The Golden Age Arcade Historian

Here's a summary of a few other major 1980s video game tournaments.

Putt Putt National Tournaments

Putt Putt $10,000 Pac-Man Tournament

On of the earliest big-money national tournaments was the Putt Putt $10,000 Pac-Man Tournament in the summer of 1981. Local and regional qualifiers were held at Putt Putt Golf & Games locations nationwide to pick three finalists, who competed in Fayetteville, NC (Putt Putt headquarters) on August 30th to crown a champion. 17-year-old Steve Hair of Columbia scored 372,600 points, edging out Chris Johnson and Mark Spina for the $5,500 first-place prize. The tournament did well enough that Putt Putt announced that they would be offering over $50,000 in prize money in 1982 in a series of $10,000 tournaments. The tournaments ended up being only $5,000 tourneys rather than $10,000. The Centipede tournament took place in January of 1982 with the finals on January 31st. Finalists played a 20-minute game at their local Putt Putt locations with their scores being called in to Putt Putt HQ. Larry Henderson of El Paso won the $2,000 first prize with a score of 299,816. The Tempest finals took place on March 28th with Curtis Kidwell of Arlington, TX taking home the two grand, scoring 409,381 points in 20 minutes. A third $5,000 tournament was scheduled for later in the spring but it isn't known if it ever took place.

1981 California State Championships

The summer of 1981 also saw one of the earliest large-scale state competitions when operator Silco West conducted a California state championship. Silco West was a spinoff of Silco Vending, which had been formed in New Jersey in 1920. In 1981, Silco West was one of California's largest operators with over 400 locations in the state (many of them 7-11s, though other clients included Circle K, Denny's Alpha Beta supermarkets, and Winchell's Donuts). Earlier in the year, Silco had formed an in-house promotion department headed by foosball champion Johnny Lott. Their first program was a state video game championship with proceeds going to the Muscular Dystrophy Association (Lott and Silco president Clyde Love even appeared on the Jerry Lewis telethon). Qualifying rounds were held at over 300 Silco-West locations in southern California over a period of eight weeks. Each week, the two highest scores at each location were recorded on a poster and at the end of 8 weeks, the 16 high scores faced off in a five-minute playoff to determine who would go to the 64-player single-elimination finals at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on August 29th. The main event was a single-elimination Asteroids tournament with two three-minute games per match. Consolation events were held on Defender and Pac-Man. The tournament also included a celebrity event featuring the ubiquitous Matthew Laborteaux, star of Little House on the Prairie and probably the famous (and avid) celebrity gamer of the era. After taking on all comers in Missile Command (he lost only once in 3 hours), Laborteaux faced DJ Rick Dees in a celebrity match. In the finals, John Conley scored 24,170 points in three minutes to beat out Charlie Wells for the grand prize - an Asteroids Deluxe machine and airfare for two to the Atari World Championships in October. The tournament was promoted on local television programs, KIIS FM radio, and even had a spot on the Jerry Lewis telethon.

A few months later husband-and-wife operators David and Marianne Davidson, hoping to repair the black eye the industry had received at the Atari $50,000 World Championships in October (see below), spent $60,000 of their own money to organize another California State Championship held at 200 Stop N Go locations with the finals at the Ramada Inn in Culver City on December 19 on Defender. Fifteen-year-old Jeff Davis won the contest and a new Defender arcade game.

1984 March of Dimes International Konami/Centuri Track & Field Challenge

Held in spring of 1984, this tournament not only had the longest name of any tournament but it is considered history's largest arcade video game tournament with over a million contestants (800,000 in the U.S. and 200,000 in Japan). The U.S. Qualifying rounds took place from April 30 to May 25 at Aladdin's Castle and National Convenience Storelocations (like Stop N Go and Hot Stop Markets). One qualifier from each of the 14 regions went to the four-round finals in Houston on May 26. Winner Gary West along with runners-up Phil Britt and Mike Mallory, travelled to Tokyo to face the top three Japanese finishers - Shinichi Takahashi, Akihiro Oozono, and 14-year-old champion Hideki Houchi . The three were put up at the Grand Palace Hotel (the event venue), given a two-day tour of the resort town of Nikko, and feted at a ceremonial dinner complete with Japanese performers. The presidents of Konami and Centuri were on hand for the main event, which took place on June 9. In the first round, players competed individually on each of the game's six events with Phil Britt winning four of them. The U.S. won the second round, in which each team was given twenty minutes to rack up as many points as possible, 220,000 - 140,000 (interestingly, the Japanese team played on cocktail machines while the US chose uprights). In the final round, each player played three games with only their top score counting. Using their "finger roll" technique, Britt and West finished first and second. All contestants won medals and loving cups and the US team got Seiko watches.

And here are some assorted pictures from other tourneys

First up, here's the winner of the 1974 Japan tournament I posted about earlier:

This wasn't a video game tournament, but here's Ken Lunceford, winner of the 1978 Bally Supershooter Tournament (billed as the first national pinball tournament).

Here's a picture from the Atari $50,000 World Championship fiasco:

Did you know that Billy Mitchell had a Siamese Twin? Here's proof from before the separation in 1984.

And here's another shot of the US National Video Game Team, circa March, 1984:

Houston Malibu Gran Prix Armor Attack Tourney - August, 1981

Tron World Championship - May, 1982

Captain Video Scramble Tournament - August, 1980

Stop N Go Krull Tourament, December 1983.

Easter Seals 10-Yard Fight Championship, August, 1984

First Annual Vs. Tennis Open, August 1984

Olympic Arcade Tricathalon - 1980

Not a tourney, but here's Craig Steele setting a record on Star Castle in 1981

Finally, here's an article from Vending Times about an all-but-forgotten attempt at an early attempt at forming a video game player's league

Victory and Victor Banana

Another now-rare game was Victory, a game similar to Defenderthat featured excellent gameplay and some of the best sound and speech for a video game at the time but was almost unknown in the arcades. A follow up called Victor Banana was released that included only minor changes to the gameplay and artwork. Both Victory and Victor Banana were creations of programmer Vic Tolomei (hence the name) and the latter reflected his odd sense of humor.

Pepper II

Pepper II was another Larry Hutcherson maze game. Each level featured four different mazes connected by tunnels .Player could enclose an area by "zipping" around it to paint the floor a different color. Enclosing an area containing a prize (like a safety pin or flower) allowed the player to attack the enemies. Retracing your path "unzipped" it so that you had to paint over it again. The game was originally called Zipper (because of the zipping and unzipping) but Exidy owner Pete Kafumann changed to something much more confusing

[Larry W. Hutcherson] "It was supposed to be called Zipper but Pete got afraid of a new lawnmower that was released called Zipper and decided on a fluke to name it Pepper II while he was sitting at the table…looking at a pepper shaker… Everybody was scratching their head trying to figure out why we were calling it that."

            Both Pepper II and Victor Banana were released as conversion kits (for Ventureand Victory - though Pepper II was also available as a dedicated unit). With sales flat, Exidy was looking for a way to market new games and became the second major manufacturer (after Sega) to jump on the conversion kit bandwagon.
            As was the case with most companies, designing games during the early '80s was challenging. Before hard drives came along, programmers had to swap disks in and out multiple times to load their games and tools into memory. Design tools didn't really exist at the time so programmers at Exidy had to write their own, including a debugger, a graphics tool, and sound tools.
            Exidy largely chose to stay out of the licensing game, preferring to design its own games. The design atmosphere at Exidy seems to have been a good one. One report claims that designers could receive bonuses for hit games that exceeded their annual salary. In 1982 the company launched a game creation contest where teams of five (one from each of the company's divisions) would brainstorm ideas for new games then compete against one another for cash prizes.

While Exidy had had its share of hits, it remained a fairly small player in the video game arena. Play Meter reports that the company had just a 2% market share in 1981 (trailing behind Atari, Bally/Midway, Williams, Stern, Cinematronics, and Sega/Gremlin). In 1982 the figure dropped to 1%. While it may not have been able to compete in terms of revenue, Exidy usually turned a profit. Exidy never went public. The decision was deliberate.

[Pete Kauffman] "We don't have the problems of a Warner Brothers or Gulf &Western. We don't have to do anything we don't want to do. Those guys have such a big animal to feed. We can do our $10-15 million a year and be as profitable as anyone[1].

After 1982, Exidy’s video game fortunes headed south in a hurry. The decline was exacerbated by earlier losses from the ill-fated Sorcerer personal computer. In the summer of 1981, Exidy had sold its Data Systems Division to a New York venture group called Biotech Capital Corp but the losses continued to affect their bottom line for months. At the 1982 AMOA show, Exidy had debuted Hard Hat (which they billed as the first “educational” game) and Snapper[2]. Neither went anywhere. Snapper never even made it into production."

[Larry Hutcherson] "I remember Snapper. Interestingly enough that game made more money when it was unplugged than when it was powered up. Yes, that's correct. More people put a quarter into the machine when the screen was black than when they could see what the game screen looked like….It was cancelled immediately after the first field test"

Fax

They weren't entirely without hits, however. The trivia game Fax (released in March) did moderately well. The game was designed to attract locations that might not normally have video games as well as to counter the negative press video games sometimes got. Exidy even produced solid oak "Elegante" model to appeal to upscale clientele.

[Pete Kauffman] You could put this game in the Hyatt Regency…and if you take a Faxgame to show your legislators or local council, you can say this is the direction our industry is going with technology. It's fun but it's also educational. It's a positive type of game you can use to sell people who are negative on games. You can point to it and say "Here is our industry"…(laughs) They might pull out a Death Race game and say 'No, here is your industry[3]

The game's multiple-choice questions (which were to be replaced regularly) were submitted by employees throughout the company, who pored over almanacs, encyclopedias, and dictionaries in these pre-internet days (eventually Exidy sponsored a nationwide contest to find questions). One question that generated a lot of phone calls asked what "Big Ben" was. The choices included "clock" (incorrect) and "bell" (correct). Other questions were a bit more tongue-in-cheek (i.e. "What is a brassiere?" - A Bust Stop). Fax wasn't a smash but it was enough of a hit to merit a sequel.

Crossbow

In November, Exidy released the first in its “alliterative shooting” series, which consisted of a dozen games released between 1983 and 1988. Crossbow was a throwback of sorts to the old electromechanical rifle games. The player controlled a crossbow (created by Barnett Crossbows of England), using it to protect a group of onscreen "friends" (including a wizard, a dwarf, an amazon warrior etc.)from a host of different enemies while avoiding hitting the heroes with a stray shot. Among the dozens of different enemies were vultures, werewolves, fireballs, lava, ghosts, and more. The player could also plink away at bonus targets like street lights and crowns. If the player safely escorted at least one friend to the other side of the screen, they could navigate across various levels on a map by shooting colored boxes. Levels included a desert, an ice cave, a ghostly street, a jungle, and (finally) a castle, where the player faced off against the Master of Darkness.

Nick Ilyin was the game's designer while Larry Hutcherson handled the level design, using a special programming language developed by Hutcherson specifically for the game's hardware, which had been custom-designed by Howell Ivy and was called the "440 System". The language included a number of features that were quite innovative for the time such as multi-threading (the ability to handle multiple program "threads" running at once. It was a "pseudo-operation" language that included a number of simplified instructions that allowed novice programmers to design levels without getting into the details of assembly-language programming. Unfortunately, Hutcherson was the only one who was proficient with it and ended up rewriting most of the levels.

Crossbow featured pulse-pounding gameplay and was perhaps the first game to use all digitized sound and music , courtesy of newcomer Ken Nicholson

[Ken Nicholson] "During high school in Cupertino I was one of six nerds invited to join the extracurricular computer club. The club was an experiment run by a math teacher and he managed to get computer equipment donated from HP. I liked experimenting with natural-language parsing programs -- the kind of thing Siri does.
Myself and another one of the computer club members somehow managed to get volunteer jobs apprenticing for software engineers at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Another computer club member met Steve Wozniak on the bus and he and another club member ended up being one of Apple's founders."

…during college I landed a job as an IT engineer for a small credit union. When that job ended I started my own software consulting business called Syntax. (A friend wisecracked: "They're taxing that now?")…
My business was based in Eureka, CA. Business was good but I decided that I was missing out on the video game boom and the legendary $100K+ salaries that video game developers were getting in Silicon Valley. So I relocated to Mountain View to try to break into the video game business.
Though I did take a few computer science and electronics classes in college, my major was theatre. I studied lighting, sound design and acting. It turned out these skills were particularly useful in the game industry.

The sound digitizing hardware used ADPCM - a compression algorithm developed by Microsoft. While the hardware was state-of-the-art for its time, storage space (especially for music) was limited.

[Ken Nicholson] "One of the weaknesses of the 440 system's audio capability was in music. Digital audio storage space was very limited and there wasn't room to store more than a few notes or phrases of music, with the rest of the space needed for sound effects. If you listen to the soundtrack of those 440 games you'll hear that things that sound like music are actually composed of shorter samples. The bugle call "charge" is an example. Also, some of the sound effects are reused but at a higher sampling rate or played back in reverse.
For cost reasons the digital audio data was stored on ROMs which were very costly to master. In later games I was asked to reuse surplus ROMs from earlier games. That required some tricky sequencing of digital audio clips to avoid the games from sounding too similar."

Nicholson turned to a number of interesting sources to create sound effects for Exidy's line of shooting games.

[Ken Nicholson] "Creating the sounds was a lot of fun. To get the sound of a skeleton exploding I went to a bowling alley and recorded someone bowling a strike. I went to a duck pond to record ducks. Most of the sounds, though, were recorded right in Exidy's offices. The Amazon warrior princess death sound was a slowed-down version of one of our female co-workers' screams.The iconic "You will die" of the Evil Sorcerer in Crossbow was my voice speaking into a metal wastebasket."

Crossbow also featured more RAM than most games at the time with 52 64k RAM chips. This was due to a (wise) decision Howell Ivy and Pete Kauffman had made at the 1982 CES to focus on games with more memory and graphics capabilities rather than pursuing the new laserdisc technology.

[Pete Kauffman] We decided not to go with the laserdisc specifically because of its drawback of the track-to-track access time…Solid-state digital has the advantage of total interaction[4].

Pete Kauffman, Howell Ivy, and Paul Jacobs

[1]Play Meter, September 15, 1983

[2] The Kusch’s Korner column in Vending Times reports that Exidy also showed Car Jamboree and Battle Cross at the show but the games were apparently never released by Exidy, though they were released by the somewhat obscure Omori Electric Co.

[3]Play Meter, September 15, 1983

[4]Play Meter, March 1, 1984

Way back when I stared this blog, I posted about Dave Needle's one-off Star Trek video game. That post was only part of a longer chapter in my book about independent video game designers. Today, I am posting the entire chapter (at least as it exists right now). The earlier post didn't seem to arouse much interest, but it was actually one of the most interesting stories I heard when researching the book. Now that I have a few more readers, I hope this expanded version will be of more interest.

Chapter 13
The Independents

The history of coin-op video games usually runs something like this: first there was Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space and then there was Pong and in-between there was nothing. In actuality, however, this may not have been strictly true (even aside from Galaxy Game and For-Play's Star Trek). The late 1960s and 1970s were a hotbed of activity in the computer field. A handful of companies, and even more individuals, were struggling to create a personal computer at the time and there may well have been others who were creating video games. These people may not have had Nolan Bushnell’s entrepreneurial instinct but it is likely that in at least a few garages and basements across the country, there were computer hackers and electronics tyros trying to build video games of their own.

Dave Needle

One such independent designer was Dave Needle, who would go on to have a hand in the creation of 3D0, the Atari Lynx, and the Commodore Amiga. After graduating high school, Needle started attending Hunter College in the Bronx. It was there that he created his first video game.

Dave Needle

[Dave Needle] About six months or so before Pong came out I did my first game. I saw an article in Popular Electronicsthat taught how to build an analog TV game[2]. I thought it was cool so I built one in the bedroom of my house in the Bronx. I built it in an attaché case. It was mostly analog, a little bit digital for some of the collision stuff. It was fun – and allowed you to play Pong, basically. I made a second game that had a gun that shot a little bullet out and you angled the gun and pushed the trigger to fire. Later I added bounce to the paddles that was controllable by a second pot to control the angle of the paddles and then I actually got the [paddles to change onscreen] to show what angle you were going to bounce the balls off of. I thought it was cool, showed it to all my friends, and didn’t do anything with it. I had a great opportunity in front of me and just didn’t do anything. I made the one-offs of these games in cigar boxes and attaché cases and I just left them like that, finished college, and went off to California.

Article from November, 1972 Popular Electronics. This was probably the article Needle referred to

This was the first time Needle by-passed his chance to get in on the ground floor of the video game explosion, but it wouldn’t be the last. After moving to California he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Not long after graduation, he got a glimpse of Computer Space in a Long Beach arcade and was immediately captivated. He went home and created a baseball video game, and once again never thought about marketing it. When Magnavox came out with the Odyssey, he and a friend managed to bluff their way into a demo but could not get into the rooms where the game’s design was being discussed. After seeing the game, Needle once again designed a version of his own in an attaché case, and once again he didn’t think about marketing it.
Around this time, Needle took a job as a civilian technician aboard the USS Enterprise and in his spare time he continued working on videogames.

[Dave Needle] So I volunteer for work on the USS Enterprise for the navy. So I’m going to spend the next nine months at sea and what am I doing in my spare time? Once again I’m building another game in an attaché case. This time it’s a multi-game game. It has a version of Breakout, it’s got a couple of different kinds of Ponggames, it’s got a maze game. [There was] no software. It was entirely hardware driven…It grew to two attaché cases…with cables that connected them on the bottom. In one of them was the power supply and all the joysticks and stuff. The other one was this giant pile of wire-wrapped boards. So that’s what I did in my spare time. I only made one of them. I never turned it into a business. What a jerk I am.

Probably around 1973 or 74 there was a fire on the Enterprise. The fire was in my shop. It burned down my shop pretty bad. Most of the equipment was totally destroyed. My game, which was in the shop at the time, was totally drenched in this corrosive fluid that they used to put out the fires and it was totally ruined.

At this time, Needle bought parts anywhere he could get them cheaply.

[Dave Needle] Radio Shack didn’t have the parts I needed. I was the manager of a team on the Enterprise…so I knew where the Navy got their parts. So I would buy a lot of those parts from the same sources the Navy was getting them from…I had military-capable wire-wrapped boards…it was the only stuff I could buy. Then one day I stumble across a store called I.C. Electronics in Los Angeles. They had a cool idea. Take integrated circuits, resistors, etc. and vacuum-pack them in nice clean packages and sell them at a decent price. Back then this was unheard of. . . One day I’m standing in the store and in comes a guy with some circuit problem. The kid behind the counter, who has no clue how to design circuits, has no way to help him. So I start helping the guy and this went on for some number of weeks. One day I’m helping a guy and he needs a part and there’s no one around so I yell at Don “Hey can I go back and get this.” He says yes and I go into his rows of parts in the back of the store and he’s got a ton of unlabeled stuff. I wound up going to work at the store for free when I wasn’t working on the ship and he paid me in parts. So I now got free parts for helping guys at an electronics store. I was in heaven.

Todd Fisher and the legendary Mike Quinn (probably at Mike Quinn Electronics)
Courtesy of Fischer's site www.Imsai.net

It wasn’t long before the store’s owner told Needle about an even better source for parts – Mike Quinn Electronics. The gruff, bearlike Quinn was one of the forgotten fathers of the computer revolution. A number of the Bay Area personal computer pioneers haunted his shop, including Bob Marsh, Gordon French, and Lee Felsenstein (Processor Technology); Chuck Grant and Mark Greenberg (North Star Computers), and Howard Fulmer (Equinox-100). Quinn frequented auctions and sales where he was able to obtain overstocked and over-manufactured parts for pennies on the dollar. He then sold the parts out of a sloppy, messy, dirty warehouse located near the Oakland Airport. Quinn’s had everything – motors, parts, control sticks, LEDs, broken video games, and, best of all, dirt-cheap prices. It was an electronics tinkerer’s dream come true. Needle and friends soon began to haunt the place. When they complained about not being able to get parts in the middle of the night, the store’s chief technician offered to give them a key, telling them to come in anytime, take what they wanted, and write it down on the back of a paper sack so they could pay for it later. Uncomfortable with the arrangement, Needle and the technician worked out a compromise, anytime he or his partners wanted anything, they would drive out to the technician’s house, then drive him to the store and he would open it up for them. While the technician’s girlfriend didn’t appreciate Needle and company’s late night visits, the trio was able to get the parts they needed whenever they needed them. The lack of money also meant that the partners often had to make do with homemade equipment.

