the back row are Todd Walker and Eric Ginner

 

Information above taken from http://www.videoparadise-sanjose.com/1983vgmt.htm

      The team (with new members) made an appearance at the 1983 AMOA show where they rated games for Play Meter magazine. The proclamation from President Reagan never materialized. Nor did the competition with Japan . Day, Mitchell, and Tom Asaki did visit the White House in September, where they presented their Japan challenge to some aides they never heard from again. They then headed to the Italian Embassy to deliver another international challenge. This one was accepted. Finally they made their way to the Japanese Embassy only to be met by befuddled diplomats who told them they had no time to play foolish video games and sent them packing. The second and third State Teams Tournaments apparently never took place. For such a promising start, it was a sad ending and perhaps the best illustration that that the golden age of video games was over.
Walter Day returned to Ottumwa where, according to an article in the October 23 Omaha World Herald he had to sleep on the floor of Twin Galaxies and on three occasions forced to live off change from the coke machine as the arcade struggled to stay afloat. On March 6, Twin Galaxies closed its doors.  The U.S. National Video Game Team, however, lived on under the direction of Steve Harris. Despite its shaky start, the USNGVT was an important milestone in the history of e-sports. Sadly, it's one the few today remember.

Galaxy Game

March 14, 2013, 3:22 pm

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A quick post about what some consider the first coin-op video game ever - Bill Pitts' and Huck Tuck's Galaxy Game.  Much of this info is from an interview I did with Bill Pitts about 12-15 years ago - back before anybody had really interviewed him and few had even heard of Galaxy Game. This is an excerpt from my book (from the chapter on Computer Space and Galaxy Game)


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Nolan Bushnell wasn't the only person working on a commercial version of Spacewar at the time. Elsewhere in the valley, a recent Stanford graduate and Spacewar veteran named Bill Pitts was createing a version on the PDP-11 computer, which had been released by DEC in 1970. While Pitts had a degree in Statistics, his real love was computers. At the time he attended Stanford, they did not offer an undergraduate degree in Computer Science (and wouldn't until the mid-1990s). In order to attract students, the Statistics department allowed undergraduate students to take graduate-level Computer Science classes and count them towards a Statistics degree. At a time when Computer Science courses were rare at any college, many students jumped at the chance to study the field in any way they could. In many ways, Pitts was a prototypical hacker.

 

[Bill Pitts] My first two years at Stanford (I started there in 1964), my hobby on campus was breaking into buildings and exploring the steam tunnels [under the campus]…I had conquered all the buildings on campus and one day I was driving through the hills behind Stanford and I noticed this new building I’d never seen before. It was a big, fancy building out in the hills but I could tell by the writing on the sign that it was a Stanford building so I went back at 11:00  at night to break in but unfortunately all the doors were open, the lights were on, and people were in there working. So there was no challenge as far as breaking into the building goes but what they had was a nice PDP-6 computer – the first really successful time-sharing system from DEC. That was the Artificial Intelligence project that John McCarthy had started and it had only been in that building for a couple of months.

 

After his groundbreaking work at MIT, McCarthy had taken his AI project to Stanford, bringing with him a number of students (as well as fellow AI-pioneer Marvin Minsky). Among them was Spacewar creator Steve Russell, who was placed in charge of the project’s ever-changing timesharing mainframe. Needless to say, Spacewar found its way onto any number of Stanford mainframes and a core of dedicated players soon emerged. As had been the case with their predecessors at MIT, the main problem for Stanford’s fledgling community of hackers was gaining access to the mainframes.

 

[Bill Pitts] In order to use the time-sharing system, there was a sign-up procedure. You had to sign up for one or two DEC tapes (we didn’t have disk drives then), some amount of core memory and a teletype. You’d sign up for all these resources and then you’d have them for the next hour or two. As an undergraduate, I had no privileges to sign up – only graduate students could do that, but because I was a Stanford student, I could use any idle resources that weren’t being used by someone else. So I ended up going there at 10:00 or 11:00 at night and I’d stay until 6:00 in the morning. I was often the only one there and had the whole machine to myself. So I stopped going to day classes and started living in the AI lab.

 

After discovering Spacewar(which he’d first seen on a PDP-1 elsewhere on campus), Pitts showed the game to a high-school friend named Hugh Tuck. Tuck was impressed with the game and speculated that if it ever got to where they could make a coin-operated version, he and Pitts could make a lot of money. A few years later, when DEC released the PDP-11 (at a cost of around $10,000), Pitts realized that his friend’s dream could become a reality.

