Addendum to Ultimate History of Allied Leisure/Centuri

November 10, 2013, 12:48 pm

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I am getting ready to post the next part of my ultimate history of Allied Leisure/Centuri, which will start covering the Centuri years, but I recently came across some new information about the Allied Leisure era that I thought I'd pass along.

I am currently reading Brian Bagnall's excellent Commodore: A Company on the Edge. While the book is mostly about the early years of Commodore (I think it covers mostly the PET/Vic-20/ C64 years) it actually has a surprisingly lengthy section that discusses Allied Leisure.

Why would a book about Commodore even mention Allied Leisure?

As it turns out, Chuck Peddle actually did contract work for Allied. For those who don't know, Peddle was the designer of the 6502 microprocessor (the processor used in the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore PET). While he was working at MOS Technology (developers of the 6502), Peddle visited Allied Leisure to try to sell them the chip. At the time, they were investigating the use of microprocessors in their games and were talking with a number of other companies. To convince them to go with MOS, Peddle designed a prototype pinball game that used the 6502. Unfortunately, the book doesn't give the game's name or even when it was produced (though it was probably 1975, the year the 6502 debuted). It does mention that Peddle demoed it at the National Computer Conference but doesn't say when. I'd love to find more info about the game. It may be the same game I mentioned in the Allied Leisure post designed by Ian Richter. It could also have been a prototype for Rock On or Dyn-O-Mite but that seems unlikely to me since I've never heard that Peddle was involved in those games.

Perhaps more interesting is that Peddle's brief stint at Allied may have altered the course of personal computer history. While at Allied, Peddle befriended a young engineer named Bill Seiler. While Peddle was working on his pinball prototype at night, Seiler had ordered an early kit computer from a company called The Digital Group. Released in 1975, the computer was much more user friendly than the recently-introduced Altair 8800. The Digital Group computer offered the choice of 4 CPUS, a warm boot, and interfaces for a cassette deck (for storage), keyboard, and monitor. After Seiler built the kit, he wrote a few programs then was unable to find anything else to do with it (there was no software at the time). Watching Seiler play with his new toy convinced Peddle that there was a market for a user-friendly personal computer and he returned to MOS Technology and began work on the Kim 1, an early personal computer released in 1976. Later, when he moved to Commodore, he recruited Seiler to work on the PET design team.

Bagnall's book has more information about Seiler's years at Allied and you can buy the book if you are interested (it's available as an e-Book). I thought I'd pass along one quote, however. When Seiler worked at Allied, he was shocked by the poor design of their games and the inexperience of their technicians (many of whom were Cuban exiles). At one point he describes the repair techniques used by a colleague:


[Bill Seiler] There was this Cuban guy who didn’t know anything about logic...He had this little book, and if a videogame like a Pong game was doing something funny, he would just change three chips and it would fix it. He did this other thing where he would rub on a chip with a pink pencil eraser and it would start working again for a few seconds, and then it would go away and he knew that was a bad chip. I said this is voodoo man[1]

Anyway, I have added the above info to my earlier post, but if you want to read more or have any interest in Commodore, I heartily recommend Bagnall's book. He conducted extensive interviews with a number of the major players (the only downside so far is that he spends little time on the pre-computer years).
Unfortunately, it looks like there won't be a sequel. Bagnall was working on one and was scheduled to release it several weeks ago, but he posted on his blog that the project has been shelved indefinitely.

It's too bad since (aside from the Commodore info), part 2 would likely have included interviews with Dave Needle and maybe more info about his early video game career.

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[1]Bagnall, Brian, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (p. 42). Independent Publishers Group. Kindle Edition.

 

 

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Video Game Myth Busters - The Space Invaders Yen Shortage

November 13, 2013, 7:16 pm

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Space Invaders was one of the most influential arcade video games in history. So huge was its impact that I consider its release to be the incident that separated the bronze age of video games from the golden age.

 

 

?