[Dave Needle] I had to build a ROM programmer. I didn’t have enough money [to buy one]. The first ROM we were using had +9v and –12v, some ridiculous set of power supplies. So I built this thing. It had 8 toggle switches, one for each bit. It had another toggle switch that would increment the address starting from zero. It had a third toggle switch that would generate the programming pulse. So you put in the part, set up the bits, and you wiggled the toggle switch that programs in the 8-bits. Then you hit the address incrementer (I had a set of LEDs reading me the binary address), and you did it again and again. So, one-bit-at-a-time, you entered the data. Because the parts were expensive and I didn’t have a lot of space I made, in hardware, a small decompression mechanism and I had about an 8-1 decompression of the imagery and the hardware decompressed on the fly to give us those images and that was cheaper than [adding] more ROMs.

Not long after the Enterprise fire, Needle and his partner (either Stan Shepard or Bob Ewell) actually got their first offer to make money at their time-consuming “hobby”.

[Dave Needle] I went to work at the Naval Air Station in Alameda around 1974. So while I was there I decided to do another game. The bar where I spent a lot of time…was looking for some kind of an arcade game to have in the bar. So me and my buddy…built a multi-game game that was a sit-down table game. Did I build twenty of these? Did I try to sell it to anybody? No. I built only one. What a jerk I am.

For their next effort, the pair decided to make use of some new technology. All of the games Needle and friends had created so far had been 100% hardware based. Now they decided to create a game using a microprocessor (they would actually end up using two 8080s in the game). While Needle had no real knowledge of software, Stan Shepherd was a software whiz. They took a trip to the Federation Trading Post (an unauthorized seller of Star Trek merchandise in Berkeley run by Charles Weiss and Ron Barlow) and offered to create a Star Trek video game for the place. When the owner told them “Sure, go ahead” they immediately began working on the game. What they didn’t know was that the Trading Post got offers like that every week and no one ever actually came through on their promise. That wouldn't be the case this time. After about four months, Needle, Shepherd, and Bob Ewell had finished the game and the people at the Trading Post were stunned.

[Dave Needle] The game had an Enterprise ship and a Klingon ship. They each had shields around them with 16 shield segments. The shields took individual hits and glowed when they got hit, which was a pretty good accomplishment in those days, and then dimmed down to a lower level of brightness. A couple of hits on a shield would make it die and then a direct hit through the shields to your ship would cause some damage. You could rotate your ship so that the incoming weapon would hit a shield instead of your ship. It was 2-player or one player against the computer. You had 99 photon torpedoes and some amount of phaser energy. In those days that was top-notch stuff. Plus we had a cloaked Romulan ship that would show up when he felt like it and shoot a fireball at you. You could damage the Romulan ship if you hit it while it was visible. The game had 16 levels of gray. It had 42 or 43 plug-in, wire-wrapped boards in a big chassis, 2 fans in the bottom

The game was spectacularly successful. We didn’t understand gaming construction and we built the cabinet bigger than 32 inches across. As a result a lot of places we tried to play the game in couldn’t get it through their door. The other mistake we made was we had this tiny coin box in the bottom that overflowed every day. So we ended up taking it out and putting in two two-pound coffee cans, one under each of the coin slots, which also filled up. While it was in the Federation Trading Post, we were making $400 every couple of days. The three of us, I now had two other partners, would leave work at lunch, drive out to Berkeley and collect the money. After a while we got tired of driving there and we just trusted him and once a week we’d go out there and they’d give us a check of a pile of cash. Did I build ten of these? Did I sell it to someone? No. What a jerk I am.

The trio's Star Trek game (which was probably created around 1977 or 1978) had another feature that would appeal to fans of the series. When a player lost, the Doomsday Machine from the episode of the same name (kind of a giant, floating cornucopia) would appear on screen and destroy their ship. The game was so popular that a local TV station got wind of it and the designers were asked to appear on Bob Wilkins’Creature Features, a Sacramento area late-night show featuring horror movies and hosted by Wilkins, who also interviewed celebrities, the most famous being Christopher Lee[3]. The next day, Needle and his friends were recognized in the streets, but even more importantly, the segment had brought them to attention of Bally/Midway who soon contacted them about creating a game under contract. With the Bally contract in hand, Needle and crew set about work on a game that would eventually see light as Space Encounters and Needle was finally able to turn his “hobby” into a profession[4].

Jerry Lawson

Jerry Lawson is one of the forgotten pioneers of the video game industry. As the designer of the Fairchild Channel Fconsole, Lawson has been called the "father of the video game cartridge". Until recently, however, his work has gone all but unmentioned in most accounts of video game history. Even less known than his work on the Channel F, however, is his creation of one of the earliest coin-op video games to use a microprocessor. A game called Demolition Derby that Lawson designed in his own garage.

The son of a longshoreman, Gerald A. Lawson was born in Queens, New York in December of 1940. His grandfather had been a physicist, but as an African American, the only job he could get was at the post office. His father had a keen interest in science and that interest rubbed off on Jerry. As a youth Jerry dabbled in chemistry, ran an amateur radio station, repaired TVs, and built walkie-talkies. After attending Queens College and CCNY, Lawson worked for ITT, Grumman, and PRD Electronics before heading west to work for Kaiser Electronics in Palo Alto. He eventually made his way to Fairchild, who hired one of its first "field application engineers" - engineers who would work with customers in the field to help out with their designs.

Fairchild had recently released its microprocessor, the F8, in 1975 and Lawson was convinced it could be used to make a video game. A few years earlier (he recalls that it was 1972 or 1973), he had built a game called Demolition Derby in his spare time and soon got to work converting it to use the F8[5].

[Jerry Lawson] I did my home coin-op game first in my garage. Fairchild found out about it — in fact, it was a big controversy that I had done that. And then, very quietly, they asked me if I wanted to do it for them. Then they told me that they had this contracted with this company called Alpex, and they wanted me to work with the Alpex people, because they had done a game which used the Intel 8080. They wanted to switch it over to the F8, so I had to go work with these two other engineering guys and switch the software to how the F8 worked. So, I had a secret assignment; even the boss that I worked for wasn't to know what I was doing.
I was directly reporting to a vice president at Fairchild, with a budget...and finally, we decided, "Hey, the prototype looks like it's going to be worth something. Let's go do something." I had to bring it from this proof of performance to reality — something that you could manufacture. Also, a division had to be made, so I was working with a marketing guy named Gene Landrum, and sat down and wrote a business plan for building video games[6].

Lawson created a top-down driving game called Demolition Derby, which he sold to Major Manufacturers - a small manufacturer in San Mateo, California. Major tested the game at a Campbell, California pizza parlor but went out of business a short time later[7]and apparently built only one copy of the game ever built (Lawson was unable to get funding to build more). As head of Fairchild's video game division, Lawson went on to create Fairchild's Channel Fhome video game system and also became one of only two black members of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club. In March of 2011, Lawson finally got some long-overdue recognition when he was honored as an industry pioneer by the International Game Developers Association. A month later, on April 9, he died of complications from diabetes in in Mountain View, California.

Others

Needle and Lawson weren't the only videogame designers who started out as independents. Among the others were Larry Rosenthal, Ted Michon, Dave Nutting, and (of course) Nolan Bushnell (all of whose stories will be told in later chapters). There is no telling how many other unknown and unsung engineers were creating games in the videogame stone age only to fade forever into anonymity before their games saw the light of day.

Sidebar - Was Demolition Derby the first coin-op game with a microprocessor?

Some sources have suggested that Demolition Derby was the first game to use a microprocessor and even that the game was released not long after Pong, but is this true? Lawson claims he started working on the game in 1972 or 1973 and sold it to Major Manufacturers of San Mateo, CA. Some sources (including the Wikipedia article on Lawson) claim that the game "debuted" shortly after the release of Pong. The F-8, however, was not released until 1975 and Major Manufacturers was not incorporated until October of 1974. The October, 1975 issue of Play Meter announced that at the 1975 MOA show (the same show where Gun Fight was introduced), Major Manufacturers would be "…. introducing two new upright games that use a microprocessor...instead of a logic board, as well as exhibiting their line of video games and a new designer cocktail table". The article does not name any of these games, nor do any other issues of Replay or Play Meter. It is not clear from the description if the microprocessor games were video games or not. The October, 1975 issue of Vending Times, however, does list two games that the company was to display at the MOA: Lunar Module and Fascination - but does not mention whether they use a microprocessor. The 1972/1973 date thus seems clearly too early, at least for a microprocessor version of Demolition Derby (though Lawson could have started with a non-microprocessor version). In addition, only one copy of Demolition Derby is thought to have been built and it never went past the field testing stage. On the other hand, while it seems unlikely that it was field tested prior to 1975, given that Major Manufacturers did plan to show microprocessor games at the 1975 MOA, it (or one of Major's other games) may have been tested prior to the release of Gun Fight.

[2]Probably the article from the November, 1972 issue. Though it was actually published the same month Pong debuted.

[3] Wilkns’ show is said to have persuaded a young fan named George Lucas to begin making Science Fiction movies.

[4] The group had actually designed a quickie game for Ramtek earlier, but the game was never released.

[5] The timing of all of this is unclear. While Lawson says he created the game in '72 or '73, the F8 didn't come out until 1975 (it could have been designed earlier, but surely not as early as 1972). While Lawson's memory could be off, another possibility is that the game started without a microprocessor and he added one later.

[6] From a February 2009 interview conducted by Vintage Computing and Games (http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/545)

[7] Major Manufacturers was incorporated on October 22, 1974 and had a booth at the 1975 MOA show where they introduced Fascination and Lunar Module and displayed other video games (though it isn't known if Demolition Derby was among them).

Max-a-Flex

By this time, the crash was in full effect and Exidy tried anything it could to turn a profit. In April, the company released their new interchangeable "Max-A-Flex" system. The system consisted of an Atari 600XL computer in a cabinet. Four games were initially available: Astro Chase, Boulder Dash, Bristles, and Flip & Flop. All four had previously been released by First Star Software for Atari computers. First Star had been founded in 1982 by New York film producers Richard Spitalny and Billy Blake to feature the work of a brilliant programmer named Fernando Herrera. Born in Bogota, Columbia in the 1940s, Herrera developed an early love for art. By age 8 he was making his own 8mm movies. After graduating from the National University of Columbia with a degree in architecture, Herrera spent three years working in his native country before moving to the U.S. in 1970. In the late 1970s, Herrera discovered personal computers and began learning everything he could about them. Herrera's son Steve had been born with multiple cataracts and pronounced blind by a number of doctors. Refusing to accept their diagnosis, Herrera set about creating a program that would help his son learn. The program would draw a capital letter "E" on the screen in various sizes and rotate it different directions.

[Richard Spitalny] The good news was that even though his son, Stevie, couldn’t speak very much, he could hold up and rotate his hand to indicate how the letter “E” looked to him as he viewed it on the TV screen and he WAS seeing it! Fernando then went on to embellish the program to include all the letters of the alphabet, in both lower and uppercase and displaying a picture for each letter, such an apple for “a”, a bumble bee for “b”, etc. He named his program My First Alphabet™ and submitted it to Atari as part of their first amateur contest for programmers. It won Best Educational Program and was then put in the finals, against the best of each category (Games, Productivity, Education, etc.) and he won! Fernando was awarded $25,000 and he was featured in numerous two-page magazine advertisements in main stream, family oriented magazine, placed by Atari discussing how a father's love and a computer changed the life of a two year old boy!

After winning Atari's first annual Star Award for My First Alphabet, Herrera pushed Atari BASIC to its limits with Space Chase, a well-regarded sci-fi game released by Swifty Software (a Long Island software company run by school teacher Lee Jackson). The game got a rave review in Electronic Games magazine. In 1982, Herrera was managing a retail computer store owned by Bill Blake, who was then working as a film producer with Richard Spitalny. The two had coproduced The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (they later coproduced the 1984 Sylvester Stallone/Dolly Parton film Rhinestone and Blake went on to produce Pumpkinhead).

[Richard Spitalny Billy and I were feature film producers at that time, based out of New York, dealing with the frustrations of trying to raise millions of dollars to fund our movie projects; so, we decided that we would build a company around Fernando to develop and publish computer games! We knew that we could self-fund development and publish games ourselves with much less money and thus have much less risk than was involved with movie projects. We figured we would be able to produce a game in much less time than it would take for us to continue to try to get our feature films funded, shot, edited and distributed. So that's what we did!

Astro Chase, Bristles, and Flip & Flop

First Star's first release was another Fernando Herrera creation, Astro Chase - an outer space shoot-em-up in which the player fought through 36 levels trying to save the earth from destruction. On each level, the player had to destroy 16 megamines while avoiding or fighting off enemy UFOS. The action was broken up by periodic animated intermissions in which the player returned to earth amidst the cheers of an adoring crowd. Astro Chase proved to be a hit, reaching #4 on Electronic Games magazine's computer game charts and winning their Arkie award for Best Sci Fi-Fantasy Computer Game. First Star eventually sold the rights to the game to Parker Brothers.

Bristles was another Fernando Herrera creation that involved a painter painting the walls of a house before time ran out. Jim Nagano's Flip & Flop was a Q*Bert-like game (though it may have been created before Q*Bert). The player controlled a kangaroo named Flip and an ape named Mitch as they tried to turn a grid of squared the same color while avoiding a pursuing zoo keeper. Like Astro Chase, Flip & Flop had animated intermissions. Like Herrera, Nagano was a newcomer to the computer game field.

[Richard Spitalny] We had an open policy for game submissions at that time. We even requested them in an insert packed in with our titles…Interestingly, Jim was in the Air Force at the time, working in a top secret, underground bunker where they kept track of every known nuclear submarine. Meanwhile, as we exchanged floppy disks in the mail, we stamped 'CONFIDENTIAL' in red on the labels. Eventually, Jim told us that for reasons he could not share, we had to stop stamping CONFIDENTIAL on the disks because he was searched every day going in and out of the facility and it was causing 'issues' as one might imagine. :-)

Boulder Dash

First Star's most successful game was unquestionably Boulder Dash, designed and programmed by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray. Liepa got the idea while playing computer games on a friend's Atari 400 computer. Deciding that he could write a game himself, he contacted a local software publisher to see what kind of games were in demand. The publisher put him in contact with another programmer named Chris Gray who had written a digging game in BASIC called Pitfall and needed help converting it into machine language. The game involved digging through dirt and rocks to unearth gems, a concept similar to the Centuri/Zilec game The Pit. Liepa felt the game didn't have legs and that the levels were all the same. He quickly built a physics engine that allowed him to create random levels by varying the position and density of the rocks and gems. Liepa then set to work adding graphics, sound, and other features, such as scrolling, to the game, which had the working title Cavern Raider. To add an element of risk, Liepa changed the game so that the falling rocks would kill you. At the suggestion of Gray, Liepa changed the player's avatar from a simple cross-like cursor to a human-like figure named Rockford, who would blink his eyes and tap his feet impatiently if the player didn't keep moving. In about six months, Liepa completed the game, which he had renamed Boulder Dash - a play on "balderdash". Liepa then spent six months shopping the game around to various software companies. One of them was First Star.

[Richard Spitalny] Peter mailed an early work-in-progress version of “Boulder Dash®” and it just so happened that I was the person who opened it. I was thus the first person at First Star Software who played it and I thought it was amazing within two minutes of playing it. It was different. It was fun. You ‘got it’ right away; but, it was also very challenging…Shortly after we received “Boulder Dash”, Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel, the editors of Electronic Games Magazine, were visiting us at First Star and I showed them “Boulder Dash” and told them that we were negotiating to acquire the rights; so, I asked them what they thought of the game. As you can imagine, they too were very impressed with the game play… the graphics being somewhat ‘under whelming’…. but the game play was just so intuitive, so exciting, so addictive … it was such a great combination of ‘mental gymnastics’ and hand/eye coordination. It was like nothing any of us had ever seen before.

First Star released the game for the Atari 400/800 and IBM PC and PC Jr. and licensed it to MicroFun, who released it for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and ColecoVision.

In November of 1983, Warner Communications acquired a 50% ownership in First Star. In early 1984 they signed a deal with Exidy, who needed games on Atari 400/800 cartridges for their new arcade system. First Star had four games available and Exidy took all of them. It may have been the first time a computer game made the transition to arcade format rather than vice versa. Exidy likely saw this as a way to provide arcade operators with a cheap interchangeable game system with a ready supply of new software titles (not to mention that Exidy itself would not have to invest in research and development). Unfortunately, the idea didn't work. Under the terms of the agreement, Exidy paid First Star an advance against future royalties and agreed to buy all the cartridges for their system from First Star. Exidy was required to sell 1,500 kits by October 1st. When they didn't, First Star terminated the agreement and the Max-A-Flex system was quickly forgotten (in 1985 First Star entered into an agreement with a Japanese company called Computique giving them rights to distribute Boulder Dash in Japan. Computique sublicensed the game to Data East, who produced a version of the game for their own DECO cassette system).

Vertigo

Perhaps the most interesting, if not successful, game "released" in 1985 was Vertigo– a game designed by Howell Ivy with the same name as Owen Rubin’s effort from two years earlier, but different gameplay. Vertigo was a vector graphics game mounted in a huge cockpit cabinet that actually swiveled and spun about. Rather than hydraulic pistons, two jackscrews inside the moved it up/down and left/right. The system was called the “XCD-1 environmental system”. Once again, Ken Nicholson handled the game's sound effects

[Ken Nicholson] The engine sound in Vertigo/Vortex/Top Gunner was a really cool "wub-wub" sound that was made by placing the bare wires from a microphone cable inside a coke can while moving my hands up and down next to it. Kind of like the principle behind the Theremin.

The game itself was a first-person outer space shooter with the ability to buy more fuel by inserting another quarter. Exidy planned to release more games for the cabinet in the future. According to Ivy, Exidy (or is that XCD?) built about 150 units. Due to the high price and the collapsing video game industry, they only sold a fraction of those. While a few may have been leased, most were given away to operators as part of a revenue sharing program. Exidy set up a division called Fifty-50 Inc. with plans to put Vertigo machines into selected arcades with Exidy splitting the coin box 50/50 with the location owner. The idea, which seems innovative, was actually yet another desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt by Exidy to generate revenue any way it could

Today's post is another that may only be of interest to me.
RePlay and Play Meter magazines both published monthly and yearly charts listing the highest performing video games (based on earnings).
I plan to include an appendix in my book summarizing all of the data from these charts (as well as the Electronic Games charts) for games from the bronze and golden ages (games released prior to 1986).
I have always been fascinated with this kind of stuff. In college, I used to spend hours poring over Joel Whitburn's books on the Billboard pop charts.

Posting the entire appendix is too much for one post, so I'll start with the introduction to the RePlay section, plus the data for Atari.

I will post the Bally/Midway data next time and if there is interest, I can continue with the rest of the data.

RePlay Magazine Charts

RePlay published its first issue in November of 1975. Over the years, they published a number of charts listing top games (video, pinball, and arcade) by performance (earnings). Through 1981, RePlay published a list of top earning games as part of its annual operators' survey. In April of 1980, they published their first monthly "Player's Choice" chart listing the top performing games based on operator surveys. They also published summary charts of top games for the years 1982-1986 based on the performance on the Player's Choice charts.

"Annual" Charts:

April 1976 poll

RePlay's first equipment poll appeared in the April, 1976 issue. It listed the top 20 arcade games in use during 1975 and 1976. Ten of the games listed were video games, including the top 3. The others were pinball and electromechanical games. I removed the non-video games to create a video game top 10. The poll also included a number of other games that drew votes but did not perform well enough to make the top 20 - though they would have made a list of the top 25 video games if RePlay had compiled one at the time. (I list these as "AM" for "also mentioned").

1976-1981 Annual Operator Surveys

Replay published its first annual operator survey in the October, 1976 issue. The survey included a list of the top ten arcade games. Operators were asked to list their "most profitable" games. 7 of the top 10 were video games, including the top 2. They also listed 4 other video games as being "mentioned strongly" (again, these are listed as "AM").

The second survey appeared in November, 1977. Operators were told "Please tell us the five most profitable games you have operated this year by model and manufacturer name." The top 20 games were listed. 12 were video games. For the first time, the top game wasn't a video game (it was Bally's Evel Knievel pin). Six other video games were listed as receiving "favorable mentions" but were too close to be ranked accurately (again, these are listed as "AM" below). For each of these charts I have removed the non-video games to create a separate chart for video games
The November, 1978, 1979, and 1980 surveys were the first to list video games and pinball separately. They listed the top 10 or each. The November, 1981 survey listed only the top three video games. After 1981, the yearly operator surveys no longer listed the top games of the year.

1983 Year-in-Review List

The January, 1984 issue included a year in review article that listed the top 20 video games and top 5 kit games of 1983, based on their performance on the monthly Player's Choice charts.