 In June of 1971 Pitts and Tuck formed Computer Recreations Inc. with plans to build a coin-operated version of Spacewar. For the next three and a half months, the two worked on the game. The hardware consisted of a PDP-11/20 computer with 8k of memory, a Hewlett Packard 1300A Electrostatic Display, and a simple point-plotting display interface (designed by Ted Panofski).  At the same time, of course, Nolan Bushnell was working on his own version of the game. Pitts and Tuck, however, wanted to take a different approach.

 

[Bill Pitts] Nolan Bushnell and I had both played Spacewar at Stanford and we were both bringing it to the masses. His way of doing it was to cut all the corners necessary to build a machine that could be sold to operators for under $1,000. I give him a lot of credit. I think that his real knack, which he demonstrated on a number of occasions, was to be able to take the current state of some complex technology and pull from that something that could be taken to the masses and generate money. My goal was to bring Spacewar in all its glory to the masses. I was driven more by wanting to bring the real thing to market at opposed to making money. I see Nolan Bushnell as an entrepreneur with both an engineering and a business aspect to him and I see myself more as an engineer.

            Bushnell heard that we were building ours at the same time he was building his. Through some mutual friends, he contacted us and said “Come on over and I’ll show you what I’m doing because I (think) that if you’re using a PDP-11 and Hewlett-Packard displays, you’re spending a lot of money to build a single system and I want you to be aware of what I’m doing because I’d hate to see you lose all of your money.”

            So we went over to Nutting Associates in Mountain View. He had started months before and he had some prototypes up and running. We played the game and I thought it was incredible what he was able to build and sell for under $1,000 but it wasn’t Spacewar. He had to cut so many corners that it didn’t really have good playing characteristics, but I appreciated the fact that he had called us over and warned us.

 

After visiting Nutting, Pitts and Tuck got back to work, and by September, the game was complete. Pitts’ and Tuck's game was much more expensive than Busnhell's. Luckily, Tucks’ family was able to provide funding for the project, whose total cost came to around $20,000.  In addition to the $14,000-plus low-end PDP-11, the game included a similarly expensive (circa $3,000) Hewlett-Packard monitor.

 

[Bill Pitts] The tube it used was a Hewlett-Packard 1310, which is like a large oscilloscope tube. The difference being that most large vector tubes used electro-magnetic deflection and this one used electro-static defection, which meant that you didn’t have all the inertia of a big coil at the back. The bandwidth of the tube was 10 to 100 times faster than an electro-magnetic display. For programming reasons, that was a whole lot easier because when the beam wraps around from one side to the other, the tube is so fast that it just does it immediately, whereas with an electro-magnetic tube, you have to detect when it goes off one edge and you need to stop and wait for the beam to get around to the other side before you can continue drawing.

 

            While much of the computer hardware for Galaxy Game was expensive, the game-specific hardware was sometimes hard to find. Coin-boxes came courtesy of veteran jukebox manufacturer Rowe International, who had heard about Pitts’ project and was eager to provide help. Joysticks were a different story.

 

[Bill Pitts] There was a place called J&H Outlet in San Carlos. It was the typical military surplus place – they had all sorts of electronic stuff and airplane parts and who knows what and they had it there bunch of joystick-like devices that were out of B-52s from the 1950s or 1960s. I guess they had been obsoleted or worn out and I was buying them at J&H outlet in 1971. They controlled something to do with the radar system on the B-52. There’s a scene in Dr. Strangelove with James Earl Jones[1]… when the nuclear bomb is detonated and there’s a fire, and in that scene I remember seeing the joystick. These joysticks got heavily modified. They’re actually very heavy joysticks. In the first game we didn’t modify them very much and they were very unreliable but in the second version I sent them to a machine shop and we had a really good engineer there do the engineering for us. They were analog joysticks originally and we converted them to where they were completely digital and they were very reliable.

 

After completing the hardware, the duo packed it into a walnut cabinet designed by an engineer in Palo Alto. The cabinet allowed the player to sit down while playing - a feature designed to encourage players to play for long stretches, resulting in more revenue. With the cabinet and hardware complete, Pitts and Tuck were ready to take their creation public.Because of the raging anti-war sentiment on campus, the two decided to change the name from Spacewar to Galaxy Game. In September of 1971, they installed the game in Stanford’s Tresidder Union (Computer Space had been placed out on test in August). The PDP computer that controlled the game was actually located in the attic of the union and connected to the game console via 100 feet of cable. The game became an instant hit. At ten cents a game (three games for a quarter) it would take a long time for Pitts and Tuck to recoup the $20,000 they’d spent building it, but that didn’t seem to faze them. The game was wildly popular with the Stanford students with people sometimes waiting an hour to play, lining up their quarters atop the cabinet to reserve a spot (a practice that would become standard in video arcades across the country in years to come). True to its mainframe predecessor, Pitts’ coin-op version contained a host of options the user could select – though in a much more user-friendly format.