 

 

Over the years, a number of stories have appeared about the game’s history and impact, especially in Japan. For some, these stories seem a bit too good to be true and some have been dismissed as nothing more than video game urban myths. Some examples:

·         What was the primary inspiration for the game? Atari’s Breakout? Atari’s Avalanche? The US space program? The 1953 film War of the Worlds? The release of Star Wars? The 1972 Taito EM game Space Monster? All have been suggested at one time or another.

·         How many copies did it sell? Figures range from 55,000-65,000 for the US and 200,000-400,000 worldwide.

·         Did the game really cause a wave of juvenile delinquency in Japan? Did kids steal yen from their parents? Or run away from home to play the game? Or pump upwards of $80,000 in to the game? Or extort other kids for game money?

·         And finally, probably the most controversial story of all (if there even is such a thing as a video game history controversy). Did the game cause a national shortage of the 100 yen coin in Japan, forcing the government to triple production?

 

In this post, I’ll take a brief look at the last two questions, especially the fourth one.

I should say up front, however, that I will not be able to give a definitive answer here, primarily because I don’t have access to the contemporary Japanese sources that would be required to find one. Nonetheless, I will summarize what I was able to find in US sources.

The story of SI causing a 100-yen coin shortage has been repeated in almost every major history of video games, including Tristan Donovan’s Replay, Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games, and Russel DeMaria’s High Score. But is it true?

Wikipedia

The Talk section for the Wikipedia article on the game includes a brief discussion of the issue, but it is short on supporting evidence. One person (Alistair Rae) even claims that the game “…didn’t cost 100 Yen to play. At the time in Japan 100 yen bought what about $10 buys today.”  Rae apparently didn’t do his homework on this, because his claim doesn’t stand up to even five minutes of scrutiny. Exchange rates in 1978 averaged about 200 yen per American dollar. Not to mention that I have found a number of contemporary articles confirming that the game cost 100 yen to play.

Even is SI did cost 100-yen, did it cause a national shortage?

Recent Articles

Charles Paradis – circa 2013

A recent article by Charles Paradis of the Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada titled “Insert Coin to Play, Space Invaders and the 100 Yen Myth” dismisses the whole thing as a myth.

http://www.academia.edu/3672374/Insert_Coin_to_Play_Space_Invaders_and_the_100_Yen_Myth

 

While Paradis may be right in his conclusion, his article leaves much to be desired, IMO, particularly in identifying the original source of the story. I think his biggest contribution to the whole issue is that he actually contacted the Japanese Mint’s PR office and the Bank of Japan. The latter could find no evidence confirming the story. The former claimed that the increased yen production of the late 1970s (which I discuss below) had nothing to do with Space Invaders and cited an interview with Toshiro Nishikado (the game’s designer) in which he “indicated he believed it all to be a wild rumour.” Is this the last word on the issue? Maybe, but he is relying on a current claim about an event that happened 35 years ago and doesn’t mention how the mint concluded that the shortage had nothing to do with SI.

As an aside, note that the article also claims that the story of the original Pong overflowing its cash box is a myth because (he claims) Nolan Bushnell debunked it and was in Chicago at the time. I suppose I can’t fault him for taking Bushnell’s word, but IIRC Al Alcorn (who was there) confirms the story and Nolan’s version of the facts is often disputable (though Paradis may have misunderstood him). He also quotes from All Your Bases Are Belong to Us, which makes the dubious claim that the whole Pong story was a fake (a story the author got from emails he pilfered from Ralph Baer’s computer, IIRC). I have already discussed my own qualms about the Pong story elsewhere, but I think Paradis dismisses it too easily.

 

But back to the yen story. There are actually at least two claims in dispute here: whether or not Space Invaders caused a yen shortage and whether or not the government had to increase production to counter it.

Let’s start with the last question. Finding out the government’s reasons for increasing yen production might not be easy but we should be able to find out if there was an increase at all. If not, then we can consider this part of the myth busted.