1982-1986 Top 40 Charts

The March, 1987 issue included a five-year retrospective of the "Player's Choice" charts. It listed the top 40 video games (dedicated and kit games were mixed together) for each year from 1982-1986 based on chart performance. The rankings were based on an overall chart performance and not just peak position (though they didn't specify exactly how they computed them). Donkey Kong, for instance was the #1 game of 1982 despite the fact that it never made it to #1 on any monthly chart.

Player's Choice Charts

Beginning with the April, 1980 issue, Replay began publishing monthly "Player's Choice" charts listing the top earning video games and pinball machines. The first chart included four video game lists: the top 25 games by distribution and performance in both street and arcade locations. Starting with the second chart (June, 1980); they switched to a single chart with the top 20 upright video games. This format lasted until January of 1982 From February, 1982 on the top 25 were listed.

Results were based on "…an earnings-opinion poll of street and game center operators in the United States…". Operators were mailed a "ballot" sheet "listing games in active operation" and asked to rate them. I do not know if they were able to write in games that were not on the list Beginning in May of 1983, Replay began publishing separate charts for "upright" (aka "dedicated" video games) and "software" (conversion kits etc.). The software chart listed the top 10 games (top 20 beginning in 1985). The charts also included an "Index" and "Distribution" percentage. The Index was used to determine the game rankings.

Index: Operators were asked to rate each game on a 1-4 scale (4=excellent earnings, 3=good, 2=fair, 1=poor). Scores were multiplied by 25 and divided by the number of responses to produce an index with a maximum value of 100 (for a game that received all 4s). Beginning with the December, 1981 issue the poll switched from a 4-point to a 10-point scale with 10 indicating "power-house earnings". The index was a simple average of the scores (with a maximum of 10).

Distribution: The charts also listed the percentage of respondents who had each game. Games that did not meet a certain threshold were not included in the charts. The threshold percentage was 25% until April of 1983 (except for October, 1982 when it was lowered to 20% for a month). In April of 1983, it was lowered to 20%. In March or April of 1985, it was lowered again to 15%. Note that this only applied to the dedicated games chart. The software/conversion kit chart had no minimum distribution threshold (probably because, initially, so few kit games were owned by 15% of operators).

Beginning in June, 1980, a separate "New Performers" (later called "Best New Uprights") chart appeared, listing the top (usually 3-5) dedicated games that did not meet the distribution threshold for the main chart..

Cocktail Chart
From February, 1982 to February, 1984, RePlay included a list of the top five (sometimes fewer) cocktail table games. This chart sometimes listed the Index and distribution percentage, but usually did not. On a few occasion,
Since the Cocktail charts were so short and short-lasting, I have not included them in the summary information below. In addition, the same games tended to appear on the charts. Only 14 different titles appeared on the cocktail charts over the years. Two games dominated the charts. Ms. Pac-Man appeared on the charts 21 times and was #1 19 times. Pac-Manappeared 23 times and was #1 4 times. No other game reached the #1 position. Three other games were also very popular: Centipede (21 appearances), Donkey Kong(16 appearances), and Galaga (15 appearances). Indexes and distribution percentages were much lower for cocktail games than they were for upright games or conversion kits. The highest index ever achieved by a cocktail game was 5.27 by Ms. Pac-Man in August, 1982. The highest distribution was 92% by Ms. Pac-Man in May of 1983. Other than Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, the highest index was 4.29 (Frogger) and the highest distribution was 61% (Centipede - though bear in mind that index and distribution were often omitted).
Note that no cocktail chart was published in the March, 1983 issue and I am missing the cocktail chart for the June, 1982 issue.

Chart Summary

The following section summarizes chart performance data for all games released prior to January, 1986. It was compiled from the annual charts listed above plus the monthly Player's Choice charts from April 1980 to March 1989 (the last issue I have from the 1980s).

NOTE that Replay did not publish a chart in the following issues: May 1980, September 1980, November, 1980, and September, 1981.

I am missing the following issues:

1988: January, February, March, June, October, November
1989: January, April-December
Note that by March of 1989, few (if any) games from prior to 1986 were still appearing on the charts. In fact, no game from before 1986 appeared on the March, 1989 charts and only 1 (Paperboy, which was #19 on the software charts) appeared on the February, 1989 charts. Nonetheless, it is possible that some of these games may have appeared on charts after March of 1989.

I am missing the index and distribution data for June, 1982 and March, 1985 (though I have the rankings).

A "+" indicates that the game was still on the charts in 1988 and 1989 and may have been included in the missing issues above or issues from after March, 1989.

Records:

Most Times Charted (monthly charts only):
Note that if a game charted on both the upright and software charts for a given month, I only count it once.

1.    Monaco GP (Sega/Gremlin) - 71
2.    Galaga (Midway/Namco) - 61
3.    Pole Position (Atari/Namco) - 56+
4.    Pole Position II [SW] (Atari/Namco) - 55+
5.    Turbo (Sega/Gremlin) - 51
6.    Ms. Pac-Man (Midway) - 43
7.    Spy Hunter (Midway)- 41
8.    Centipede (Atari) - 39
9.    Pac-Man (Midway/Namco) - 34
10. Paperboy (Atari) - 32+
Birdie King II (Monroe/Coin-It) - 32

Longest Chart Span:

1.    Monaco GP (Sega/Gremlin) - 84 months (April, 1980 - April, 1987)
2.    Pole Position II (Atari/Namco) - 62 months+ (December, 1983 - February, 1989+)
3.    Galaga (Midway/Namco) - 62 months (January, 1982 - March, 1987)
4.    Pole Position (Atari/Namco) - 61 months+ (March, 1983 - April, 1988+)
5.    Turbo (Sega/Gremlin) - 56 months (April, 1982 - December, 1986)
6.    Ms. Pac-Man (Midway) - 43 months (March, 1982 - November, 1985)
7.    Centipede (Atari) - 43 months (August, 1981 - March, 1985)
8.    Paperboy (Atari) - 40 months+ (October, 1985 - February, 1989+)
9.    Spy Hunter (Midway) - 40 months (March, 1984 - July, 1987)
10. Pac-Man (Midway) - 37 months (January, 1981 - March, 1984)
11. Hang On (Sega) - 36 months+ (December, 1985 - December, 1988+)

NOTE - if we included appearances on the annual charts, the following games would make the list:

In October, 1976 Death Race appeared in the "also mentioned" section of the charts rather than the main charts.

1.    Sea Wolf (Midway) - 46 months (October, 1976 - August, 1980)
2.    Death Race (Exidy) - 45 months (October, 1976 - July, 1980)
3.    Sprint II (Atari) - 41 months (November, 1977 - April, 1981)

Highest Peak Index

4/100 point system
1.    Asteroids (Atari) - 100
2.    Defender -(Williams) 99.34
3.    Space Invaders (Midway/Taito) - 98.71
4.    Monaco GP (Sega/Gremlin) - 98.61
5.    Pac-Man (Midway/Namco) - 98.39

10 point system
1.    Gauntlet (Atari) - 9.88
2.    Punch Out (Nintendo) - 9.86
3.    Pole Position (Atari) - 9.76
4.    Ms. Pac-Man (Midway) - 9.67
5.    Pac-Man (Midway/Namco) - 9.63
Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics) - 9.63

Note - the highest peak rating for a conversion kit was 9.4 for Thayer's Quest (RDI)

Highest Peak Distribution %

Asteroids (Atari) - 100%
Centipede (Atari) - 100%
Donkey Kong (Nintendo) - 100%
Galaxian (Midway/Namco) - 100%
Pac-Man (Midway/Namco) - 100%
Space Invaders (Midway/Taito) - 100%

Note - Ms. Pac-Man had a peak distribution percentage of 98%. The highest peak distribution percentage for a conversion kit was 92% for Mr. Do! (Universal)

Most Charted Games (Company) - including games licensed to other companies

Incomplete

1. Atari/Kee - 51

2.    Bally/Midway/Sente- 49
Note - includes Bally/Sega (1 game) and Bally/Sente (5 games)
3.    Sega/Gremlin - 26
4.    Nintendo - 16
5.    Taito/Taito America - 15
6.    Namco - 14, Konami - 14
8.    Exidy - 13
9.    Data East - 12
10. Williams - 11
11. Cinematronics - 10
12. Centuri - 9, Stern - 9

The following section includes summary information for every game that was released prior to January, 1986. It includes data from the Player's Choice upright and software charts as well as the "annual" charts. Games are listed by manufacturer in alphabetical order. Licensed games are listed under the company that released them in the U.S. (i.e. Gyruss is under Centuri) and noted under company that they were licensed from.

For each game, the following data is listed in the monthly charts section:

1.    Name - if a game is licensed from another company on the list, that company will be noted (i.e. "lic Namco")

2.    First Appearance : Last Appearance (Span) – The month and year the game first and last appeared on the charts (as of March, 1989), along with the number of months between first and last appearance in parenthesis.
NOTE that given the missing issues from 1988 and 1989 listed above, some games that ended their run in these years may have had slightly longer runs.

3.    Times Charted– The number of times a game appeared on the charts as of March, 1989. This often gives a more accurate gauge of a game’s popularity than the peak position alone.
NOTE that given the missing issues from 1988 and 1989 listed above, some games that charted in these years may have had charted a few more times.

4.    Peak Position– The games highest position on the charts (preceded by a # sign)
Note: for games listed #1 or #2 the number of times they appeared at that position is listed in parenthesis.

5.    Average (Peak) Index - The average and peak values for the game's performance index (see above). For games that spanned the 4/100 and 10 point systems, I include figures from whichever method included the peak index.

6.    Average (Peak) Distribution Percentage - The average and peak values for the game's distribution percentage (The percent of operators responding to the equipment poll who had the game).

[SW] indicates "software" chart

Games that appeared only on the "New Games" charts and not the upright or software charts are also listed, along with their peak position on the "New Games" chart, the month they achieved the peak, and their peak index and distribution percentage.

Note that for annual charts, the 1983 chart that appeared in the January, 1984 issue is listed as "1983" while the 1983 chart that appeared in the March, 1987 issue is listed as "1983b".

Atari/KeeGames charted: 51

#1 games: Asteroids, Black Widow [SW], Pole Position, Pole Position II [SW], Tank

Most Appearances: Pole Position (56+), Pole Position II (55+), Centipede (39)
Longest Span: Pole Position II (62+ months), Pole Position (61+ months)
Highest Peak Index: Asteroids (100), Gauntlet (9.88)
Highest Peak Distribution %: Asteroids (100%), Centipede (100%)

Annual Charts

Asteroids: 1980 (#1), 1981 (#3), 1982 (#19)
Asteroids Deluxe: 1982 (#29)
Atari Football: 1979 (#2)
Black Widow: 1983b (#30)
Breakout: 10/76 (#5), 1977 (#3), 1978 (#5)
Centipede: 1982 (#4), 1983 (#12), 1983b (#9), 1984 (#35)
Crystal Castles: 1983 (#20), 1983b (#29), 1984 (#23)
Dig Dug (lic. Namco): 1982 (#15)
Drag Race: 1977 (#4)
Fire Truck/Smokey Joe: 1978 (#9)
Gauntlet: 1986 (#2)
Gran Trak (10 and 20): 3/76 (#5)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: 1985 (#39), 1986 (#19)
Indy 4: 10/76 (#6)
Indy 800: 3/76 (#4), 10/76 (#4)
Kangaroo (lic. Sun Electronics): 1982 (#20)
LeMans: 1977 (AM), 1978 (#10)
Marble Madness: 1985 (#29)
Millipede: 1983 (#13), 1983b (#8), 1984 (#25)
Missile Command: 1980 (#4), 1982 (#38)
Night Driver: 1977 (#7)
Paperboy: 1986 (#12)
Pole Position (lic. Namco): 1983 (#2), 1983b (#1), 1984 (#2), 1985 (#4), 1986 (#14)
Pole Position II (lic. Namco): 1984 (#1), 1985 (#3), 1986 (#6)
Space Duel: 1982 (#21)
Space Race: 3/76 (AM)
Sprint I: 1978 (#3)
Sprint II: 1977 (#2), 1978 (#2), 1979 (#3)
Star Wars: 1983 (#3), 1983b (#19), 1984 (#11)
Starship I: 1977 (#5), 1978 (#7)
Steeplechase: 5/76 (AM)
Super Breakout: 1979 (#8)
Super Bug: 1977 (AM), 1978 (#6)
Tank: 3/76 (#1)
Tempest: 1982 (#11)
Twin Racer: 3/76 (#6)
Video Pinball: 1979 (#10)
Xevious (lic. Namco): 1983b (#27)

Monthly Charts

Asteroids	04/80-08/82 (28)	24	1(9)	97 (100)	97% (100%)
Asteroids Deluxe	05/81-05/82 (12)	11	5	82 (95.11)	76% (88%)
Atari Basketball	04/80	1	15
Atari Football	04/80-07/80 (3)	3	9	68 (78.57)	83% (84%)
Atari Football (4p)	04/80-12/80 (8)	6	6	68 (92.18)	37% (41%)
Battlezone	12/80-10/81 (10)	10	2(2)	80 (96.97)	76% (88%)
Black Widow [SW]	05/83-10/83 (5)	3	1(1)	6.5 (8)	24% (35%)
Centipede	08/81-03/85 (43)	39	3	92 (96.62)	94% (100%)
Crystal Castles [SW]	09/84-02/85 (5)	3	8	7 (7.4)	24% (32%)
Crystal Castles	10/83-05/85 (19)	16	6	6.6 (7.33)	46% (57%)
Dig Dug (lic Namco)	06/82-03/83 (9)	10	7	7.5 (8.44)	72% (83%)
Empire Strikes Back	06/86	1	18	7.3 ()	% (39%)
Fire Truck	04/80	1	22	56	22%
Firefox	07/84-01/85 (6)	4	9	6.4 (7.17)	23% (25%)
Food Fight	10/83	1	24	6.2	24%
Gauntlet	12/85-12/87 (24)	24	1(6)	8.2 (9.88)	67% (96%)
Gauntlet (2P)	12/86-08/87 (8)	9	8	7.1 (7.62)	20% (41%)
Gravitar	10/82-11/82 (1)	2	22	6.1 (6.11)	33% (37%)
Indiana Jones [SW]	11/85-02/87 (15)	16	3	7.5 (8.69)	44% (55%)
Kangaroo (lic Sun)	08/82-12/82 (4)	5	8	7.5 (8.52)	56% (64%)
LeMans	04/80-08/80 (4)	4	13	60 (65.27)	53% (61%)
Lunar Lander	04/80-07/80 (3)	3	4	59 (59.72)	57% (58%)
Major Havoc [SW]	07/84	1	5	6.9	21%
Major Havoc	04/85-05/85 (1)	2	24	5.7 (5.92)	23% (24%)
Marble Madness [SW]	10/85	1	18	6.9	39%
Marble Madness	04/85-09/85 (5)	6	5	7.5 (8.05)	31% (41%)
Millipede	03/83-05/85 (26)	25	3	6.9 (8)	52% (67%)
Missile Command	10/80-02/82 (16)	10	3	86 (94.12)	80% (91%)
Night Driver	04/80-01/81 (9)	6	10	69 (77.38)	48% (54%)
Paperboy [SW]	10/85-02/89 (40)	32	1(1)	7.4 (8.79)	41% (58%)
Paperboy	07/85-09/85 (2)	3	3	8.5 (8.91)	29% (41%)
Peter Packrat [SW]	11/85	1	20	6.6	17%
Pole Position (l Namco)	03/83-04/88 (61)	56	1(7)	8 (9.76)	81% (90%)
Pole Position II [SW]	12/83-02/89 (62)	55	1(7)	7.6 (9)	61% (79%)
Return of the Jedi	04/85-10/87 (30)	5	16	6 (6.33)	18% (25%)
Road Runner [SW]	08/86-09/86 (1)	2	10	7 (7.33)	15% (21%)
Sky Raider	04/80	1	24	54	0
Space Duel	04/82-08/82 (4)	5	12	7.1 (8.3)	53% (62%)
Sprint II	04/80-04/81 (12)	9	5	73 (86.71)	77% (80%)
Star Wars	09/83-07/85 (22)	23	2(1)	7.1 (9.53)	69% (82%)
Super Breakout	04/80-08/80 (4)	4	12	65 (69.03)	50% (53%)
Super Bug	04/80-10/80 (6)	5	11	62 (68.33)	46% (54%)
Tempest	12/81-11/82 (11)	12	3	7.9 (9.17)	89% (96%)
TX-1 (lic Namco)	06/85-07/85 (1)	2	1(1)	9.1 (9.33)	17% (17%)
Warlords	07/81	1	18	72	25%
Xevious (lic Namco)	04/83-09/84 (17)	14	8	6.6 (7.95)	38% (48%)

Games appearing only on "New Games" chart: Arabian (7/83, #5, 7.13, 9%), Fast Freddie (11/82, #6, 5.22, 15%), I, Robot (11/84, #5, 5.43, 13%)

Recently I came across some info about some possible early attempts at a coin-op video game that I thought some might find interesting (note that here I use the term "video game" in its current common-use sense - I am fully aware of the controversy over the definition of the term and that many don't consider vector games video games, but that's a topic for another time).

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were probably the first people to actually start buildign a coin-op video game (or at least the first anyone knows about) but who was the first to think of the idea? (and I'm talking serious consideration here - like someone who was serio.us about doing it)
Let's look at a few contenders.

Nolan Bushnell

This is probably the answer most would give. Nolan claims that he first saw Spacewar at the University of Utah. Varying accounts date this incident from as early as 1962 to the "mid-60s" and claim that Bushnell thought of monetizing the game either soon after seeing it, or while working at the Lagoon Amusement Park during this same period.
But is this account true? Ted Dabney claims that Bushnell never mentioned Spacewar (or the idea of a commerial video game) to him until he saw the game at Stanford around 1969. Of course, just because he didn't mention the game to Dabney doesn't mean he hadn't seen it earlier, but some people still question his account of having seen the game as an undergrad. IIRC, Goldberg and Vendel wonder if Bushnell claimed to have seen it in the mid-60s in order to establish priority over Ralph Baer (who started working on his video game in 1966). They also pointedly (again, IIRC) omit any mention of Nolan seeing the game at U of U. I did a quick search to see if I could verify that University of Utah did have the game by the mid-1960s. Or even to see if they had a PDP-1 by then (since DEC supposedly included the game on all the units they sold) but didn't really find anything. Of course, even if he did see the game in the mid-60s, that doesn't mean he saw the dollar signs at that time.

So, if Nolan didn't come up with the idea until 1969-ish (and I'm not saying that is or isn't the case - his account may be entirely truthful), who might have done so earlier?

Steve Russell et al

At least one source I read mentioned that the Spacewar design team briefly discussed the idea of trying to sell the game but quickly dropped it, figuring that DEC was their only potential customer and they wouldn't be interested. Even if this is true, however, it doesnt' really count because a) it sounds like it was nothing more than a brief discussion rather than a serious proposal and b) it wasn't for a coin-op version of the game.

Hugh Tuck

According to Galaxy Game designer Bill Pitts, Hugh Tuck was the one who suggested creating a coin-op version of Spacewar. But when did this occur? Pitts said he saw the game around two years after he enrolled at Stanford in his Junior year. Pitts enrolled in 1964 so that would place the incident around 1966 or 1967. He also says that he realized Tuck's idea was feasible about three years later when he was working for Lockheed and saw that DEC had released the PDP-11. The PDP-11 was released in December, 1970 but I don't know when Pitts found out about it. The two of them formed Computer Recreations in June of 1971, however. From this info, Tuck's suggestion of monetizing the game came somewhere between 1966 and 1968.

Richard Ball

According to the Wikipedia entry for Nutting Associates, engineer Richard Ball drew up a proposal for a coin-op video game called Space Command. After Nutting passed on the idea, Ball and coworker Ransom White formed their own company called Cointronics. There are some problems with this story, however. First, the Wikipedia article is completely unsourced. In 2012, someone named Judith Guerin left a comment on an article by Benj Edwards about Computer Space that made essentially the same claim, but again no source is given and I don't know who Judith Guerin is. I don't know if she was using Wikipedia as her source or vice versa or if they both used a different source.
Even if the story is true, however, when did it occur? A Google books search revelas that Cointronics showed two games (Zap Ball and Ball/Walk) at the 1968 MOA show so they were around by then. A search of the California Secretary of State website shows that Cointronics incorporated in early 1969 so it seems to be a good guess that the company was formed sometime in 1968 and Ball left Nutting shortly before. I was unable to track down Ball or White (though I did confirm that White usually went by "G. Ransom White"). So let's say this incident occured in 1968.