 

[Bill Pitts] In the original [mainframe] version, in order to get negative gravity for example, you would go in there with a debugger and you’d know the magic location of where the gravity constant was and you’d stop the program and change the number, making the gravity stronger or weaker and you could even make it negative, but you had to be a programmer to go in and change these things. In my version…what I did was to have a bunch of buttons between the joysticks that allowed you to select the various options. There were like 16 different setting for the gravity field, you could select the level of thrust your engines had, you torpedo velocity etc. When the ship got to the edge of the screen, it could wrap around, you could bounce off, or you could blow up. One of the interesting variations was to have negative gravity, which was always pushing you to the edge of the screen, and to have the edge set to blow you up.

 

Another feature from the original was the realistic star field (which included Polaris in the center of the screen in addition to the sun). The player’s ship was controlled by a joystick to control rotation and thrust with a button on the front to fire the lasers and another on top to engage the hyperspace feature. A dime (or quarter) brought you a certain amount of fuel, which was consumed at varying rates depending on what you did.

Before long, Galaxy Game was drawing crowds of Stanford students and became so successful that Pitts and Tuck changed their original plans for the game. Similarly to Nolan Bushnell, the designers soon decided that the only way to turn a profit on the game was to allow one computer to power multiple terminals so they designed a second version of Galaxy Game using a more powerful display interface that would allow the computer to drive four to eight terminals.

 

[Bill Pitts] When we built the first machine, we didn’t expect to make money. We knew it was costing a lot of money to build one machine and what we wanted to do was see how much business we could generate and then we would go back and figure out how cheap we had to make the machine to really be successful but when we encountered such a huge wave of enthusiasm from the people that were playing the game, we forgot what our plan was. We were just out of college and were not business people. So we decided that we would amortize the cost of the computer by having it drive up to four consoles and each console had two players. So we embarked on building version two and that had fiberglass casing and a lot more tooling and meant buying another computer and more displays and that’s how we ran up to $60,000 in expenses. While it could have driven four consoles, what we ended up putting at Stanford (because it was all they had room for) was the 2^nd version that had a PDP-11 inside one of the fiberglass cases and it drove both systems. You could either drive those two consoles as two totally separate games or you could interlink the two and have four player games where they were all fighting each other.

Placed in a blue fiberglass case designed by Hugh Tuck (who had a mechanical engineering degree from Cal Poly), this new version was installed in the Tresidder Union coffee house in June of 1972. This second version included some new features, such as being able to increase the rotation and thrust speeds by holding the joystick in position for a certain amount of time. Despite the features, the second unit failed to match the success of the original.

 

[Bill Pitts] The system at Stanford in the Student Union always did well. The other system I had, I moved it all over the place and I never did well. Somehow the Stanford community really appreciated this game and they were willing to read a legal-sized document of instructions. In other places, they just didn’t want to do that.

 

Eventually, the second unit made its way back to the student union coffee house, where it remained until May of 1979, taking in around $60,000.Unlike Computer Sapce, Galaxy Game never saw the outside of the Stanford campus and only two units were ever built. Pitts and Tuck realized from the start that their creation was too expensive to be commercially viable on a large scale (the $60,000 in revenue generated by the second unit was barely enough to cover the cost of building it) and never tried to market the idea to any coin-op manufacturers. The duo's intention had never been to create a game for mass-production, but to produce a coin-op version of the mainframe classic realistic in every detail no matter what the cost. In that, they succeeded admirably

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[1] Jones, in his first movie role, played bombardier/radar operator Lt. Zogg.

Arcade Origins

March 22, 2013, 7:37 pm

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Today's post covers the early history of four of the more popular arcade chains of the 1970s and 1980s. It's a little short on details, but I hope to correct that in the future.

Time-Out Family Amusement Center

In 1970, Tico Bonomo opened the first Time-Out Family Amusement Center. Bonomo's grandfather Albert Bonomo had emigrated to the U.S. from Turkey. In 1897 he founded the Bonomo Company in Coney Island and began selling salt-water taffy and hard candy. Albert's son (and Tico's father) Victor invented a new confection called Turkish Taffy  Bonomo Turkish Taffy became one of the country's most popular candy treats (people loved to crack it to pieces before opening the wrapper), especially after Tico Bonomo created The Magic Clown, which ran on NBC from 1949 to 1954 (it continued on local networks until 1959). Created solely to sell taffy, it was one of the first sponsored children's programs.