 

World Coin News – February, 2012

In regards to this question, Paradis cites another article from the February, 2012 issue of World Coin News by Mark Fox titled “Space Invaders Targets Coins”

http://www.academia.edu/2568838/Space_Invaders_targets_coins

First of all, I have to say that it warms my heart to see that a numismatic journal would publish a whole article on the subject. The article includes a summary of production of the 100 yen coin in Japan (the source is the 1995 Krause coin guide). In 1977 Japan minted 440 million 100-yen coins. In 1978 the figure dropped to 292 million, in 1979 it rose to 382 million, and in 1980 it rose again to 588 million. Space Invaders was released in Japan in June, 1978. The numbers show that there was an increase in yen production from 1978 to 1980, though nowhere near a threefold increase. However, a glance at the chart reveals that the 1978 figure was atypically low.

NOTE – I should mention here that it appears that Fox was not the first one to come across this info. The same chart appeared in a 2009 LiveJournal post by The Eidolon;

http://theeidolon.livejournal.com/235676.html

In his article, Fox dismisses Space Invaders as a factor in the increase. Instead he offers another reason (suggested by a coin dealer who had lived in Japan for 40 years). In 1967, in response to rising silver prices, Japan had begun making 100-yen coins out of copper and nickel (they had previously included small amounts of silver). In response, people began hoarding the older coins, sometimes melting them down to extract the increasingly valuable silver. The Fox article speculates that the increase in yen production was an effort to counter this hoarding. As for the shortage, Fox cites a quote from Chris Kohler of Game Life who said that his ““…understanding of [the shortage] was always that there had not been an increased production of coins, but that certain Tokyo newspapers had simply reported on spot shortages of coins.” Is Kohler correct?

Tracking the Source of the Legend

So where did the yen-shortage story come from?

Scott Cohen’s Zap?

When you are dealing with potential video game history myths, one source that always comes to mind is Scott Cohen’s Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari. I did a quick search of my digital copy and Cohen does indeed repeat the story:

“When Taito first introduced the game in Japan a year earlier, the reaction was so phenomenal it caused a coin shortage. The Japanese government had to quadruple the yen supply, just so kids could feed the machines”

In this case, however, Cohen is not the original source of the claim. Zap was published in June of 1984 and the story goes back much farther than that.

(typically, however, Cohen exaggerates the claim saying that Japan quadrupled rather than tripled production)

Martin Amis?

 

In his article Paradis decries the lack of a reliable source for the yen shortage claim, noting “The rare instances where these examples give any citation, they tend to reference Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders.”

I don’t have time to go into Amis’ book here (suffice it to say that it is one of the more interesting books in video game history) but I doubt if he was the first to make the claim. Amazon reports that Invasion of the Space Invaders was published on November 1, 1982. There were at least two other books published the same year that also included the story:

Craig Kubey’s The Winner’s Book of Video Games and Steven Bloom’s Video Invaders. Amazon does not list exact publication dates, but if Amis’ book was published in November, it seems likely that Kubey and Bloom predated him.

Newspapers and Magazines

In any event, the three books mentioned above are likely irrelevant since it is unlikely they got their info directly from a firsthand source. It seems more likely that they repeated a story they heard elsewhere. But where?

New Scientist, December, 1980

Pardis mentions an article in the December 18-25, 1980 issue of New Scientist titled “The games that aliens play”.

Luckily, the magazine is available on Google books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ainC3-wuz_kC&pg=PA782&dq=%22The+games+that+aliens+play%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dkyAUqrxCIj4kQeZh4DgDQ&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20games%20that%20aliens%20play%22&f=false

The relevant sentence reads:

“The Japanese company Taito developed the original Space Invaders for coin-operated machines – they became such a craze in Japan that the mint had to treble its supply of 100-yen coins.”

Can we find an earlier source? Yep.

Various Sources, November, 1980

 

 

 

 

In early November of 1980, a number of stories appeared making nearly identical claims about the 100-yen rumor.