Unknown Stanford Student/Staffer

FInally, there's this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8zU8WQO-PY

This is from a 2006 panel discussion that was part of a celebration of the PDP-1. The panel included a number of members of MIT's famed hacker community of the 1960s, including Alan Kotok, John McCarthy, Peter Sampson, and Spacewar creator Steve Russell. During a q-and-a session after the discussion, an unidentified audience member claims that in 1966 or 1967 American Express provided Stanford with seed money for a program to come up with potential projects for future development. The person claims he drew up a proposal to put a multi-player version of Spacewar on a dedicated, timeshared PDP-1, put it in a bowling alley or shopping center, and charge people to play. Stanford considered the idea too frivolous to submit.
Unfortunately, I have no idea who this guy is. I don't think it's Hugh Tuck (plus, his story is very different from Tucks) but if his story is true, he might be a good candidate. True, his game likely wouldn't have had a coin-slot, since it seems he was talking about charging per block of time, but he was thinking about putting the game in a bowling alley.

Someone else

Of course, ideas are cheap and there could well have been any number of people who entertained the idea of a coin-op "video" game far earlier than any of those mentioned above (and some would say that it's irrelevant who thought of the idea - it's who implemented it that matters).

Odds and ends

Speaking of Computer Space, here's an early article on the game from the May, 1972 issue of Vending Times

And speaking of Nolan Bushnell, take a look at this:

So who is that and what does he have to do with Nolan Bushnell?
That's John Bushnell, Nolan's great-grandfather. Born in England in 1823, John came to America and went to Utah in 1850 in one of the early companies of Mormon settlers. At one point, he actually wanted to return home but Brigham Young sent him to the new town of Fillmore, where his family was one of the first six in the area. He opened a store and a post office before trading his property for a farm in nearby Meadow in 1862.

OK, that really doesn't have anything to do with video games, but I found it interesting.

Finally, speaking of Cointronics, here's a photo of their countertop game Ball/Walk (games like this drive me nuts since I suck at pretty much any game other than pinball that involves a steel ball - I tried to play Ice Cold Beer once and I think I got one ball in hole).

Recently, I was going through some of the Magnavox Vs. Activision documents that are available at the University of New Hampshire School of Law website (it looks like they were donated by Ralph Baer):

http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/Activision_Litigation_Documents/Activision_Lit_Doc_index.asp

For those who don't know, Magnavox launched a number of patent infringement lawsuits beginning around 1974 against various companies (they were also sued themselves, I believe).

Here are some of the coin-op companies named in the suits - along with the games they mentioned in the suits):
·         Atari
·         Bally
·         Midway (Playtime and Winner)
·         Seeburg (Pro Hockey, Pro Tennis, Paddle Ball [all by Williams, which Seeburg owned at the time), Olympic Tennis [released by See-Fun, another Seeburg company, though I think it was just a brand name they used),
·         Allied Leisure (Paddle Battle, Tennis Tourney)
·         Chicago Coin (TV Ping Pong, TV Tennis, Olympic TV Hockey, TV Goalee)

They also mentioned Ramtek's Hockey and Soccer and URL's Video Action III, so they may have sued them too. Consumer manufacturers named in the suits include Sears, APF Electronics, and Fairchild.

Most of the documents were rather boring but there were some gems in there (testimony by Willy Higinbotham, for instance - lists of which Activision games infringed on their patents and which didn't - Activision sales figures).

The info I found most interesting was a list of early computer games and other devices that were mentioned in the trial. One of the tactics tried by the companies in the suits was to claim that the Magnavox patents were invalid because there were earlier inventions that constituted "prior art" or invalidated the patents for other reasons.
All such attempts failed, but it appears that these games came up again and again.
Some of them are very well known to video/computer game historians.

Spacewar and Tennis For Two were brought up numerous times. They even trotted out the old MIT Bouncing Ball program (I don't think they were implying that this was a game. My guess is that they were offering as an example of a program with "coincidence detection".)

I don't think the old "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device" was on the list, though the patent was referenced. If not, this was probably because this patent was actually referenced in one (or more) of the Baer patents. One of the claims the various companies made was that Magnavox and/or Sanders was aware of these games at the time they applied for their patents but failed to mention it to the patent examiner.

There were a number of games, however, that I've never seen mentioned anywhere else and some sounded quite interesting.
Here is a list, with a few notes.

Michigan Pool Game (1954)

In 1954 William George Brown created a pool simulation at the University of Michigan. The program was demonstrated at the Association for Computing Machinery meeting in Detroit that same year. It was a two-player pool game with 15 balls and a cue ball that made use of a CRT.

Training Device For Marksmen (1960)
Fritz Spiegel's Military Trainer (1960)

In 1960, the US patent offices issued a pair of patents[1]for a military training similar developed for the German aircraft manufacturer Bolkow (they had been patented earlier in Germany). The device included a CRT and a pair of controls. The trainee used a joystick-like device to steer a guided missile that appeared on the screen towards a tank while avoiding flying the missile into the ground. A second controller allowed an instructor to move the tank or set up various training scenarios. The second of the two patents was issued to Fritz Spiegel, an employee of Messerschmitt (Bolkow merged with Messerschmitt in 1968). The defendants claim that the device was (or could be) connected to a standard television set. The patent was later sold to APF Electronics, who manufactured the 1977 Pongconsole TV Fun. Magnavox sued APF in 1977 (they learned of the Spiegel patent the same year) but the case was dismissed for lack of venue. In 1981, Magnavox acquired the Spiegel patent. In the Magnavox/Activision case, Magnavox acknowledged (or at least refused to deny) that the Spiegel patent constituted "prior art" in relation to the "507" Baer patent. While the device made use of a CRT (and apparently a raster-scan display), it was designed as a training device, so calling it the first video "game" would seem a bit ludicrous.

NOTE - Much of the above info was taken from Activision documents, so you may want to take it with a grain of salt. While it appears that Magnavox admitted that this constituted prior art, the court did not find that it invalidated their patents. I haven't really looked into the reason why, because that's not my primary interest.

Rand Corporation Handball/Jai Alai Game (ca 1963)

Unfortunately, no details on this one are provided in the available documents for the case.

GE/NASA Scene Generator (1964)

In 1964 NASA purchased a system from General Electric that simulated various docking and landing maneuvers. The program included numerous modules: a lunar landing simulation, a spaceship docking simulation, a "game" in which the player controlled and airplane (or helicopter) and fired bullets at a moving tank, an aircraft-carrier landing simulation, and an airport landing simulation. The system used a color raster-scan display and made use of a joystick-like controller. It was designed by Jim Van Artsdalen, (possibly the same person who later worked on Origin's Ultima III and Ultima IV), James Lawrence, and James Smith. Like the Spiegel device, however, this appears to have been more of a training program than a video game.

IDI Pool Game (1966)

John Drumheller graduated from MIT in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. During his undergraduate years, he developed a number of programs for the PDP-1 in building 26, working alongside the hackers as they developed Spacewar. Among the programs he created was a Mill game (the Scandinavian equivalent of checkers) and a Go algorithm. After graduating, Drumheller went to work for Adams Associates. In 1966, Information Displays, Inc. of Armonk, New York approached Adams about developing a demonstration program for their monitors. Drumheller, who just two days earlier had started experimenting with a program that made balls bounce onscreen, volunteered to write a pool game. Written on a DDP-116, the game was shown at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in the fall of 1966. Two players used a light pen to maneuver a cue stick and play a (somewhat) standard game of pool. The game included 15 balls, a crude form of English, and kept score automatically. In 1967, Drumheller's brother-in-law Peter Mullarky created a version of the game for another computer that used a vector display. From Drumheller's courtroom testimony it appears that the original version may have used a raster display, but this isn't clear. Drumheller also claims that he considered making a consumer version of the game that would run on a standard TV set. He also claims that he was later told that someone at MIT was developing a pool game at the same time he was.

NOTES - Drumheller's testimony is actually available on the site and makes for good reading. At least most of it does. A lot of time is spent discussing exactly how you hit the ball. Apparently, it was possible to hit the cue ball without actually moving the cue stick. The program just sensed where the light pen was and ignored the cue stick (though if you touched the cue stick, it moved). The court went to some length to note that this (ignoring the cue stick) was not the normal method of play.

My guess is that this was done because I believe that one of the patents covered having one object on the screen impart motion to another object and they wanted to show that this program did so (if the cue stick graphic didn't actually move, you could argue that it didn't).

RCA Pool Game (1967)

What is it with pool games? In 1967, RCA demonstrated a pool game on their Spectra 70 computer during an open house event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton. The BBC filmed the game, which was also the subject of an AP news story. The game was mentioned in the Magnavox cases and was referenced in one of the Ralph Baer patents from 1977.

NOTES - I am not sure that this was created for the Spectra 70. The text doesn't say for what system it was designed. But the Spectra 70 manual and a number of other Spectra 70 materials were entered as evidence, so I'm assuming it was.

CDC Baseball Game (ca 1967)

This game was briefly mentioned in documents for the Magnavox/Activision case but Activision doesn't seem to have done much research into the game and no other detail is given in the available case documents. They were likely talking about that various games that were developed for the CDC 6600 (which included games like baseball, Lunar Lander, and Spacewar). A baseball game called BAT was created for the system, but that may have been a different game. Announced in 1964 and released in 1966 with a price of $7 million, the CDC is considered by some the first "supercomputer". The baseball game may have been programmed by Thomas J. Spence (who is mentioned in the Magnavox/Activision documents in relation to the game).

NOTES - When I first started researching this one, I came across this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vtg-COMPUTER-BASEBALL-Electronic-Data-Controls-1969-Table-Top-EARLY-VIDEO-GAME-/110602045332?pt=Electronic_Battery_Windup_Toys_US&hash=item19c0654794

and briefly thought it might be the game they were talking about.
It wasn't but that sure looks like a cool game (though not for $825).

[1] Patents 3,046,676 and 3,135,815.

Today's post is the final installment of my history of Exidy (not counting the errata and statistics). Unfortunately, it won't be nearly as complete as the other posts since a) it's after the time covered by my book and b) I don't have nearly as many sources of information for the post-1989 years.

Cheyenne and Combat

1985 saw the appearance of the second and third games in Exidy's alliterative shooting series. First up was the wild-west themed Cheyenne. The game was basically Crossbow in a western setting. The player maneuvered as single character through eight different wild-west settings (a saloon, a canyon, a stagecoach attacked by natives, a graveyard, a ghost town, a forest, and a mineshaft) collecting bounties on outlaws and avoiding enemies. Initially the game was known as Buster Badshot or Busby Grits (after the main character). Pete Kaufmann, however, insisted they name it Cheyenne. KenNicholson jokingly suggested that the next game should start with "C" to. Exidy took him up on the idea and dubbed their series of rifle games the "alliterative shooting" series (the idea was abandoned after the fifth game).

Keeping to the alliterative theme, the next game in the series was Combat. This time the theme was military. The player, armed with an M-16, tried to liberate a series of countries while climbing the ranks from private to General of the Army. An easier version of the game called Catch 22 was also produced. Both Cheyenne and Combat appeared on Replays software charts in 1985 and 1986 with the former peaking at #4 and the latter at #10.

Exidy sales manager Mereille Chevalier

On the business front, things didn’t go as well. Gene Lipkin (formerly of Allied Leisure and Atari) signed on as company president on January 2, only to leave within a few months to head the newly reestablished Sega. Exidy, meanwhile, was having financial problems. In an effort to raise money they worked out a loan arrangement based on leasing their Sunnyvale factory to an outside party at a higher rate than they were paying in rent. The deal fell through when the property owner objected and on July 17, Exidy filed for bankruptcy.
After 1985 Exidy's video game fortunes went into sharp decline. The alliterative shooting series continued in 1986 with Crackshot (a target shooting game), Clay Pigeon (skeet shooting) and Chiller The latter went on to become Exidy's most controversial game since Death Race (Replay opined that it made Death Race "look like a gumball machine"). It featured perhaps the goriest graphics to date in an arcade video game. Particularly gruesome was a torture chamber scene, that featured a victim chained to a wall, and another having his head crushed in a vice. The idea had not started as a game at all.

[Larry Hutcherson The scene with the guy chained to the wall was a goof that I put together while I was developing better art tools on the 440 system. One day …[Pete Kauffman] walked by and said, we have to make that game. And one thing lead to another.

Shooting the hapless victims released a veritable fountain of blood (though squeamish operators had the option of turning it green "…for a more 'monster movie' effect if that's the way people want it to appear should they get flak from customers."[1]).

Exidy also released some non-shooting games in 1986. Top Secret was a James-Bond style driving game in which the player fought off enemy cars with a variety of weapons, including heat-seeking missiles, oil slicks, time warps, and force fields. It was available as a conversion kit for the company's shooting games or in a sit-down cabinet. The game had been shown as 0077, part of a new series of games (Exidy planned to follow up with 0088 and 0099, but never did so). When the game was fully released, the name had been changed to Top Secret, with theaddition of 50 levels, a 360-degree steering wheel, and a new control panel (though one wonders if the estate of Ian Fleming had something to do with the name change). Perhaps the most unexpected offering was Top Gunner, a licensed first-person shooting game in which the player flew over a series of 3D surfaces fending off groups of oncoming enemy ships. What made the game unexpected was that it was (probably) the last vector graphics arcade game ever produced. While the graphics were outstanding they were also outdated as vector games had gone the way of the dodo two years before. If Top Gunner was the year's most unexpected game, Spin-A-Ball was perhaps the most unusual - a video redemption game that offered the player the choice of four ball games like shuffleboard and Skee ball. The summer of 1986 witnessed two big changes at Exidy. First the company moved its factory to Fremont. Second, veteran engineer Howell Ivy left to join Sega.

In early 1987 the company moved its headquarters to Santa Clara. In late summer, they final emerged from Chapter 11 and began producing gun games again, starting with Hit 'N Miss (the alliterative idea had finally been dropped). Unlike the gory Chiller, Hit 'N Miss was a kiddie themed game without a trace of blood. In the December issue of Replay, Pete Kauffman explained why, noting "We've learned the hard way from our past six shooting games that blood and guts are not accepted in the long run." On a slightly more risqué note, Exidy also released one of its most unusual products in 1987 - a condom vender called the Rainbow Machine. (Theyalso announced a video war game called Under Fire that was apparently never produced).
Exidy's final gun games came in 1988. WhoDunit was a mystery themed game in which the player used a "dueling pistol" to protect a character named Max as he made his way through s house searching for a hidden key. 1988 also saw Exidy try a new tack with Showdown, a video poker game that featured comical animated, talking opponents whose tells often revealed when they were bluffing. The game was available in a dedicated cabinet, and a countertop cabinet. The most unusual configuration was a conversion kit for Exidy's gun games, perhaps the only case of a poker game that used a rifle controller. The rifle could could also be used to play a bonus gunfight round. Payout poker games were still illegal in many locales at the time and so called "amusement only" card games were suspect (often with could reason). Showdown may have been the first, if not the only, video poker game to truly merit the label. Larry Hutcherson also developed a credit version of the game called Yukon for sale in Malta. From 1984 to 1988, Exidy concentrated the majority of its efforts on its gun game line. The first two, Crossbow and Cheyenne had proven enormously popular. Perhaps too popular. While Exidy released nuermous update kits and rebate programs for the games, no one wanted to buy them. Pete Kauffman's wifeVirginia, who took a job as the company's sales manager in 1986, explains why.

[Virginia Kauffman] I found out that many Crassobws, Cheyennes, and Combats didn't need a software update because they were still taking good money in. It was a thrill to hear that, but a little frustrating when you were trying sell a conversion[2].

In 1989, Exidy finally gave up and exited the video game field entirely to concentrate on redemption games. First came Twister, a bowling/roll-up game where the player rolled a ball at a moving target. More followed in the 1990s, including Hot Shot, Troll, Critter, 4x4 (a truck racing game) and Turbo Ticket (a ticket blowing machine where the player put their arms through two circular openings and grabbed swirling tickets). As the new millennium started, the company changed its name to Xidy and continued producing redemption games with founder Pete Kauffman still at the helm. In 2006 Mean Hamster Software acquired the rights to develop coin-op games under the Exidy name.

Bonus Pictures

Hardware Designer Mark Von Striver

[1] Pete Kauffman, Replay, April, 1986

[2]RePlay, August, 1988

Recently, I've been looking through some annual reports and 10Ks for Allied Leisure/Centuri and across some interesting info. These things seem boring at first but they sometimes contain a treasure trove of info. For some years they only had one or the other (10k or annual report) , for others they had both. They are very similar and I've seen them referred to interchangably. The annual report contains a lot of the same info as the 10k but is aimed at shareholders so it has more PR type stuff. the 10K goes to the SEC and contains just the nitty gritty.
My library has a set of annual reports for various companies. Only public companies had to file a 10k with the SEC and most coin-op companies were private. Allied Leisure/Centuri was one of the few that did. Others include Bally/Midway, Warner Communications (parent of Atari), Williams, Xcor (parent of Williams before it spun off), Seeburg (parent of Williams before Xcor), Gulf + Western (parent owner of Sega), Columbia Pictures (parent of Gottlieb), AES Technology (parent of Game Plan), Micropin (owner of Elcon), Merit, Game-A-Tron, Ramtek (though only after they stopped making video games), and Status.

Release Dates/Production Numbers

The most interesting thing I found was some info on release dates and sales for various games. I'm sure this isn't nearly as interesting to everyone else, but I find it fascinating and am always on the lookout for production numbers. They don't have actual production numbers but there's enough info for a rough ballpark estimate.

Let's start with 1982:

Here are some more precise numbers

Note thatAllied was selling games (to distribuors) for about $1700 each on average.

Finally, we have this:

Unfortunately, they don't tell us what game goes with what letter, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Are they listed in the same order they are in the paragraph above?
Luckily, they give the release date and I have plenty of info on release dates.
We know from the first document above that game D was The Pit.

Release dates are a bit hard to come by. There is a document floating around the web with Atari release dates but that is an exception. I have a lot of souces I use for release dates, but here I'm going to use 4: MAME, the September 1984 DRA price guide, the Play Meter "catalog" issue (PM), and the RePlay catalog issue" (R)
The DRA price guide was a price guide to used games sold to operators in the 1970s and 80s. It included release dates for games. The RePlay and Play Meter catalog issues were annual/semiannual issues listing recent games by company, along with release dates. Play Meter used release dates while RePlay usually listed the month the game was announced in their magazine (though the two wer often the same).
If the game appeared earlier at an industry show, I'll note the date the show started.
For the games above, here is what I have:

Challenger: 11/1981 (DRA), 12/81 (MAME, PM, R), shown at 1981 AMOA show (10/27)
Round Up: 11/81 (DRA, MAME), 12/81 (PM, R) - also at AMOA
D-Day: 3/82 (DRA), 4/82 (MAME, PM, R) - shown at AOE (3/26)
The Pit: 4/82 (DRA, MAME, PM, R) - also at AOE
Loco-motion: 3/82 (DRA), 4/82 (MAME, PM, R) - shown at AOE (3/26)
Tunnel Hunt: 7/82 (PM, R), 8/82 (DRA)
Swimmer: 11/82 (MAME, DRA), 12/82 (PM) - shown at West Virginia MVA show (9/26)

I think that Tunnel Hunt is game F and Swimmer is G.
D-Day and Loco-motion are probably C and E.
Challenger and Round-Up are games A and B.

If we assume that the games are listed in the same order in the they appear in the chart, things line up rather nicely. Challenger and Round Up could be transposed, but they both sold about the same number. D-Day and Loco-motion could be switched too, but game C sold fewer than game E.

Can we turn this into actual production numbers? Sadly, no. the percentages listed appear to be percentage of total video game sales in dollars, not units (as will be clearer below). To turn this into actual production runs, we'd have to know how much each game sold for, which we don't.
I could check my trade magazines, but they usually list what operators paid, not distributors.
But, if we assume that all games sold for the same amount we can just multiply the percentage by the total units sold and get some rough, ballpark figures.
Of course, the games didn't sell for the same amount and the same game probably didn't sell for the same amount at different times. Their 1982 report notes that games sold for $1,400-2,000 in 1982. The popular games probably sold for close to $2000, so the numbers below are probably not too bad.
Here's what we get if we make the simplifying assumption that all games sold for the same price ($1700):

A (Challenger or Round Up): 790 units, $1.34 million in sales
B (Round Up or Challenger): 860 units, $1.46 million
C (D-Day or Locomotion: 60 units, $102 thousand
D (The Pit): 1,806 units, $3.07 million
E (Locomotion or D-Day) 339 units, $576 thousand
F (Tunnel Hunt) 677 units, $1.15 million
G (Swimmer): 877 units, $1.49 million

NOTE - the percentages listed only add up to 62.3%. The chart only lists figures for games intrduced in fiscal year 1982 (which ended 10/31). I suspect that the discrepancy is due to games from 1981 that were still selling in FY 82. In fact, I'd guess that the other 37.7% is almost entirely, if not entirely, due to Vanguard, which was released late in 1981. If we assume that Vanguard sold for $1700 (which again, is probably not true) we can ballpark that it sold around 3,300 units in 1982.