In 1970 Bonomo sold his interest in Bonomo Turkish Taffy to Tootsie Roll Industries and was looking for a place to invest his money when he encountered some electromechanical arcade games and decided to open his own arcade (he apparently also opened an instant portrait studio around this time). His first location in Northway Mall in Colonie, New York, was a resounding success. The next year, he opened four more locations, including locations in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Bonomo opened his business just in time to cash in on the first video game boom and by 1975 there were a dozen Time Outs. By 1978 there were 20. As video game arcades began to gain a reputation as a hangout for unruly teens, Time Out began to revamp its image by brightening up their arcades with brighter colors and more family-oriented design, resulting in more expansion. On December 30, 1986 Bonomo sold the entire chain (which at the time comprised 74 locations - including non-mall "Station-Break" locations - in 15 states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico) to Sega, staying on as president and CEO. In the early 1990s, Time-Out was purchased by the Mall Entertainment Division of Edison Brothers' (a clothing and shoe maker from St. Louis and Tico retired to Virginia.  He died in Great Falls, Virginia on September 14, 1999.

Photo of a Time-Out - from the excellent Time-Out Tunnel website (http://timeouttunnel.com/)

 

Time Zone

 

A Time Zone in Detroit - from the Detroityes.com website

 

            The similarly named Time Zone was founded in 1974 by Ted Olson. At the time, Olson (who had majored in accounting at the University of Montana) was working as comptroller for Atari when he decided to purchase the company’s street route. After getting the okay from Nolan Bushnell, Olson took the route, along with the rights to the name Syzygy and went into the arcade business for himself. The first Time Zone was opened in a small San Jose shopping center on November 1, 1976. At only 700 square feet, however, the space was too small and after Olson experienced problems with loitering and disturbances from neighboring stores, he closed the location within 18 months. A second, 1,500-square-foot location at the much larger Mountain View Center mall proved much more successful. Like Time Out, Time Zone attempted to create a family atmosphere where adults as well as teens could enjoy the arcade experience. Olson spent $30,000 - $40,000 a year on radio advertising and promotions to push his message. By the end of 1977 Olson had six arcades in the Silicon Valley area and was still growing.

 

Malibu Grand Prix

 

 

In March of 1975, a group of overgrown kids from Orange County CA created the first Malibu Grand Prix near Angel Stadium in Anaheim.  The idea had come about when Ron Cameron, a Malibu investor, was visiting Detroit and came across a miniature speedway where people could drive cars around a dirty track. He took the idea home with him to California, made a few improvements, and started his own business. Initially, the only feature was a miniature race track with three-quarter scale, custom-designed, 28-horsepower, formula one racers powered by Sachs-Wankel rotary engines, which allowed anyone to play Mario Andretti for a dollar a lap. The cars, which were valued at $12,000-15,000 each, cruised along at speeds of up to 67 MPH. The "official fastest time" for each location was posted on a board outside the track. After three or four months, the location installed a half dozen pinball games and a handful of video games (operated by an outside vendor) outside the main building. When the games proved to be an easy source of extra income, the owners tore down some of the offices in the main building to make room for more. When the second location opened up in Fountain View, it included a small game room with about 25 games. The third location opened in Pasadena in July of 1976 with 67 games. The owners quickly realized that using an outside vendor to supply their games was costing them money and began operating their own games. While the race track remained the focal point of the centers, the video games became almost as well-known. By late 1976 the first Malibu Grand Prix's outside of California were opened in Tucson, Denver, and Houston.  As the video game explosion got into full swing, Malibu Grand Prix became one of the largest arcade chains in the country. In 1977, Cameron sold the chain to Warner Communications (owners of Atari) for $4 million. Under Warner, the chain soon expanded to over 100 locations nationwide. The Malibu Grand Prix idea eventually spawned imitators such as Funway Freeway, which had locations in 19 states when Warner sold it to Six Flags in 1980. On December 31, 1983 Warner sold Malibu Grand Prix to a holding company controlled by two Canadian businessmen for $19 million, who later merged it with a company called Castle Entertainment. In 1984 the chain lost $6.3 million on revenues of just $28.1 million. In the first quarter of 1985 they lost $2.4 million more. Ron Cameron fared much better. In 1988 he sold his five acre estate for a reported $7 million - at the time the second highest price ever paid for a home in Malibu (after Johnny Carson's $8.5 million purchase in 1984). In 2002, the last three remaining Malibu Grand Prix was purchased by Palace Entertainment.