Two of them were reports on the national Space Invaders tournament.
One was by UPI reporter Ed Lion (the earliest version I found was from the November 10 issue of the Springfield (IL) Morning Union). It claimed that Space Invaders:

“…caused an immediate sensation and the Bank of Japan had to triple its production of 100-yen pieces – the coin used for the game in pinball arcades – just to meet the demands of Space Invaders-crazed players. One Japanese man poured $80,000 into the machines."

Another from the November 9 New York Times  by Dudley Clendenen (since they sell articles, I only posted a portion of it) reported

"Last year it is said to have caused the Bank of Japan to triple its production of 100-yen coins to satisfy the demand"

A third from the November 7 Youngston (OH) Vinidcator says
"The Bank of Japan had to triple its production of 100-yen pieces to meet the demand of Space Invaders players."
Note that the article quotes Tom Halfhill of Cleveland Magazine. - a possible source for the quote.

The fact that three different articles made the same claim within three days of one another indicates that the source of the quote came from somewhere else.

Gannett, October, 1980

 

Going back another month, I found a story from the October 19, 1980 Rockford (IL) Register by Evelyn Short of Gannett News Service.

“When it was unveiled in Japan in 1978, Space Invaders nearly caused `economic chaos. A government investigation into an unusual shortage of 100-yen coins found that the money was lying in limbo inside thousands of Space Invaders machines.”

Aha, not only does this article mention the increased yen production, but now there was a “government investigation”. Note, however, that there is no mention of tripling the supply.
On an interesting side note, the article also mentions the 23rd UFO trick and claims that it was discovered in December, 1979 by a group of (MIT?) students

Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 1980

 

This one's on Google News.
From Sydney (Australia), September 9, 1980

"The craze reached such heights there at one time the country faced a serious shortage of 100-yen coins. A Government inquiry found that people were pouring all their coins into the Space Invaders."

Again we have a mention of a "government inquiry" and no mention of trebling the supply.
Sadly, no source is given for any of this info and before September, 1980 my trail runs cold. I found a number of articles on the game from early 1980 and 1979 but none directly mentioned the yen story.

However, I did find one other article that might be relevant

Pacific Stars and Stripes, July, 1979

 

This article (another UPI article) from the July 20, 1979 Pacific Stars and Strips has a number of interesting claims in regards to delinquency that we will discuss below. For purposes of the yen question, however, note the following intriguing quote from a Japanese hotel clerk:

“We’ve got plenty of bills but we often run out of the coins and have to wait for the machine to be emptied.”

It doesn’t say anything about a national shortage, but it does show that individual locations often ran short of 100-yen coins, lending credence to Kohler’s speculation that these local shortages were reported by the Japanese media and got blown out of proportion. Of course, that still doesn’t explain the whole “government investigation” business. One possibility (and this is pure, unsubstantiated speculation) is that the story (assuming it’s not true, and I’m not saying that’s the case) resulted from a combination of reports of local shortages and a government effort to curtail the hoarding of coins containing silver (though the last claim is also speculative).

 Delinquency?

What about the claims of the delinquency caused by the game? This story hasn’t been as widely disseminated but it may be even more interesting.

Among the claims I found were the following

Invasion of the Space Invaders

·         This one is second hand, since I haven’t read the book (it costs over $100 used on Amazon) but Amis supposedly wrote that a 12-year old in Japan held up a bank with a shotgun demanding his loot in coins so he could play the game.

 

Play Meter – August, 1979

·         Police concerned by juvenile delinquency caused by the game “…have ordered an investigation”

·         “The education Ministry has asked local teaching authorities to do what they can to stop children playing the game”

·         “Japanese newspapers have been carrying reports on cases of delinquency related to SI and state that in the past three months about 250 school children were placed under protecting police guidance and custody in Tokyo alone.”