How about 1981? That one's slightly harder.

The percentages for game A and B are 7.4% and 1.1%.
Again, we known that Phoenix is game C.
Here is the release info:
Eagle: 10/80 (DRA, PM), 11/80 (R) - shown at a distributor show on 9/12
Phoenix: 11/81 (DRA), 12/81 (MAME, PR, R) - shown at AMOA (10/29)
Route 16: 4/81 (DRA), 5/81 (MAME, PR, R)
Pleiades: 6/81 (DRA, R), 7/81 (MAME, PR)
Vanguard: 7/81 (MAME - Japan rls date??), 9/81 (DRA, R), 10/81 (PM)
Challenger: 11/1981 (DRA), 12/81 (MAME, PM, R), shown at 1981 AMOA show (10/27)

These don't correspond precisely to the order listed. (i.e. Phoneix is game C but is listed second). If we eliminate Challenger and game B, howeer, the others line up almost perfectly. Could B be Challenger? The dates are way off but the sales figures seem right (Challenger or Route 16 had to be the lowest selling game). Also, Challenger was the only game on the list that Centuri designed in house. Could they have released it in limited run earlier? Another possibility is that they're talking about Killer Comet, which was also designed inhouse. Centuri released it at the same time as Eagle and later licensed it to Game Plan. Maybe they got the two confused (by the time the report came out, Challenger had been released)

Let's go with the assumption that Challenger is B and the rest are in list order (again, the production run #s are VERY rough ballpark estimates based on the simplifying and erroneous assumption that all games sold for the same price).
Note that I am using the exact total sales figures here (31,541 units and $61.46 million)

Game A (Eagle) 2,334 units, $4.55 million
Game B (Challenger? - Killer Comet???) 347 units, $676 thousand
Game C (Phoenix) 13,373 units, $26.06 million
Game D (Route 16) 1,546 units, $3.01 million
Game E (Pleiades) 4,889 units, $9.53 million
Game F (Vanguard) 7,444 units, $14.5 million (plus, probably around 3,000-3,500 units in 1982)

The percentages here add up to 94.9%, so it doesn't look like many 1980 games sold in 1981.

How about 1983?

NOTE that Centuri changed their fiscal year end from 10/31 to 12/31 in 1983.

We know that Gyruss is game B and Track & Field is game E. Once again, the rest seem to correspond to the list Unfortunately, I couldn't find figures for total video game sales or total units sold in 1983 (still looking through the document).

If we another simplifying assumption, we can get some even rougher estimates.
If we assume that games in 1983 cost $1700 (the average price in 1982), we get this:

A (Munch Mobile) 93 units
B (Gyruss) 2824 units
C (Guzzler) 130 units
D (Aztarac) 99 units
E (Track & Field) 7,089 units and still going strong

If we use the aveage price from 1981 ($1949) we get:

A (Munch Mobile) 80 units
B (Gyruss) 2463 units
C (Guzzler) 113 units
D (Aztarac) 87 units
E (Track & Field) 6184 units

Finally, 1984

That's all they gave for 1984. Too bad (they had already abandoned video games for sports equipment and seafood by the time the annual report came out).
We do have numbers for Track & Field and Hyper Sports, however (note that the two accounted for 87% of video games sales in fiscal 84, with Track & Field alone accounting for 63%).

Using a unit price of $2000 or $1500 gives us

Track & Field: 6250 units or 8333 units for a total of about 12-15,000 units (seems high to me)
Hyper Sports: 2400 units or 3200 units

So we have some very rough numbers for production runs and some solid release dates.
That was probably mind-numbingly boring for most of you, but I was glad to find it.

A few months back, I posted about the "blue sky" ripoff artists of the early 80s like Potomac Mortgage, Fascination International, and Leisure Time Electronics. You can read the post for details, but basically these companies would sell overpriced, low-quality arcade games to the public at seminars and through want ads, promising enormous profits and offering warranties, location finding services etc. They would then fail to deliver the promised services or goods for months, or not deliver them at all and the games would make almost nothing. Numerous lawsuits were launched against these companies and they were investigated by the State of California and others.

One of the things I mentioned in my post was a claim that some of these games were made by Centuri. I was skeptical at the time, but in perusing Centuri's annual reports, I found that it's actually true.

The 1981 report, in fact, reveals that Centuri was actually sued by both Leisure Time and Fascination International, Inc..

Note that last line, where Centuri says they suspect the two were one and the same.
The 3/15/82 Play Meter (and other issues) confirm that Leisure Time and Fascination International, Inc. were in fact essentially the same company.

Centuri was also named as third party in a 1983 suit against Fascination.

This all raises a few questions.

1) As I will discuss in my next post, Allied Leisure (former name of Centuri) had an exclusive distribution arrangement with Fascination, Ltd. of Elk Grove Village, IL for cocktail table pins.
Are Fascination Ltd. and Fascination International, Inc. the same company?
It's not really clear.

Fascination Ltd. was formed in 1973 (in October, 1973 they released a cocktail video game, which is one of the contenders for the title "first cocktail video game".)

They went bankrupt in August, 1978.

After this, the two principals (Robert Anderson and Robert Runte) funneled the assets of Fascination Ltd. into another company called Astro Games, which also went bankrupt.
At the time of Fascination Ltd's decline, they were the subject of 167 lawsuits from people or companies who were unhappy with games they purchased because they couldn't obtain warranty service.

What about Fascination International, Inc.
Most sources say they were from Texas.

The 3/15/82 Play Meter reports that one investigator flew to Chicago to track down Leisure Time and Fascination International's original home office. The article even refers to Fascination as "Fascination Ltd." but that may have been a misprint - maybe they were thinking of the earlier company) So they apparently were at one time in the Chicago area.

One problem with connecting the two is that Fascination Ltd. went bankrupt in 1978 (though the principals could have started a new company with a similar name.

A bigger problem is that I have not found any personnel in common between the two companies. The principals of Fascination International were Joseph Cassioppi, William Thompson, and Eugene Hill - names I've never seen mentioned in connection with Fascination Ltd.
.
In the end, there's just not enough to connect the two companies other than a lot of coincidences.

2) The second question is, why was Centuri involved in such shady goings-on and what exactly were the games that Centuri made for Leisure Time and Fascination International? (Actually, that's two questions) The annual reports don't say but there are some intriguing possibilities (OK - wild ass guesses is a better term).
At the 1979 AMOA show, Allied Leisure showed four new video games.

From Play Meter:

The only one of these that I know was released was Clay Shoot, which was actually designed by Phillip Lieberman, who went on to program games for Pacific Novelty. Could the others be the games they pawned off on Leisure Time?

Here's another description of Space Bug:

Battlestar had been shown at the 1978 AMOA show:

Another possibility is Space Chip, which they also showed in 1978 (at the JAA) but I'm not positive that was a video game.

I have no idea if these were the same games sold by Leisure Time/Fascination (and maybe even Potomac). As I said, it's a total guess. It does make some sense, though.
Allied Leisure was bought out by the Koffman family in mid-1979 and renamed Centuri in 1980. At the time of the buyout, the company was in serious trouble. Plus, their games had long had a reputation for unreliability.
Again, we may never know if these games were the ones they sold to Leisure Time. Maybe one day a copy of Space Bug, Battlestar, Lunar Invasion, or Space Chip will show up

The third thing I found interesting in Allied's reports was not a video game topic but a pinball one - Allied's cocktail pins and when they started making them? Most sources list Take Five, released in April, 1978, as Allied's first cocktail pin, but the annual reports/10ks show that they started building them MUCH earlier.

Most gamers who were around in the 1980s remember cocktail table video games, but a lot of them don't know that they made cocktail table pinball games as well. The heyday of cocktail pinball (if you could call it that) was brief - the vast majority of the games were released in 1978 and 1979. Companies that made cocktail pins in this period include Game Plan, Midway, Mirco Games and, of course, Allied Leisure Industries.

The concept wasn't entirely new. As I mentioned in a previous post, back in the 1930s, Rotor Table Games of New York had produced at least two cocktail table pinball games - Confucius [sic] Say and Cross Town. These appear to have been anomalies, however, and the next games didn't appear until late 1970s.

But which modern cocktail pinball game was the first? Did anyone beat Allied's Take Five out the door?

In March, 1978 (the month before Take Five was released), a company called Century Consolidated Industries released two cocktail pins: Circus Circus and Star Battle.

In April, 1978 (the same month as Take Five) The Valley Company released Spectra IV.

Around this time, Coffee-Mat Industries released Cosmic Wars and Star Battle (the latter is the same game as the one released by Century). The Internet Pinball Database doesn't list a date but notes that it was prior to December, 1978 because that is the earliest test date mentioned in documents they received from the designer. I'm not actually sure if the dates on IPMDB are normally release dates, but this seems to indicate that they sometimes use test dates.

In any event, I don't think these games came out until 1979.
Star Battle was show at the Ohio MAA show on May 11-12, 1979.

The introduction of Cosmic Wars was announced in the 11/15/79 issue of Play Meter.

As an aside, the 6/15/80 issue of Play Meter says that Coffee-Mat had recently "...displayed its latest cocktail table and a video game called Nimbus (another kind of reaction tester)...:
Despite their description, I don't think this was actually a video game. It might have been one of those reaction testers popular at the time that timed how quickly you pressed a button twice in succession. I think, however, that I did read the Coffee-Mat made a cocktail table video game back around 1974, but now I can't rind the article (I think it was in Vending Times or maybe Cashbox, but maybe I'm misremembering).

The first modern cocktail game listed in the Internet Pinball Machine Database is Fascination Ltd's The Entertainer, released in September, 1977. Fascination, however, didn't actually design the game. Which takes us back to Allied Leisure.

The first reference I found to cocktail table pins from Allied was in their 1976 10K report. Allied had shutdown pinball production in June due to unexpected quality issues. The report mentions that they relaunched the pinball line in November, 1976 and then says that they "introduced a new concept in pinball games, i.e. a cocktail table version…". It is not clear however, if they started making cocktail pins in November, or some time later. The report also says that to date, Allied had made 300 "stand-up" pins and 800 cocktail pins. Note that the 10K report was created in spring of 1977, if not later so the 800 may include games made in early 1977.

Allied's 1977 report claims that they introduced a cocktail pin in April, 1977. This seems to conflict with the information in the 1976 report but as I mentioned, that report was created in spring, 1977 or later - possibly after April, 1977. OTOH, I don't think it was created TOO long after April (I suspect they had an SEC deadline they had to meet). OTOOH If they didn't produce their first cocktail pin until April, it's hard to see how they could have produced 800 by the time of the 10k report (unless it came up far later than normal).

The 1977 report reports that Allied had made ca 3,500 cocktail games to date.

The big question is: What games were they talking about? I've never seen any reference to a cocktail pinball game with the Allied name in 1977, and certainly not in 1976.

The answer might be here:

The above is from their 1977 10k report. Allied did have an "exclusive distributorship arrangement" with Fascination Ltd (of Elk Grove Village, IL). Fascination was founded in August, 1973 as National Computer Systems Inc. and made one of the first (they claim it was THE first) cocktail table video game in October, 1973 (more on that in a later post).

In September, 1977 Fascination released The Entertainer- a music-themed cocktail pin featuring the likeness of Roy Clark of Hee Haw fame. The following articles are from the September 1977 issues of Play Meter and RePlay respectively (the guy to the right of Roy Clark is Bob Anderson of Fascination).

The game, however, was actually designed by Allied Leisure, as this article from the 12/77 Play Meter makes clear:

In early March, 1977, Allied filed for bankruptcy. They were discharged from bankruptcy in November, 1977. According to the article above, their deal with Fascination saved them from going under. Other accounts I've read seem to intimate that Allied was unhappy with their deal with Fascination (they didn't come right out and say so , I had to read between the lines - which is always dangerous). In addition, Allied had already released a Roy-Clark themed standard pinball called Super Picker earlier in 1977. They had inked the deal with Clark in late 1976. The driving force behind the idea was Allied's marketing director Arnold Fisher, who was likely hoping to reproduce Bally's success with licensed pins like Cap'n Fanastic and Tommy(he didn't). Given this, it seems to me that Allied would have wanted to release The Entertainer under their own banner and probably ceded the rights to Fascination only reluctantly (though that is mere supposition on my part). In any event, they got out of their arrangement with Fascination in 1978 and started producing pins under their own name.

But if The Entertainer wasn't released until September, 1977 then what were the games Allied released before then?

Perusing my collection of RePlay and Play Meters, I found a few intriguing hints.

First, a report on the January, 1977 ATE show in London from the February, 1977 RePlay:

I've never seen any other reference to a "video pingame in a cocktail cabinet" from Allied. This sounds like a video version of pinball (like Exidy's TV Pinball) rather than a video/pin combination. There is a flyer for an Allied cocktail video game, but it has no date and I don't know if it was a pinball game (it appears to be a ball-and-paddle game)

Speaking of Chase, it appears to have been a very cool looking sit-down air combat video game:

It was mentioned in their 1977 10k report, which said they only made 200 (unless they also made an EM game with the same name at the same time, which seems doubtful). Don't ask me what X-11 was, though I suspect it was an EM game, not a video game.

But back to cocktail pins. Here's an even earlier mention from the June, 1976 Play Meter. This one is reporting on Allied's recent spring distributors meeting in Miami. If this wasn't an Allied-specific meeting, I'd think that maybe they were talking about Mirco's Spirit of '76 but they appear to be talking about an Allied "tennis and pin cocktail table" of the same name. Again, this may be a video pinball game in a cocktail cabinet and/or may be the game pictured in the flyer above.

Not all video game and coin-op companies were located in Silicon Valley or Chicago. Allied Leisure Industries was located in faraway Hialeah Florida. Today, not many people remember the name Allied Leisure (though a few people remember them by another name) but for a while, they appeared to be on their way to the top of the video game heap - only to literally crash and burn and then rise from the ashes.

All-Tech Industries

David Braun, 1970 - courtesy Billboard

David H. Braun had been in the coin-op industry since the 1950s and in the music industry even longer. In 1944 he and his brother Jules formed a record label called Deluxe in Linden, New Jersey and began recording artists like Billy Eckstine and the Four Blues. In 1947, they became one of the first labels to explore the burgeoning New Orleans R&B scene, recording a number of sides including Roy Brown's proto-rock-and-roll classic Rockin' at Midnight. That same year, their plant and warehouse burned down (it wouldn’t be the last time Braun had to deal with a devastating fire) and the Brauns sold half of their interest in Deluxe to King Records. Two years later they started a new label called Regal Records, which they liquidated in 1951. Finished with the record business, Dave started a new career in the coin-op business, working for a kiddie ride manufacturer in Linden named Mars Manufacturing. In 1952, he moved to Florida and co-founded All-Tech Industries, a manufacturer of kiddie rides, pool tables, and grip testers. In the early 60s, Braun became All-Tech's lead designer. In the early 1960s, he created a number of innovate machines that combined kiddie rides and games. In 1961's Indian Scout, kiddies could ride a galloping horse while using a six-shooter to gun down rampaging buffalo. Hi Way Patrol put tots in the role of a traffic cop, chasing down speeders in a miniature police car complete with flashing siren. A similargame, Cross Country Race was created by Braun and Harry Mabs (inventor of the pinball flipper). Braun wasn't All-Tech's only designer, however. Ron Haliburton was a tinkerer. Early on the Nashville engineer built one of the first $1/$5 bill changers in his garage. In the early 1960s, he created a prototype for a coin-operated slot car game. Word of his creation reached All-Tech, who hired him to work in their engineering department alongside Braun.

All-Tech's Indian Scout

Patent for All-Tech's Cross-Country Racer
by David Braun and Harry Mabs

Allied Leisure - the pre-Video Game Years (1968-1972)

courtesy RePlay, 1976

By the late 1960s, Haliburton had risen to president of All-Tech when he and Braun decided to form their own company to build arcade games and to give Braun's son Bobby (who had cerebral palsy) something to do. In November of 1968, Haliburton and the Brauns' new company was incorporated as Allied Leisure Industries. The company, however, had been created six months earlier from the merger of other companies[1]. Like Bushnell, Dabney, and Alcorn, the Florida trio never intended to manufacture games. At the time, coin-op was still a closed industry and a group of outsiders, especially one from Florida, was likely to have a hard time breaking in. Instead, they planned to use their design skills to create prototypes for existing coin-op companies. When they began talking to other companies, however, they didn't care for the deals they were offered and when they saw how well their prototypes were received, they decided to build them themselves. Their first game, Monkey Bizz (1968) belied their kiddie-ride roots. The player used a metal hook to snag plastic monkeys from the bottom of a playfield. Next came Unscramble (October, 1969) where players tried to unscramble letters to form three-letter words (a five-letter version called Select-O-Maticfollowed in December). While their first three games were successful enough that Allied moved to a new 1,000 square-foot facility, they had still lost $79,000 in 1969 on modest sales of $415,000. Their next game put them on the coin-op map.

Wild Cycle

In early 1969, Chicago Coin released Drive Master one of a new breed of driving games that quickly became all the rage. In earlier driving games, like Southland Engineering's Time Trials (1963), the players drove tiny slot cars around a miniature track. Drive Master was different. The image of the track was stored on a large plastic disc and projected onto the playfield, where the player steered a plastic model car.

A number of similar games appeared in 1969, including Sega's Grand Prix, Kasco's Indy 500, and the biggest hit of them all, Chicago Coin's Speedway, which went on to sell 10,000 copies. In 1970, Allied Leisure decided to get into the act, but with a difference. Instead of a car, Wild Cycle (April, 1970) put the player in control of a tiny fluorescent motorcycle. As the player drove around the track, the handlebars vibrated, and when he crashed, they popped out at the player (perhaps one of the earliest "force feedback" controllers). The game even featured an 8-track tape deck that played music as they cruised. Chicago Coin answered with Motorcycle(October, 69), which blew air in the player's face. Despite the competition, Wild Cycle was Allied's most popular game yet. So popular, in fact, that two other manufacturers tried to buy Allied out. Allied decided to continue making games on their own. When their cabinet maker refused to continue working for them because he also worked for a competitor, Allied created its own woodworking shop. By this time the company had moved two more times before settling into a 40,000 square foot facility. They also had two other divisions turning out billiard supplies and consumer products (including a jogging machine called Master Jogger and an exercise bike designed by Dave Braun)

Next, Allied took to the skies with Sonic Fighter (June, 1970), another projection screen game in which the player shot down enemy fighters. Engineer Jack Pearson[2]explains how these games were created.

[Jack Pearson] "What you did was you went to a local hobby shop and bought a 3D model of an airplane or whatever you wanted to shoot down and you painted up this model and took 35mm slides from all different angles and then built a projector. We’d go out and buy a projector lamp and build a mechanism for it ourselves and buy a lens. Then we’d have the projector mounted on a mechanism that we could move. So when we wanted to send an airplane across a screen, we’d turn this motor which would drive the projector and then turn the lamp on and it would show that picture going across the screen.

You had a little PC board that had contacts on it and a wiper blade and as the projector moved, the wiper blade would move to different contacts on the projector. The gun would have the same kind of mechanism. So if the projector was on pin 2 and the gun was on pin 2 and the trigger was pulled, you’d get a [closed] circuit. Then we’d have a solenoid that would pull another slide in front of the projector with a picture of a red explosion. So the explosion would move the same way the airplane would have. It was difficult because you had to make everything yourself - the projectors, the guns and so forth"

Allied came back down to earth with two more projection driving games, the two-player Drag Racers (June, 1971), and Spin Out (October, 1971). On November 24, 1971, Allied went public, an unusual move for a coin-op company, but Allied did it to avoid having to rely on banks for financing. In 1972 and early 1973 came the quiz game What-zit (February, 1972), two more air combat games, Crack Shot (November, 1972) and Rapid Fire (February, 1973), and an old-school driving game, Monte Carlo (1973?)[3]. Troy Livingston was VP of manufacturing during this period. He had come to Allied after a career that included a stint at NASA, where he'd designed motors, some of which ended up on the moon. At the 2005 pinball expo, Livingston told a humorous story about Rapid Fire and Crack Shot. At the, he was running a route on the side and Allied gave him some prototypes of the games to put out on test. When an ice cream store on the route closed down, Troy and a friend went to retrieve the prototypes, one of which came in a greyish cabinet that looked like a safe. Perhaps a little too much. As they carted the game out the back door, they were surprised to find themselves surrounded by five police cars.