Aladdin's Castle

 

            Even bigger than Malibu Grand Prix was Aladdin’s Castle. The chain had its origins in a company known as American Amusements, Inc. After graduating from the University of Miami, Jules Millman went to work for the coin-op distributor World Wide Distributing in Chicago. His uncle, who owned a discount store, let Millman put some games at the entrance where they made over $100 a week. If a handful of games could make that much money in a high-volume discount store, thought Millman, imagine how much money they'd make in a dedicated location in a mall. Millman visited mall after mall and they all turned him down flat. Then he found a mall that was having trouble leasing space and talked them into letting him try his idea. Millman created something far different from the typical coin-op game location, creating a family-friendly location where parents could take their kids. He installed carpeting. Smoking and eating were banned. It was an instant success. Before he had a chain of arcades (called Carousel Time) in malls across the country. The company’s marketing department began scanning newspapers looking for announcements of new shopping mall openings then convincing the owners to add an amusement arcade. It was often a tall order. Many at the time felt that arcades were hangouts for troublesome teens and hoodlums. The Carousel Time people then made a novel suggestion – “You already have kids hanging out here in the mall. Why not give them a nice, well-policed place to have fun rather than having them prowl the aisles and other stores?”[1]Getting the mall owners to agree with their proposal was only half the battle. The company then had to make sure their new arcade would comply with local zoning laws, which could be quite restrictive in the early seventies. In April 1974, Bally purchased American Amusements and changed the name from Carousel Time to Aladdin’s Castle (the chain had about 50 locations at the time). By the end of 1975 the chain had 75 locations and eventually became the largest of the arcade chains. With 450 locations at its peak in 1983, it was called “the McDonald’s of the arcade business.”  As the video game industry crashed, Aladdin's Castle went into sharp decline. Bally closed 46 locations in 1984, 88 in 1985, and 47 in 1986 (though in terms of profitability, the chain had its best year yet in 1986). In 1989 Bally sold the chain and exited the arcade business entirely.

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[1] Replay magazine, November 1979

Rare Games, More 1975 Atari Photos, and Odds and Ends

March 28, 2013, 9:25 pm

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Here are a few games I've come across that I've seen almost nowhere else. Actally, I haven't "seen" most of them since they don't even have flyers or photos that I know of:
 
Mugger (c1982?) – This game was mentioned in Michael Rubin's Defending the Galaxy, which described it as follows: "Walk through alleys shooting possible muggers. Earn points by killing the muggers before they kill you; lose points if you accidentally kill an old lady or an innocent bystander…Your shots graphically splatter the victims against the walls. Mugger never made it past its prototype in Atlanta." I don't know how reliable Rubin's book is so you may want to take this one with a grain of salt.

Love Miner (c1983) – An outer space mining game in development when Simutrek went under. It is not known if it reached the prototype stage.

Cowboy Casino (1983) - A card game featuring laserdisc footage of live actors in wild west garb produced for the Countercade countertop unit. It was shown at the 1983 AMOA show (and again at the 1985 show) but it is not known whether it made it into production or not. I may be wrong about it being show in 1983 (have to check). Could this be the same game as the 1993 CDO title?
 

Here's an odd one (or three) from the November 1982 issue of Replay.

Three "adult" video games from Computer Kinetics.

Stripper was featured in the movie Joysticks and is apparently a knockoff of Streaking.

As for X-Hot Stuff and Stop the Iatola? I didn't even know there WAS a category called "Red Neck Games". What else would be in it? Big Buck Hunter?

 

 

 

Here's a better version of the photo (from TAFA) - no mention of Stop the Iatola though.

 

 

 

Finally, another Pong clone from 1975:

 

 

 

 

 
I was recently going through some 1975 issues of Play Meter and found a few pictures I thought I'd post.
 
First up, some Atari pix:
Note the Puppy Pong (sign?) on the right
 

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Tank II and Goal IV on the production line
 

 

 

 
Here's Al Alcorn (what's that on the board behind him? Is it a diagram of a paddle?)
 

 
Joe Keenan:
 

 
 
The big dog himself (that's Nolan Bushnell)
 

 
 
Here's an article on Atari from the February 15, 1973 Boston Herald. I think it's interesting because it still refers to them as "Syzygy" instead of "Atari" (even though they had incorporated in June of 1972 and already released Pong):
 

 

 
Not Atari, but here's another 1975 picture I found interesting. It's a computer portrait booth introduced by Taito America. They installed it at Old Chicago, a combination mall/amusement park that opened that year in Bolingbrook.
 

 
Here's another non-video game. I think this one is from ca 1981 (have to double check):
 

 

Finally, another non-video from (I think) 1975. This one involved shooting coins out of a gun.
 

 
A few Un-TAFA'd games:
 

 
 

 

 

PSE's Frenzy cabinet