The most unusual and innovative, product during these years came when Allied entered the pinball field with two games: Sea Hunt (May, 1972) and Spooksville (September, 1972). They may have been pinball games but they were anything but standard. The idea came when Allied's designers watched players bang and pound on regular pinball games and wondered “why not give them a machine they can shake without tilting it?” Their solution was something called shakerball. Shakerball was similar to regular pinball machines but the games were housed in a vertical cabinet with a smaller, free-floating playfield. The cabinet featured two large handles that the player gripped and shook causing the entire playfield to move up and down. Thumb buttons on the top of the handles activated the flippers. Despite its innovation, the novelty never really caught on, in part due to reliability problems, and shakerball remains a short-lived mutant offshoot of the pinball bloodline. Allied, however, was convinced that the concept could work and planned to enter the pinball market full scale in 1973, once they'd fixed the service issues. Then something happened that put all their plans on hold - Pong.

[1]Allied's first annual report in 1971 said that " Allied Leisure Industries, Inc. is the surviving company of successive mergers of affliliated companies. These mergers have been accounted for as poolings of interested and accordingly, the summary of earnings includes the operations of the company and its predecessors since inception on May 28, 1965."
[2] Note that Pearson didn't actually work on Sonic Fighter.
[3] Monte Carlo may have featured a ball bearing rather than a car. Allied's 1974 annual report includes a production schedule of games . It lists a game called Speed Ball as being in production duing March and April of 1973, but I have found no other reference to it and it does not appear in their list of games in the same annual report..

Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney - The Video Game Era Begins

In November of 1972, Atari released Pong and Allied engineers quickly purchased a copy of the game then had it shipped to their Florida factory so they could take a look[1].

[Jack Pearson]Allied Leisure heard about Pongand we got a distributor in California to send us one and we paid him about twice what it cost him to buy it. We didn't know anything about solid-state games. We were all relay logic so we took it to a company in Chicago called URL and they more-or-less copied the circuitry and started making boards for it. We came out with Paddle Battle and I think we sold more than Atari did.

URL was Universal Research Laboratories, a contract electronics firm in Elk Grove Village, Illinois (in later years they would create a number of home and arcade video games and even have a video games division of their own).

[Troy Livingston] When Pong came out, we found out about it and somehow acquired one of the pong units …and literally took it apart and realized that it wasn’t made for the coin-op industry the electronics were just never going to survive coin-op…so I re-designed the power supply, the coin circuitry, and the power on the board and then worked with URL, who resigned the logic board, which had 76 or 77 7400-series TTL chips on it.

There were other design challenges as well. Since video monitors didn’t really exist at the time, Allied (like most other video game companies) had to turn to a different source for their displays.

[Troy Livingston] The first year Paddle Battle came out, we used to buy Hitachi and Zenith black and white TVs and maybe a few Motorolas. The salesperson for black and white televisions for one of the major chains came to our plant January 2^nd and we bought his entire allotment for the year on January 2^nd. The salesperson went away and said “That’s it for me, I’ve got my bonus and I’m done for the year” and he retired for the year…We took out the circuitry that made them a TV and all the tuner circuitry, went into the video amp circuit and made them into monitors and dropped them into the box and sent them out that way.

After gutting the televisions of their electronic innards, Allied was left with thousands of TV tuners. Unable to find a use for them or get rid of them, they ended up tossing them in a dumpster. Technical challenges or not, Paddle Battleproved a huge hit for Allied – the biggest hit, in fact, that the company ever had.

[Troy Livingston] We had standing orders for months to fill semis full of games. The distributors said, “Just keep shipping truckloads until we tell you to stop.” I think we made 17,000 Paddle Battles and then we came out with a four-player, Tennis Tourney. I think we only sold about 4 or 5 thousand Tennis Tourneys and then it pooped out.

Jack Pearson remembers that the game sold even more.

[Jack Pearson] We sold 22,000 copies of Paddle Battle[2]and we followed it up with a 4-player called Tennis Tourney. Gene Lipkin was our sales manager at the time and Dave Braun told him that he would give him ten dollars[3]for each Paddle Battlehe sold. When he didn’t get his money, he left and later became president of Atari.

The son of coin-op veteran Sol Lipkin (who had a long career at American Shuffleboard and National Shuffleboard), Gene Lipkin was one of the youngest sales execs the coin-op industry had ever seen. He wasn't the only Allied sales exec to leave for Atari. A year or so after Lipkin moved to Atari in early 1975, Allied hired Joel Hochberg, who had worked in the industry since 1956 and was working 90- weeks in a broken arcade when Allied tabbed him. He later joined Lipkin at Atari.

While Atari eventually got the best of Allied in the personnel department, in 1973 it was Allied who was getting the best of Atari by beating them on their own game. In fact, with a likely 17,000+ units sold, Allied may well have had the bestselling Pong clone of everybody. In some ways, it isn't surprising that they were able to outproduce Atari. While Allied wasn't exactly a seasoned veteran, they had 4 1/2 years of coin-op experience under their belt at a time when Atari was only a few months removed from the days they had to struggle to make just 10 Pong units. Allied also had a much greater production capacity. This was probably a matter of necessity rather than choice. A practically the only coin-op company in Florida, Allied didn't have a network of suppliers ready at hand like there were in Chicago. Allied had to make everything itself.

[Ron Halliburton] You have to understand that at that time we did everything onsite. We built transformers, we built cabinets, we did our own sheet metal, we did c&c stamping even back then – that required a great deal of people. We were probably up around 250-300 people at that time[4].

Allied more than tripled the size of its facilities in 1973 and were sprawled out over 3 separate buildings: a 30,000-square-foot manufacturing, headquarters, and R&D facility; a 28,000-square-foot cabinet shop, and a 38,000-sqaure-foot complex that housed silkscreening, fiberglass, a paint shop, and metal working (including a $30,000, 110-ton punch press).

[Jack Pearson] We had better production facilities [than Atari]. Back then, to us, a year was a long time because we were used to having to come up with a new game every three or four months and when you had to do tooling and everything else, it was a real burden. We [started producing the game] right after Atari and we had a better sales staff and a better factory. We got up to producing 150 a day. At one point we wouldn’t take an order if wasn’t a tractor-trailer-load full, about 40 games.

Given their edge in manufacturing, it's no wonder that Allied was able to out-produce Atari, but how did they manage to top the sales of other veteran coin-op companies like Chicago Coin, Williams and Bally/Midway who produced Pong clones of their own. It may have been because they got to their game to market first.

[Jack Pearson] Our philosophy was that if you wanted to make any money you had to go out there and get it first and go like the devil while you've got it because someone else is going to be coming with it later. So put it out and go as fast as you can so that by the time the next guy copies it and gets into the market you will have your profit out of it. And that was the philosophy we all lived on.

While Allied only beat Midway to market by a month or so, that month may have been crucial.

[Jack Pearson] We were selling a ton of Paddle Battle and we had already designed Tennis Tourney. Since we had the money we could afford to stock inventory so we made a few hundred Tennis Tourney, boxed them up and kept them in the warehouse. We didn't tell anyone about it. We were going to wait until the sales on Paddle Battle dried up. Then Midway came out with their 2-player game. I think we were selling at $995 and they came in at $945 to try to get a piece of the action. So we dropped to $895, they dropped another $50, we dropped another $50 and it kept on until we got to, I think, $795. Now we'd already made our profit and Midway couldn't make any money selling at that price. Then we announced the 4-player and Hank Ross told us that they couldn't give their game away. That's an example of the marketing strategies we had in those days.

In some ways it was a bit surprising that Allied was able to get a game to market so soon and build so many so quickly. In earlier years, they had been plagued with production delays. In 1972, Allied had never had more than one game in production at a time and often had lags between one game in the next. For the entire month of April, their production line had sat idle - a potentially fatal situation for manufacturing company. In addition, they rarely brought a game back into production after it had stopped and usually kept little inventory on hand. In 1973 they had as many as four games in production at once and scheduled overruns and brought games back into production to meet renewed demand (Crack Shot, for instance, was brought back into production twice). In 1972, Allied had only been able to turn out 40 games a day. In 1973 they were cranking out 150.

Then, Allied scored another coup when they became one of the first companies on the market with a 4-player Pong game when they released Tennis Tourney in July of 1973.

[Ron Halliburton] Everybody was trying to catch up with everybody at that point. What we did was we built the boards and got the components in and I think we built 500 or 1000 of them and didn’t show them to anybody – blew out our Paddle Battle’s and then released this new 4-player that nobody knew anything about and it destroyed the 2-player market overnight and Hank Ross has never forgiven me for that even though we’ve been great buddies for a long, long time.

Ross wasn't the only one who was upset. Nolan Bushnell was livid that Allied had come out with their 4-player game two months before Atari released theirs (Pong Doubles). In November Allied released its soccer game Super Soccer. The video game explosion had put all of Allied's other plans (including their full-scale entry into the pinball market) to the back burner. By January, 1974, they had six games in production at once and four were video games: Tennis Tourney, Super Soccer Ric-O-Chet, and Deluxe Soccer (the last two for export only[5]).

This chart appeared in Allied's 1973 Annual Report

For Allied, the effects of the ball-and-paddle success were both immediate and impressive. From 1972 to 1973, sales increased more than sixfold from $1.5 million to $11.4 million and an $838,700 loss in 1972 turned into a $1.6 million profit in 1973. Allied made more money in 1973, in fact, than it had it all of its previous years combined.

[1] The Pong Story website reports that Allied actually licensed the game from Atari, but other sources disagree.

[2] The different figures given by Pearson may be due to the fact that he is recalling the total number produced of Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney combined.

[3] In an interview on www.centuri.net, Lipkin recalls that he was promised $15 for each game sold

[4] Haliburton was referring to a time around 1974 here. Allied's annual reports show that they had about 250 employees at the end of fiscal year 1973, up from 200 the year beofore.

[5] Allied also had an electromechanical game called Galaxy Raider in production, but no trace of it has turned up in the years since.

1974 - Disaster Strikes

With the success of Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney, Allied seemed poised to become a major player in the video game jungle. They had built more Pong games than perhaps anyone else and had streamlined their production process to eliminate waste. Then disaster struck. In January of 1974, Ron Haliburton traveled to London to attend the Amusement Trades Expo. When he stepped off the plane back in Florida, he was hit with a bombshell. On January 31, Allied’s manufacturing plant had been struck by a devastating fire. While the fabrication plant was virtually undamaged and the woodworking shop completely untouched, half of their headquarters and manufacturing facility was destroyed and production ground to a complete halt.

[Troy Livingston] It was arson. [They had] 5-gallon glass containers of gasoline. We had two compressor rooms…One of those was thrown in each compressor room on opposite sides of the building at Four O’clock in the morning and it burned to the ground… The fire burned down three square blocks of buildings. We literally then went from a burned-down building [and] 90 days later we were back in full production building the same quantity of TV games.

Other sources cite an electrical malfunction as the cause of the fire. Whatever its cause, the fire was a financial catastrophe. Due to insufficient insurance coverage (and some industrial doors that failed to release), Allied suffered half-a-million dollars in losses (and over $1.5 million in total damages) from the fire, not counting the downtime.

Thankfully, they weren't down for long. On March 1 they moved into a new 40,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing plant and in April, just 90 days after the fire, Allied was back in full production. The only problem was that URL now had an over-supply of boards (even after releasing their own ball-and-paddle game Video Action). In an effort to use up them up, Allied quickly churned out a pair of new ball-and-paddle games. Hesitation (April)was another soccer game and Zap (October) was a Ping-Pong game that allowed players to move their paddles horizontally as well as vertically. Neither game, however, matched the success of Paddle Battle. By 1974, the video game market had softened considerably in the wake of the Pong glut and Allied soon began looking for greener pastures.

They announced plants to reenter the pinball market they'd abandoned in 1973 and to enter a brand new market - gambling. The Gambling Devices Act of 1962 amended the Johnson Act to permit states to allow the manufacture of gambling devices for sale outside the state. Until the early 1970s, the only state to have taken advantage of the act was Illinois and for nine years the only coin-op company to enter the market was Bally. Then Seeburg dipped their toes in the water. Allied had wanted to enter the market for years, especially when research revealed that 2/3 of states were considering legalizing gambling. They could do nothing, however, until Florida amended their laws. When they finally did, Allied quickly announced plans to produce their first slot machine.

Despite all the new plans, it was good old fashioned electromechanical arcade games that remained Allied's bread and butter in 1974 as they released three new pieces during the year. Knock Out (August) was a twin-rifle game Chopper (October), was another motorcycle game. The player sat on a simulated motorcycle while steering a plastic toy model along a track. Unlike Wild Cycle and other driving games, however, this one didn't use a projection screen. Instead the player "drove" along a non-moving track while flashing strobe lights simulated the effect of speed.

Their biggest hit of the year, however, was May's Super Shifter. The gameplay was basically the same as Chopper, but there were two key differences. First, instead of a motorcycle, Super Shifter featured a glowing plastic corvette. Second, the game shipped in a sit-down cabinet complete with racing seat. Chopper and Super Shifter seemed to be more exhibitions than games, but they were surprisingly fun. The emphasis was on realism, with a tachometers, a digital speed readout, Christmas-tree starting lights, revving engines, and flashing lights. The game was so popular that it was put into production a second time after the initial run of 3,000 sold out. In the April, 1977 issue of RePlay, a panel of experts voted on the best arcade pieces of all time. Three of the five put Super Shifter among the top ten. Troy Livingston tells of a humorous incident about a bomb threat Allied got while the game was in production. When Livingston called the Hialeah police department and told them to send their bomb squad, they hung up. They didn't have one. Bravely, Livingston made his way to the Super Shifter cabinet containing the alleged bomb As he began to open the cabinet Ron Haliburton, who had staged the whole thing, tossed a cherry bomb behind him and watched with glee as the "bomb" (and Livingston) went off.

While Allied made a respectable $7 million in revenue in fiscal 1974, they lost $266,000 due to the fire and the market downturn. On the other hand, they had survived a disaster that could easily have spelled the end of the still-relatively-young company. Only time would tell in 1975 would be any better.

1975-76: Video and Arcade Games

Despite plans to curtail video game production, Allied produced (at least) five new titles in 1975 and early 1976. Robot (February, 1975) and Fotsball (March) were ball-and-paddle games, though the latter (a video version of foosball) came in an innovative stand-around cabinet. Allied finally got around to producing video versions of the two arcade game genres that had been putting bread on their table for years.

Street Burners (May, 1975) was a driving game while Ace (March, 1976) was a two-player aerial combat game in which each player controlled a biplane and tried to shoot down his opponent. When a player’s plane was hit, he bailed out and unscrupulous (or morbid) players could shoot helpless opponents as they slowly descended in their parachutes. Fire Power (January, 1976) was a tank vs. airplane game that some say was one of the earliest video games to feature scrolling. Ski was one of the more inventive of the video games released in the late 1970s (though there is some question as to whether it actually was a video game). The player stood on a pair of footpads while gripping a pair of ski poles. By twisting her body she could move the footpads and control the direction in which the on-screen skier was travelling while the ski poles could be used to control speed. As the player shooshed down the slopes, they were serenaded by alpine music. RePlay reported that the game did especially well in ski resorts in New York.

Allied produced only one electromechancial arcade game in 1975, but it was a doozie. The"fabled" (as RePlay later described it) F-114 (June) was an absolutely gargantuan projecting screen air combat game that put the player in a swiveling seat, facing an ginormous screen while blasting away at enemy jets. Allied's sole arcade effort of 1976 was Daytona 500, another outstanding sit-down projection screen driving game. Manufacturing problems, however, pushed its planned May release to June and affected sales projections

An Unusual Departure (or two)

In January, 1975 Allied entered into an agreement with another company (probably Advanced Patent Technology[1] of Nevada, who sued them in 1978) to begin development on a solid-state slot machine. In 1976, Allied introduced one of their oddest and most expensive products - the AstroPrint photo booth. In development since 1975, the machine printed computer-generated portraits of patrons. While paying money for a low-res, pixilated, "photo" from a dot matrix printer might seem downright loopy today, at the time the units were all the rage. When Allied debuted the unit at the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas, the line extended all the way around the mezzanine. Almost no one lined up to buy it however. By the end of 1976, they'd sold only 20. Maybe it was the $12,500 asking price. Hoping to do better, the company hired two salesmen just to market the unit but by 1977 it, along with their ill-fated slot machine venture, appear to have gone by the boards.

1975/76 - Solid State Pinball

Allied's most significant move in 1976 was its reentry into the pinball market. The move had actually started in late 1975 with the introduction of Dyn-O-Mite, the company’s first traditional pin. One thing about the machine, however, was anything but traditional. Dyn-O-Mite was the first successful solid-state, microprocessor-based pinball game. Unlike shakerball, Allied’s earlier pinball “innovation”, solid-state pins would catch on. Indeed they would completely transform the industry. Companies like Atari and Bally had produced experimental pins with microprocessors as early as 1973 but none ever made it past the prototype stage. At the 1975 MOA show in October, a small company from Phoenix called Mirco Games, best known for its foosball tables, introduced a pinball game called Spirit of ’76 whichis generally considered the first microprocessor pin to have been commercially released. Mirco’s game may have been innovative, but it sold less than 200 units (partly due to its uninspired playfield and backglass art). Dyn-O-Mite proved much more popular. The playfield featured the stylized likeness of Jimmie Walker, the rubber-faced young star of the sitcom Good Timesuttering his catch phrase “dyn-o-mite!”

While Dyn-O-Mite made its debut around the same time as Spirit of ’76, however, the Mirco game has generally been given precedence. There is evidence however that Allied may have beaten them to the punch. In addition to the two-player Dyn-O-Mite, Alled released a four-player version called Rock On, which may have been released as early as September, 1975, a month before Spirit of ’76 debuted at the MOA show[1]. At the time, Allied had actually been working on solid-state pins for months, perhaps even years and may have been the first company to fully commit to the concept. Development of Dyn-O-Mite was underway by April of 1975, when a prototype version was shown to distributors[2], and even that may not have been the company’s first stab at solid-state pins. In Brian Bagnall’s Commodore: A Company on the Edge Chuck Peddle, reveals that he had visited Allied while trying to drum up customers for his 6502 microprocessor. Created by Peddle at MOS Technology, the 6502 would be used in a number of early personal computers, including the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore PET. At the time of Peddle’s visit, Allied was talking with a number of microprocessor companies with an eye toward investing in the new technology. To convince them that the 6502 could be used in coin-op games, Peddle volunteered to build them a microprocessor-based pinball game. Working through the night and sleeping on a mat at Allied during the day, Peddle created a prototype and showed it at the National Computer Conference. Bagnall does not name the machine, mention anyone else working on it, or give a date (though it seems to have occurred sometime in 1975, the year the 6502 was introduced). While this could have been Dyn-O-Mite or Rock On, it seems unlikely. Troy Livingston described another early Allied attempt at a microprocessor pin.

[Troy Livingston] Allied Leisure actually was the first company to build a solid-state pinball machine. Bally patented it first but Allied Leisure actually built the first totally solid-state electronic pinball machine. We built 13 units and it took about 18 months to build. They were solid PC boards. It was the first totally electronic pinball machine ever. It was a disaster.

[It used] 7400-series TTL chips. I don’t know how many chips it had in it but it probably had 10 square feet of PC boards – literally. The entire inside of the cabinet was lined with PC boards. It was so expensive; we could have never made it on a production basis. Also, you just couldn’t keep it working. There was very little in the way of signal-level connectors available in those days...or they were for the fledgling space industry and were like $1000 each. So we were literally having to make our own connectors. Now you go to AMP and you buy a nice connector but in those days it didn’t exist.

Then the microprocessor… came out. Luis Sanchez and a couple of the other guys learned how to use it and designed the first processor-controlled pinball machine and manufactured it. We didn’t file patents on it, but I had machines sitting on the floor before Bally’s patent.

The prototype was designed by Ian Richter, another former NASA engineer. So should Allied be considered the father of the microprocessor pin? Probably not. Peddle’s game likely came well after Atari’s Delta Queen or Bally’s Flicker prototypes and there isn’t enough information to date Richter’s game (assuming, that is, it isn’t the same game mentioned by Peddle).

Chuck Peddle at Allied

Chuck Peddle at Allied

The most innovative thing that came out of Peddle’s prototype project, however, had nothing to do with pinball. While working on the game, he had befriended Allied engineer Bill Seiler. Personal computers were just appearing on the market and Seiler ordered a kit computer from a Denver company called The Digital Group. In 1975, The Digital Group began selling what they called the “Cadillac of Computers” - a kit system that offered users a choice of four CPUs and included cassette, video, and keyboard interfaces. While it was much easier to use than the Altair 8800, there was no real software available for it and after Seiler got his unit up and running he was hard pressed to find something to actually do with it. Seeing Seiler’s enthusiasm for the product, despite its obvious shortcomings, Peddle realized there was a market for personal computers and after completing his pinball game, he returned to MOS Technology and began working on the Kim 1, an inexpensive, user-friendly PC based on the 6502 that was released in 1976. Before leaving, Peddle promised Seiler that the two of them would one day design a personal computer together. When he later moved to Commodore and began working on the PET, he made good on his promise and brought Seiler in to work on the design.

Pinball Problems

Despite their promising start, Allied’s reentry into the pinball market ultimately proved unsuccessful. They sold just 1600 pins in the 1976 fiscal year. State-of-the-art technology or no, Allied had little experience designing pinball games. When they put their first game on test, for instance, they were surprised when they arrived at the test location to find the playfield covered in black streaks. They had used a chrome plated ball - something pinball designers didn't do because, well - it left black streaks on the playfield. The real issue, though, was reliability. The games were plagued with technical glitches (the most serious of which was a balky digital scoring unit). Cancelled orders poured in, damaging Allied's relationship with its distributors. In June, they cut back substantially on the pinball production (they resumed production in November), leading to an even more fateful decision.

Entering the Consumer Market

In June, after the pinball sales fell off, Allied decided to enter the home video game market. Projecting sales in excess $1.5 million for the upcoming Christmas season, Allied produced two home units (though it appears that both were actually produced by URL under contract). Name of the Game I was a $67 four-player game that offered the choice of four ball-and-paddle games and two target games (via a gun controller). Name of the Game II was cheaper ($45) two-player version. They quickly lined up order for 60,000 units - over $3 million worth. Once again, however, most of the orders were cancelled - this time because of shipping delays for a key component and because FCC approval of the game, which was scheduled for September, was delayed until December. Allied also had commitments to buy parts for 25,000 units. In the end, Allied built only 17,000 units and Christmas sales totaled only $350,000. They sold another $320,000 worth in fiscal year 1977 but still had 4,000 units in inventory, which they ended up dumping for as little as $15 apiece. And they probably didn't even get to keep all of theat. To rub salt in their wounds, Magnavox brought suit against Allied for patent infringement. Allied signed a deal promising Magnavox a 1.25% royalty on future arcade product sales (except pins) up to $225,000, plus a maximum base royalty of 4.75% on sales of products covered by the Magnavox patents, and a maximum base royalty of 6% on sales of home products covered by the patents - including, of course, Name of the Game.

[1] Advanced Patent Technology later, after name changes, became Alliance Gaming, who bought Bally Gaming International in 1996 and changed its name to Bally Technologies in 2006.

[1] The Internet Pinball Database lists this release date, but gives no source and I have been unable to confirm it. The release date for Spirit of ’76 is also uncertain (Internet Pinball Database simply lists “1975”

[2]Play Meter, November, 1976.

[3] Some claim that Sega Japan may have produced solid state pins (such as Millionaire, Big Kick, and Adventure) even earlier.

BONUS SECTION

Recently, I ordered a copy of the articles of incorporation for Cinematronics and Exidy.

Here is the one for Cinematronics. Not much of interest. The main thing that struck me was the date. Earlier, I had speculated that Jim Pierce may not have joined the company until May, 1975 or after, based on a help-wanted ad the Partee and Garrison ran in various papers. This document, however, was notarized on April 11, 1975 and Pierce was already onboard at that time (though it may have taken them awhile to discontinue the ads).

1977 - Bankruptcy and Skateboard Parks

Financially, 1975 and 76 had not been good years for Allied. The company lost almost $700 thousand in 1975 and a whopping $3 million in 1976. Total revenues had declined to under $4 million per year. On March 4, 1977 (after a spate of lawsuits from angry creditors) the company filed for chapter 11. Only an almost $1 million loan from David Braun saved them from disappearing completely[1]. Allied attributed its bankruptcy to three issues: the production delay for Daytona 500, unanticipated service problems with their solid state pins, and their disastrous attempt to enter the consumer market.

With Allied mired in financial difficulties, only a handful of games trickled off the assembly line in 1977, perhaps as few as three. Their most ambitious effort was Super Picker. Noting the success that Bally had seen with licensed celebrity-themed pins like Tommy and Capt. Fantastic, Allied marketing director Arnold Fisher decided to give the concept a try and inked Roy Clark of Hee Haw fame to a deal in 1976. Unfortunately, Roy Clark was no Elton John and Super Picker failed to take off. According to Allied's annual report they released just two "specialty arcade pieces" in fiscal year 1977 and they barely qualified as "released". Chasesold just 200 units and X-11 sold 120. The former was a first-person air combat video game in a sit-down cabinet that seemed quite advanced for its time. The debuted a third game at the AMOA in October, another huge (electromechanical) air combat game called Battle Station. They also released the gangster-themed pinball game Getaway Scott Cohen's Zap reports that Allied was designing a home backgammon game in 1977, but never marketed it (the company's annual reports don't mention it at all). Perhaps the most bizarre move in 1977, and a sign of their dire financial straits, was a subcontract to manufacture fiberglass skateboard parks (they got $13.5-20,000 per park and by early 1978 they had orders for about 25).

Aside (possibly) from Chase, Allied had not released a video game since early 1976. This may have been due to a lack of talent. On October 31, 1976 Allied had a staff of 20 engineers. By the time their 1976 annual report appeared, only 10 were left. One reason may have their video game designers began to slowly disappear. Upset with Dave Braun’s financial arrangements, Jack Pearson and Ron Halliburton left to form a design company of their own called Arcade Engineering[2]. When they needed employees, Haliburton and Pearson called Allied Leisure, who soon found themselves without a design staff. It wasn't the only personnel issue allied had during the year. In

Allied's bottom line didn't get any better during the year, but it didn't really get any worse either. For the fiscal year ending October 31, they lost $3.1 million on sales of $3.7 million. The news wasn't all bad however. On November 3, Allied was discharged from bankruptcy. They only way they were able to keep their head above water by striking an exclusive distribution deal with Fascination, Ltd. of Elk Grove Village, IL. . They also found themselves without one of their founders when Bobby Braun (who had been replaced as president by Morton Mendes in August, 1976) died suddenly on December 28th.

1978 - A comeback? - Allied's Cocktail Table Pins

Allied rebounded in 1978, thanks largely to another pinball innovation- the cocktail table pin. Like cocktail table video games, these games featured smaller playfields and allowed the player to sit down while playing. Cocktail pins had appeared as early as the 1930s but never really taken off. Allied had actually started making the games much earlier, but exactly when is uncertain. Their 1976 annual report claims that they made 800 cocktail pins (plus 300 microprocessor pins) to date (this figure included the first few months of 1977). In June, 1976 Play Meter reported that they'd shown a game called Spirit of '76 at a recent distributor meeting, describing it as a "tennis/pin cocktail". RePlay (2/77) reported that they had shown a "prototype of a video pingame in a cocktail cabinet" at the ATE in London in January. On August 12, 1977 David Braun and Ian Richter filed for a patent on a cocktail pinball cabinet. According to their 1977 annual report Allied had introduced a cocktail pin in April, 1977[3]and had sold 1,150 cocktail pins that year (compared to just 375 standard pins) and 3,500 to date. No trace of these machines, however, has turned up. The annual reports mentioned that they had an exclusive distribution deal with Fascination,Ltd. (the same company that had a 1974 patent for a cocktail video game cabinet) for the games and they may have been released under the Fascination name. That was the case with The Entertainer released in early fall. The Entertainer was another Roy Clark-themed pin, this time in a cocktail cabinet. When Arnold Fisher signed Clark to a licensing deal in 1976, he announced plans to introduce more games featuring the country star's likeness, including "coffee table" and cocktail models. He even planned on showing games at the Consumer Electronics Show. It appears that Allied wanted out of their deal with Fascination and wanted to produce The Entertainer themselves but they were mired I bankruptcy at the time and had to make the deal to stay afloat[4](though they entered into another exclusive arrangement with Fascination in July, 1978). Allied's first pin of 1978 was actually a standard pin - March's Hoe Down (a non-licensed version of Super Picker). They followed in April with Take Five, their most successful cocktail pin, and according to most sources, their first. Later in the year they debuted two more: Flame of Athens and Hearts Spades. Allied sold 4,290 cocktail pins in 1978. As for other games, there weren't many. In May they were appointed exclusive distributors for a pool table made by Champion Billiards. They showed two games later in the year - a water-pumping electromechanical game called Space Chip and a video game called Battlestar - but don't appear to have released them. They also licensed the projection screen rifle game Clay Champfrom Namco but it wouldn't be released until 1979. Thanks almost entirely to its pinball games, Allied actually turned a profit (of $3.2 million) in 1978 for the first time in five years.

1979: Back in the Red

Allied's turnaround was short-lived. For those who looked beyond the numbers, this probably wasn't surprising. In 1978, for the first time, the company hadn't introduced an electromechanical game or a video game. They didn't do much better in 1979, releasing just two more cocktail pins: Disco '79 and Star Shooter as well as Clay Champ. While sales increased to $6.2 million in 1979, the highest total in since the Paddle Battle days of 1974, Allied (once again) lost almost a million dollars ($154,000 of the total came from the settlement they paid to Magnavox).

Late in the year, Allied seemed ready to mount another comeback when they announced that they showed not one, but four new video games at the AMOA show: Battle Star, Clay Shoot, Lunar Invasion, and Space Bug. Of the four, the only one that was ever actually released was Clay Shoot, a video version of Clay Champ. By the time of the show, Allied was in trouble. While they had sold 10,000 cocktail table pins since introducing the concept in 1977, they had posted losses in five of the previous six years. Allied had released a number of innovative games over the years, including shakerball and cocktail pins, the video game Ski, and arcade hits like Wild Cycle, F-114 and Super Shifter. But while their products may have been long on innovation, they were short on reliability. In 11 1/2 years of existence. Allied had turned a profit just 3 times. Not for nothing did some refer to them as "Allied Loser".

The biggest news of 1979, however, was that the company had new owners. In a June 1 agreement, Brighton Products of Binghamton, New York acquired a controlling interest in Allied. Brighton was part of the KoffmanGroup of Industries, a conglomerate headed by Milton Koffman and his nephew Burton with a reputation for taking struggling companies and turning them around. As part of the agreement, Allied's officers and directors, including Dave Braun, resigned (though Braun would stay on in an advisory role). In 1980, the company would get new leadership, a new focus, and a new name. Only time would tell if they would get a new lease on life.

[1] Allied's annual report reports that Braun loaned Allied $215,000 plus an additional $85,000 for 1.6 million shares of stock.

[2] I'm not sure then the exodus bega. The 1976 annual report came out some time after March 2 (the SEC received it in September). Arcade Engineering may not have been formed until 1978.

[3] The seeming discrepancy with the 1976 report may be due to the fact that the 1976 report included the first months of 1977. While Allied's fiscal year ended on 10/31, their annual reports were generally prepared in spring of the following year, and often included information on the first quarter of the next year. The 1976 report, for instance, indicates that Allied resumed pinball production in November and that the cocktail pin wasn't introduced until that time or later.

[4] Fascination did release a number of Allied-designed pin uner their own banner in 1979, including Circa 1933. According to Allied's 1978 annual report , the Fascination agreement had accounted for 1/3 of total sales.

Not much narrative this time, just some interesting photos I've found in various trade magazines:

May, 1978

Jews For Jesus was sued by Bally/Midway for infringement over this Pac-Man-themed religious tract.

From the 1978 JAA show. I like the Nintendo Shooting Trainer in the bottom row.
Courtesy Cash Box magazine.

A few scenes from "The Video Game" gameshow (short-lived follow-up to StarCade)

Some rare shots of a P.J. Pizzazz (Sega's answer to Pizza Time Theatre)

A few unlisted (or rarely listed) games:

UEP's Beam Shock

Here's another Kamikaze (I'm not sure who made this one - love that 'fro, though)

From Play Meter, January, 1976

Rare cabinet shot of Rock-Ola's Rocket Racer

Elcon's Diversions cabinet (1981)

From the 1975 MOA - Meadows Star Shooter video pinball game in a pinball cabinet. Never made it into production.

Another rare cabinet photo - Alstate's Battle Back

A couple of non-video games I found interesting:

From Play Meter, 6/15/80

From 1984

From April, 1976 - I don't think PSE ever released this one.

Last November, I posted a preliminary report on the first cocktail video game: (http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/preliminary-report-what-was-first.html)

Since then, I have gathered some more information and thought it was time for a follow-up.

So what was the first cocktail video game? I'm still looking into the matter, but here are the prime candidates I've identified so far:

Elimination/Quadrapong

Atari's Quadrapong is probably the game I've most-often seen identified as the first cocktail video game (at least among those with some knowledge of the subject - I'm not counting articles like the one that said Space Invaders was the first video cocktail).

Here's one example:
http://www.glasshotel.net/teleblivion/history.htm

But when, exactly, was it released.

According to the well-known Atari internal document available on the web, Quadrapong was released in March, 1974. The game, however, may have actually been on the market a bit earlier than that. A flyer appeared in Vending Times in January, 1974. But flyers often appeared in trade magazines a month or two before a game's release. The trademark registration for the game lists a "first use in commerce" of March 4, 1974 and a "first use anywhere" of January 1, 1974.
Of course, none of this really matters because Quadrapong was really just Atari's version of Kee's Elimination.

The Atari internal document lists Elimination as an October, 1973 release. I didn't find a trademark registration for Elimination under Atari or Kee, but I did find one for WCI Games, Inc. of Sunnvale filed 7/12/76. I'm guessing that "WCI" is Warner Communications, but am not sure. The registration gives a first use in commerce of 10/31/73 and a first use anywhere of 10/31/73. The October 6, 1973 issue of Cash Box announced that the game was (or would be, I don't have the actual issue, just my notes) sample shipping.

So, was Elimination the first cocktail video game?
Maybe not.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I think there is some question as to whether it counts as a cocktail game at all given that it lacked the flat top where player's could put a drink and that seems to have been marketed at a game that you stood, rather than sat, to play and I think that the flat top and ability to sit while playing were almost defining characteristics of cocktail games.

Even if you do count it as a cocktail game, it may not have been the first.
Here are some other candidates:

Fascination, Ltd.

According to an article in the April, 1975 issue of Play Meter (a key source of information on this whole question), Fascination Ltd. of Des Plaines, Illinois claimed it was the first to market a video cocktail table.

Is there any merit to this claim?
Fascination was founded in August, 1973 as National Computer Systems, Inc. by Bob Runte and Bob Anderson (in the latter's living room).
Runte actually did file a patent for a cocktail video cabinet. Two of them, in fact.

The first was filed on July 17, 1974 for an "Amusement Device":http://www.google.com/patents/US3940136?dq=ininventor:%22Robert+Ralph+Runte%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UXucUOThBOuD0QGx6IDwAg&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw

The second was filed on July 29, 1974 for an "Amusement Game Table":http://www.google.com/patents/USD237727?dq=ininventor:%22Robert+Ralph+Runte%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UXucUOThBOuD0QGx6IDwAg&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA

The patent was filed in June, 1974, long after Quadrapong debuted (though he could have filed another patent earlier). Of course, patents - especially in these early years of the video game industry - sometimes weren't filed until months after the game was released.
So was this the case here?

Yes, it appears it was. That same April, 1975 article includes the following:

According to this article, then, Fascination Ltd. sold its first cocktail video game in October, 1973, the same month as Kee's Elimination. Which one came first? I don't know for sure (though if Elimination was sample shipping by the 6th, then it seems that it would have the better claim).

Of course, there are at least two other candidates.

National Entertainment

One intriguing possibility is a cocktail video game made by Atari for National Entertainment.
Once again, we look at the April, 1975 article:

This story is backed up by Nolan Bushnell himself in an interview in the June-July 1975 issue of Play Meter.

[Nolan Bushnell] We tried to sell cocktail tables clear back when and we were singularly unsuccessful through our regular distributorship organization. It was just a thing no one was ready for. We ended up building and selling some in Tokyo as early as mid-1973. The operators over there were a bit more aggressive and did rather well with it. But we could get no interest whatsoever in the states. So, we were approached by National Entertainment and we said, "Sure, we’ll build you a cocktail table."

Exactly when did all this happen? The April article says it was in "late 1973" but is no more specific. The Bushnell interview indicates only that it was some time after "mid-1973".

Several months back, I interviewed Doug Hughes, who says he actually worked on the game.

He doesn't remember exactly when the project started, but thinks it might have been as early as early/mid-1973 or even late 1972. In any event, his memory is that it was clearly before Elimination/Quadrapong.

The 1972 date is clearly far too early, and the mid-1973 date seems too early as well so Hughes' memory of the dates appears to be off. OTOH, from his memory of the details and people involved, he clearly knew of the game and was involved with it (at the time of the interview, I didn't even ask about cocktail games, much less about the National Entertainment game. In fact after he told me about it, I didn't even make the connection with the game from my earlier post until I went back and reread the April article in more detail).

Interestingly, Hughes also worked with Dick Januzzi later, after National Entertainment became Innovate Coin Corporation (Hughes worked on their game Spitfire).

There is one other piece of info I found that might support a mid-1973 date.

The following appeared in the March 22, 1975 issue of Cash Box.

This article says that National Entertainment was founded "almost two years" before March 22, 1975. Again, this is a bit vague, but would seem to indicate a date in summer, 1973, or possibly in very late spring. The article also indicates that National Entertainment put some games in the field very soon after Atari delivered them (assuming that Atari is the "leading video manufacturer" referred to) and even sold some before turning to Meadows.

I did an entity search at the California Secretary of State's office and found no entry for "National Entertainment, Inc." from the early '70s. I did find one for National Entertainment Company, incorporated in San Jose on 3/15/74 but the name is wrong and the date seems to be too late (though they could have filed earlier).

So the evidence I have points to a date no later than "late 1973" but I can't pin it down more precisely than that. Given the evidence, it seems to me that there is a decent chance that the National Entertainment game was started before October and they may even have sold some before that date, but the data is just too inconclusive to draw a firm conclusion.

Atari's Japanese Game

But what about that cocktail game that Atari built and sold in Japan "as early as mid-1973", before National approached them? If Bushnell's dates are correct, that would seem to be a clear candidate for the first cocktail video game.

Doug Hughes actually remembers working on that game as well, but didn't recall the details.

And did Atari release the game under its own name, or did they license it to a Japanese company?

One very intriguing possibility is that they licensed it to Namco.

I came across the following flyer on a Japanese site devoted to Namco history.

Unfortunately, all I could find there was a tiny thumbnail and I've yet to find a better copy.

This appears to show a cocktail Pong game.

The flyer is not dated, but Pong Doubles came out in September, 1973.

Could this be the game Bushnell (and Hughes) was referring to?

Given Atari's relationship with Namco at the time, I can't imagine that they'd have licensed a game to another Japanese company.

I don't know if the game is the game Bushnell was talking about or not, but right now Atari's mid-1973 Japanese cocktail Pong (whenever it was released and by whom) is my leading candidate for first cocktail video game.

Finally, I should mention a few games that I consider non-contenders.

TAFA lists Nutting's Table Tennis cocktail as a 1973 game, but this is almost surely incorrect (they similarly list Computer Space Ball as a 1972 game, while trade magazines don't mention it until mid-1973). The release of Table Tennis was announced in the June 1, 1974 issue of Cash Box and the game was not listed in their 1973 catalog issue, which listed the games released in the previous year (it WAS listed in the 1974 catalog).

I interviewed Andre Dubel, founder of Elcon Industries and he said that as far as he knew, Elcon was the first company to release a cocktail video game (he said he came up with the idea and had never seen it in a video game before). Unfortunately, I am unable to confirm this story and the evidence I have indicates that Elcon didn't start making video games until well after 1973 (the first reference I've found to Elcon is an announcement for their cocktail conversion kit in the June-July, 1975 issue of Play Meter.

Chicago’s Stern Electronics may not have had as many coin-op hits as Atari, Midway, or Nintendo, but during the video game heyday of the 1980s they produced a number of solid efforts, both in-house (Berzerk) and through their relationship with Konami (Scramble, Super Cobra etc.) One game that wasn’t a hit was 1983’s Dark Planet. What it lacked in sales, however, it made up for in innovation. While companies like Atari and Midway with their massive production facilities and huge design staffs could crank out mega-hit games by the truckload, smaller firms like Stern often had to turn to novel gameplay elements in an attempt to catch the fickle fancy of the jaded gaming public. Dark Planet was a space shooter with genuine 3D effects in the mold of Sega’s Subroc 3D (though it used an entirely different technology). The game was the brainchild of toy designer Erick Erickson. At the age of 9, Erickson had begun taking art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving on to the Kansas City Art Institute where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in industrial design, Erickson had begun looking for work in his native Chicago. At the time, Erickson's portfolio consisted primarily of toys, novelties, and the like and a number of people suggested that he apply for a job at a company called Marvin Glass & Associates. Erickson had never heard the company's name but he certainly knew their products, which included some of the most legendary toys of the 1960 and 1970s such as Lite Brite, Toss Across, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, Mouse Trap, Operation, STP Racers, Ants in the Pants, Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, Simon, Mr. Machine, Mystery Date, and even the original chattery teeth.

Marvin Glass, the man, from an article by Erickson himself at http://www.spookshows.com/toys/glass/glass.htm

Unfortunately, Marvin Glass didn't hire new college graduates at the time and suggested that Erickson come back after he had a few years of experience under his belt. Disappointed, Erickson took a job at Embossagraph Display Mfg Co, whose primary business was making point-of-purchase displays for breweries in the Milwaukee area. The company was looking to get the toy market, however, and Erickson was put to work designing cereal premiums and Cracker Jack prizes. Two years later he was hired by Marvin Glass. For a toy designer, it was pure heaven. His first major success was The Slime Monster Game, a board game released by Mattel in 1977 to make use of the popular "slime" product they had released the previous winter. At the center of the board was a green plastic monster with slime oozing from his mouth. The goal was to move your characters from the high school to the armory to pick up a landmine and knock over the creature before it "slimed" you. The game's success landed Erickson his own office.

As Erickson continued to design toys for Marvin Glass, he noticed that the video game field was exploding and suggested that the company enter the new market.

[Erick Erickson] I was watching the video game business go crazy in 1979. We were in Chicago and all the major video game manufacturers were in Chicago…Instead of selling something that retails for $20 now you can sell something that retails for $4,000. Look at the difference in royalties you can make on it.

Marvin Glass took Erickson’s suggestion and before long, he had about two dozen people working for him creating video game concepts for companies like Bally/Midway and Williams (the first was for a game called Mothership, which eventually turned into Midway’s Kozmik Krooz’r, but that’s another story). Then the firm's partners called a meeting, inviting everyone from the cooks to the accountants to the game designers and announced that all video game projects were to be shut down immediately. Erickson was stunned. Rather than coming to him in private and telling him about the decision, they had done so in a public meeting and he felt humiliated. He was also frustrated that he would no longer be allowed to work on video games when he knew that there was a goldmine out there just waiting to be tapped - especially in Chicago, the center of the coin-op universe. Then a coworker named Dan Langlois began encouraging Erickson to leave and start his own video game design company and before long the two of them did just that.

Erick Erickson, from http://www.houseofmasks.bizland.com/homabouterick.html

Erickson felt he needed something big to start his company - something phenomenal. He and Langlois had just cut their apron strings and had no job to fall back on. Inspired by the asteroid scene in The Empire Strikes Back (where Han Solo flies the Millennium Falcon into what he thinks is a crater, only to find it is the mouth of a reptilian creature), Erickson created an elaborate concept for a 3-D game that involved fighting aliens on the surface of an asteroid. Now he and Langlois needed to sell the concept. There was one problem. Neither of them were programmers and they lacked the engineering skill and materials to make a coin-op video game. They could have drawn up a proposal on paper, perhaps supplementing it with a storyboard of two, then shown it to one of the Chicago area video game manufacturers. Instead, Erickson took a much more innovative approach, based on something he had learned from Marvin Glass himself. When trying to sell toy concepts, Glass didn't want to leave anything to the imagination because he never expected executives to have any imagination. So he had his designers create prototypes that were as close to a finished product as possible. Erickson took the same approach with his video game idea. He decided to create a demo model that was as close as possible to a real arcade video game, but without the circuitry or programming.

[Erick Erickson] …what I did was [to] always create an illusion. Each cabinet was an illusion…in order to portray the illusion what I would do is rotoscope a puppet show … I took a super 8 mm camera and shot live action of me manipulating the icons on wands to get the rhythm, pace, and feel of the movement and then I would photograph that and …translate [it] to stop-motion…so it looks like it was pixelated in those days but what I'm doing is showing a video tape of a movie that I made that creates the illusion. When a client would come up to see one of my machines it would appear to be a full working machine with graphics and everything. The headers would light up. Everything would be in place so all the boss had to say is "Could I sell that". So I made it real easy for them.

Using stop-motion animation, models, rotoscoping etc. the duo created a video tape of simulated gameplay then mounted it in a full-fledged cabinet, complete with all the bells and whistles. Erickson even included a tape recorder with electronic music and sound effects. Most video games at the time used simplistic, upbeat music. Erickson wanted something more fitting for the game's theme. Something like Darth' Vader's theme from Star Wars or the electronic music of Alan Parsons Project's I, Robot (which Erickson was listening to at the time). In later years, when the two were designing electromechancial games, Dan Langlois would sometimes crouch behind demo units with a control box, making the game elements appear to move in response to the player's actions.

Working in the basement of Erickson's house, the pair had a demo unit ready in about two weeks and began calling various coin-op companies in Chicago. When they contacted Gary Stern, he was interested enough that he took a limo to Erickson's house to take a look. He bought the concept on the spot and gave the pair an advance and a contract granting Stern first refusal rights on any game they developed in the next year. With an advance and a monthly check, Erickson and Langlois moved into their own office in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago's manufacturing section near the various coin-op factories (they had to chase prostitutes of their gangway every morning where they got to work turning their demo into an actual video game.

The final game, Dark Planet, would incorporate a number of ideas from the demo, including the use of actual models inside the cabinet. Using urethane, Erickson sculpted an alien landscape, then used mirrors to create the illusion of a full planet curving away into space. The player peered through a small viewport to see the playfield, where green and red filters produced a 3D effect.

[Erick Erickson] I divided the red and blue colors through filtration. If I wanted something to be on the surface of the planet I would make it blue and if I wanted it to be flying above the planet I would make it red…You're flying above the planet your laser is focused [on the surface] and causing all kinds of havoc through its crackling fire scarring the face of the planet...There was a vacuum tube on the side built into the wall...you can fly into [the tube] and it transports you down to the lower [level where] you've got this civilization…building tracks so they can bring out the laser train...One system starts and you try to keep it under control, then the other system starts and you have to try to keep IT under control…and the third system starts…it's like spinning plates. You have to be everywhere at once. Then the volcano starts to erupt...you blast into the mouth of the volcano…and it's okay for a while but then it will erupt again and if erupts and covers your whole screen you don't know where you are and are going to get blown up…then the cannons on the rim start shooting - it's just a mayhem of a battle…you keep controlling this situation that's looking like it's out of control...it's a 3D wonderland and when people saw it they went ape

Meanwhile, Stern needed someone to program the game. They turned to Bill Jahnke and consultant Dale Jurich. Jurich, a computer science graduate of the University of Illinois, had opened an arcade called the Apple Duck in the Urbana-Champaign area in the early 1970s along with Andy Dallas (who went on to become a world renowned magician, hypnotist, and escape artist). After cofounding a company called Small Systems Services (where he developed one of the first microcomputer versions of FORTRAN) and working for Intel, Jurich founded his own consulting company called Dale Jurich Associates. Jurich (who was living in Oregon) landed a contract at Stern where his friend Bill Jahnke was already working. Jurich and Jahnke were tasked with turning Erickson and Langlois' video tape concept into software. It was an interesting coincidence that Jurich's first game involved a volcano. In 1980, he had witnessed the eruption of Mt. St. Helens from the second floor of the Intel facility in Aloha, Oregon and his first college roommate, volcanologist David Alexander, had died in the eruption.

Dark Planet programmer Dale Jurich (from his LinkedIn page)

Working from Jahnke's home in the Chicago Suburbs, the two worked on the game for the better part of a year, creating one of the more interesting, if lesser known, games of the golden age. Stern showed Dark Planet at the 1982 AMOA show and "released" it in January of 1983 but only in limited numbers. Despite high hopes for the game, it never went into full production (Erick Erickson recalls that around 350 were sold). One problem was the high production costs. Some reports also claim that aligning the games optics proved difficult. Another problem was that the player had to be a specific height to be able to actually see the 3D effect properly. Players who were too tall had to bend over and players who were too short couldn’t reach the viewer at all (though a slide-out stool was reportedly included in some versions). While Dark Planet had failed to catch fire, Stern didn’t abandon the idea of 3D graphics. Even more ambitious was their attempt at a hologram-game that actually projected the image of a plane over the top of the monitor. Once again, however, engineers experienced technical problems with the game’s optics and it never made it into release.

As for the team that created Dark Planet, Dale Jurich never programmed another coin-op video game (though he did program PC Pool Challenge for the IBM PC). After their contract with Stern ended, Erick Erickson and Dan Langlois inked another deal with Williams Electronics where they submitted a number of video game concepts (such as Cockroach - a bug-squashing game involving a kind of early touch screen). None of them were ever released- though Williams did release their Still Crazy pinball game. Today, Erickson designs high-quality custom sculptures and masks based on life masks of famous individuals (http://www.houseofmasks.bizland.com/). Marvin Glass later decided to give video games another go and designed a number of titles for Bally/Midway, including Journey, Wacko, Tapper, Domino Man, and Timber. While it may not have sold many copies, Dark Planet stands as one of the more interesting creations of video games' golden age.

See a video of Dark Planet's gameplay here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wO69GrbYiA

Thanks to Erick Erickson and Dale Jurich for taking the time to provide information for this article.

Extra - Kickstarter Projects

Finally, I thought I'd mention three Kickstarter projects that might be of interest to readers of this blog (though they likely already know about them). Two have already been funded and one still has about two weeks to go.

The one that still hasn't reached its goal is for a new retro gaming magazine called Retro It looks very promising and they have some impressive contributors lined up:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/socalmike/retro-the-multi-format-throw-back-video-game-magaz

The other two are already funded.
One is a documentary about the Nibbler high score attempts (but it also includes interviews with the designers)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playlandpictures/man-vs-snake-the-long-and-twisted-tale-of-nibbler?ref=live

The other is for a book on "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" consisting of a number of exclusive designer interviews
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748556728/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers?ref=live

Donkey Kong on the production line

1979 ad for Funspot

Another shot of the Atari Theatre Unit, from April, 1976

Some undocumented games:

Electrocoin's Minesweep (1977)

Infinity 1 from Nova Games of Canada (1984)

1976

Technical Design Corp's Whiz IV, from the 1975 MOA show

From Vending Times, May 1979
This sounds like the same game as the Warp Speed prototype in MAME

Finally, a few that are documented but rare

A photo of Sente's Shrike Avenger at the 1984 AMOA show

This Sega Car Hunt cabinet is different than the one on Arcade Flyers

Today’s post is about Video Action, a line of consumer/arcade video games made by URL from 1974-76. Normally this blog covers arcade games and does not veer into consumer (part of the reason I started the blog was because there are already so many sites, blogs, and books dedicated to home games). Occasionally, however, the two overlap, primarily when a coin-op company also makes consumer games, as was the case here.

Not only was Video Action made by a coin-op company but it was one of the earliest, if not THE earliest consumer video games to hit the US market after the Odyssey (though consumer Pong games had appeared on the European market earlier).

I actually thought I’d already posted on this, but I couldn’t find the post, so sorry if this is a repeat.

The Pong Story Website

Usually, the go-to source for consumer Pong games is David Winter’s excellent Pong Story website. With Video Action, however, the Pong Story’s story seems a bit muddled. Let’s look at what the site has to say about the game.

Here’s what is says about Video Action and Video Action II:

“They [URL] also produced their first Video Action arcade game, model VA-I, housed into an octagonal table. A few thousands were produced. After the Allied Leisure fire and other financial problems, URL found itself with millions of dollars of electronic components. URL had to do something with this inventory, so one of its co-founders quickly decided to get into the consumer market. Thus was born the second Video Action game, model VA-II. It was first announced in 1974, and released later in 1975 in two forms: one with a TV set and a coin box for use in bars, and a home version which could use any TV set. The former was more successful as it was designed to make money. The latter didn't sell as well as the former because of its high retail price of almost $500 (the circuit board itself cost around $200 to manufacture).”

The site then shows a photo of Video Action II and goes on to talk about Video Action III and Indy 500 (aka Video Action IV).

There is no photo of the initial game (Video Action).

Is this information accurate? Much of it appears to be, but some (particularly the info on the first unit) seems to be off. In researching my book and the game, I tried to verify this info but was unable to find anything definitive. I did find some things, however, that seem to indicate that URL’s first consumer game came out sometime earlier than Winter’s timeline indicates.

Bill Olliges

The first time I heard anything about a URL consumer video game was several years ago when I interviewed URL cofounder Bill Olliges. At the time (circa 1999) I barely knew who URL was, much less that they had produced a consumer video game. Here’s what Olliges told me when I asked how URL started in video games.

[Bill Olliges] We saw a game from Nutting called Computer Space anddecided we could do the digital logic that was necessary to do that kind of game…So we started on a game called Paddle Battle and that graduated into a 4-player called Tennis Tourney. Paddle Battle really seemed to take off…and we were shipping boards down to Allied Leisure in Florida like there was no tomorrow. Suddenly we couldn’t find enough ICs to continue at the pace we were at so we began to buy much, much bigger lots. Somewhere along the way, Allied had a major fire that shut down their manufacturing operations and we had inventories of ICs coming out of our ears so I decided “As long as we have the parts we might as well build a consumer game” So that’s what we did. We built a board and chassis in a kind of a pedestal – a flat tabletop that you could put a small black-and-white television on and you had your own arcade game. . .It was a 2 or 4 player paddle game.

Olliges’ story seems to comport with Winter’s account except for a couple of things. First, he makes no mention of a cocktail game or any other video game made by URL before the Allied fire, other than the ones they did for Allied itself. He also mentions that “you could put” a TV on their game, indicating that it could be attached to a standard TV. This does not appear to be the case, however, at least not at first.

Flyers

One of the first sources I always check when researching a game is TAFA (The Arcade Flyer Archive). TAFA has two flyers for Video Action. The first is dated 1975.

Normally, I would suspect that this was the source of Winter’s claim that the cocktail arcade version came first. The cabinet doesn’t exactly seem “octagonal” to me but I could see where some might say it was. The flyer, however, includes no model number, “VA-I” or otherwise.

The second flyer (also dated 1975) is a four-page flyer with much more info.

It lists five models:

· VA-II: their basic home or “waiting room” model

· VA-IIC: the same model, but with a coin box

· VA-T: the cocktail game from the first flyer

· VA-TC: coin-op version of same
All four of the above include three games: Tennis, Soccer, and Hockey

· VA-MP: A second cocktail model with different games (Volleyball and 4-Court Tennis) plus a “robot” option

Note that there is no model “VA-I” listed (though if there was a VA-II, you’d think there would have been a VA-I). Also note that the VA-MP model does indeed come in an unarguably octagonal cabinet.

Of course, we still don’t know when these games were released. The flyers are listed as being from 1975 but a) that isn’t very precise, b) this flyer was likely produced some time after the first game was available, and c) TAFA flyer dates (especially in the 1973-75 period) are often off by a year.

Trade Magazines

My next source for games is usually the trade mags. Unfortunately, they are probably not going to give us the full story here since Play Meter didn’t start until December, 1974 and RePlay until October, 1975. Vending Times and Cash Box were around earlier in 1974 but I don’t have the full issues with me right now. I do, however, have some scattered issues as well as my notes (which include all the release dates I could find). A bigger issue is that those magazines covered the coin-op market so they might not have listed a game that was available only as a consumer unit (though they generally did so if it was made by a coin-op company).

Here’s what I found.

The February, 1975 issue of RePlay contains an announcement that Control Sales (more on them later) “introduced” Video Action II at the winter CES in January (the same show, by the way, where Atari was showing Home Pong).

Essentially the same article appeared in the February, 1975 issue of Vending Times.

The most interesting line for purposes of this article is:

“Video Action II, which carries a suggested retail tag of $299, is priced considerably under its predecessor model which included a television receiver. The customer can now buy the electronic game and connect it to his television receiver at home.”

The “predecessor model” had a built-in 12” TV and, it was built-in – not an option – a seemingly fatal decision for a consumer product. Especially given that over 90% of homes already had TVs.

The Pong Story claims that Video Action II cost “almost $500” (I read somewhere that the exact figure was $499) even without the television and indicates that the $200 board was the main reason. No mention is made of the consumer version being available with a built-in TV.

Reading the RePlay article, I’d guess that the “predecessor model” (presumably Video Action) was basically the same as Video Action II except with a built-in TV and a $500 price tag (the article does mention that the Video Action II was priced “considerably under” its predecessor).

The May, 1975 RePlay had the following:

So it looks like the arcade cocktail table version (VA-TC) was introduced around May (Cash Box reported the same thing), not prior to the Allied fire. Unless, of course, there was a previous cocktail version. The only other cocktails mentioned in the 4-page flyer are VA-T, which was a consumer cabinet and VA-MP, which I’d guess came out later given that it had 2 different games, plus a “robot” feature (a feature URL included on its Video Action III home unit in 1976).

These articles indicate to me that the original game was not a cocktail game, but instead was a version of VA II with a built in TV. The evidence, however, is far from conclusive, so we have to dig further.

Newspapers

One good source for info on consumer games is newspapers. While searchable, online newspaper archives are becoming more and more common and comprehensive, however, they still only have a fraction of total amount of data that’s out there in print form, so I didn’t have high hopes when I started searching.

Nonetheless, I did manage to find some good (if scant) info.

The first mention I found was this ad from the September 2, 1974 St. Charles (Missouri) Journal.

The photo isn’t the best, but that seems to be the same game as Video Action II and clearly includes the TV set (note how they try to make this a selling point). Too bad they didn’t list an SRP (though if it was $499, you can see why they might not want to).

The most interesting thing here is the date. September 2, 1974 was over a year before Atari introduced Home Pong and over four months before they showed it at the CES. And given that this was the only 1974 ad I could find, it may well have shipped even earlier.
Could this have been the first US home video game after the Odyssey?
The Pong Story doesn't seem to list an earlier one (at least not in the US, it does list ome 1974 models from Europe). Vendel and Goldberg state flatly that it was the first home tennis game on the market after Odyssey.

Of course, consumer games aren't my specialty so I may well be forgetting some obvious early home games.

The next ads I found for any version of the game weren’t until November, 1975 when I found a number of ads for Video Action II.
Here's one from the 11/2/75 Omaha World Herald

And here's a photo that was part of an article on the game in the 11/18/75 Galveston paper.

Given the above, it looks to me like the original Video Action came out sometime around the fall of 1974, included a built-in monitor, and had an SRP of around $499. They may have produced a coin version as well.

Video Action II looks to me like the same game but without the TV and at a lower price (probably created after URL realized how silly it was to produce a consumer game that couldn’t be connected to a TV).

Sidebar – Control Sales and Venture Technology

OK, so what about Control Sales. Control Sales handled the marketing of the games (which were manufactured at URL). Control Sales was a manufacturer’s representative organization founded in 1968 by Ron Rutkowski.

TAFA actually has another flyer that touches on this topic. It's from a company called Venture Technology. This one is a 6-page flyer but I’m only showing the most relevant page.

The game here appears to be the same as URL/Control Sales model VA-MP. Note the claim that they sold “over 3,000” units, which comports with Winter’s claim of an octagonal cocktail game that sold “a few thousands”. (As I said, I suspect the flyers were the main source of some of Winter’s info).

But who is Venture Technology?

First, if you look at the rest of the flyer, you’ll not only see photos of the original Video Action but of a number of coin-op titles made by Electra Games. Electra was the coin-op division of URL, set up in early/mid 1975.

Look a little closer and you’ll see that Venture Technology and Control Sales were both in Des Plaines and in fact had the same address. A search through Replay reveals that both were headed by Ron Rutkowski, so I suspect that there were basically the same company.

I plan on trying to contact Rutkowski sometime soon and may even try to recontact William Olliges. If so, I'll report back what I hear.

More Golden Age Tournaments

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 7

Dave Needle and Jerry Lawson - Two Early Independent Video Game Designers

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 8

RePlay Magazine Chart Summary - Part 1

Who Was the First Person To Come Up With the Idea For A Coin-Op Video/Computer Game?

Early Unknown Computer Games Mentioned in the Magnavox Suit(s)

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 9

Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 1: Release Dates and Production Numbers

Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 2: The Leisure Time/Fascination Connection

Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 3: What Was Allied's First Cocktail Pin

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 1

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 2

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 3

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 4

Photo Odds and Ends and Undocumented Games

What Was the First Cocktail Video Game (Redux)

Forgotten Gems - Stern's Dark Planet

More Photos And Undocumented Games

URL's Video Action - The First US Consumer Video Game after Odyssey?