·         In March a 10-year old boy was arrested for stealing 230,000 yen from his neighbor’s house to play the game,

·         Later a 9-year-old girl ran away from home with 300,000 and traveled several hundred miles to Okinawa to feed her Space Invaders habit

·         The NAIA restricted access to the game for those under 15 unaccompanied by an adult

·         (My favorite) The most common offense was stealing cigarette lighters, which could be used to rack up free credits on the game

 

Pacific Stars and Stripes, July, 1979

·         Students cutting class to play the game

·         “two workers from the Japanese National Railways stole cameras, wristwatches, and other valuables from fellow railway workers at a dormitory, and pawned them to get money to play ‘Space Invaders’

·         “12-year old children in one school terrorized a group of 8- and 9-year olds, extorting 100-yen (U.S. 50 cents) coins to feed the game”

 

Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 1979

 

 

 

 

 

·         The story of the 9-year old runaway appears again (this time in US dollars)
·         The story of wrapping a 5-yen coin also appears again

      ·         Could the 8 and 12 year olds here be the same story as the 10-year-old in the Play Meter story? The amount of money is about right.

So many details of this story almost match what is in the Play Meter story that I wonder if this was their source. If so, they made a number of subtle changes, which could be a sign of a legend in the making.
 

 

Finally, here’s one of the earliest articles I could find, from the April, 1979 RePlay. It mentions nothing about a yen shortage or any delinquency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

August 20, 2013, 10:56 pm

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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).

 

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

Video Game Firsts??

November 22, 2013, 7:38 pm

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While perusing early trade magazines, I often come across information that challenges existing ideas involving well-known video game "firsts". Personally, I'm always skeptical of such claims and hesitant to state definitively that something is the "first" instance of such and such because the claims all too often turn out to be incorrect.
I think this is even more true with video games since the early years of video game history are largely unknown and unexplored and people often make or repeat such claims without examining the evidence (which often doesn't exist).

Today, I examine a couple of these claims.

The First Video Game With A Microprocessor

The first is the question of the first video game to use a microprocessor. The standard answer has always been Midway's Gun Fight and that may well be true. In one of my first posts, I examined the idea that PMC's Aztec might have beaten them to the punch but it turns out it didn't.

Today I look at another candidate that has much more solid evidence behind it. - Mirco's PT-109

An article on Mirco in the November, 1975 issue of Play Meter had this to say:

The article here is talking about the 1975 MOA show in October - the same show where Midway debuted Gun Fight. Note that Mirco is the same company that introduced Spirit of '76 - generally considered the first microprocessor pin to be released (though I have my doubts about that one as well - there were actually at least two more microprocessor pins at the 1975 MOA).
And if you didn't know, Spirit of '76 was designed by Dave Nutting and Jeff Frederiksen who went to Mirco after Bally rejected their microprocessor pin prototype in 1974.

Here's the second page of the PT-109 flyer.

Note that it claims the game is "microcomputer controlled".
While PT-109 was on display at the MOA, that doesn't tell us when it was actually released. The game's release was announced in the November, 1975 issue of Cash Box, though I don't have the issue handy to check the verbiage and they may have just been announcing that it was on display at the show (though some companies actually started taking orders for their games at the MOA).

I would like to confirm that PT-109 had a microprocessor and if so, what kind, but It looks like it at least came out very close to Gun Fight if not at the same time.

In my earlier post, I mentioned another candidate for first microprocessor game - Jerry Lawson's Demolition Derby. Exactly when the game was created is unclear. Lawson says he started in 1972 or 1973 and either Goldberg or Vendel (I think - I forget which one and don't have my notes handy) report that Alcorn told them about Lawson paying them a visit during their Pong days. Demolition Derby used a Fairchild F-8 microprocessor but almost surely didn't have one until 1975, when the processor was released (though as a Fairchild employee, Lawson could have gotten a preproduction version).

Lawson supposedly sold his game to Major Manufacturers, who tested it but never released it, but I have not been able to confirm that fact. I did find the following interesting comment in the October, 1975 Play Meter however.

Once again, the subject is the upcoming MOA show. The article mentions that Major would be showing two "arcade games" and the wording makes it sound like they are not talking about video games, but is it possible that one of the games was Destruction Derby?

Finally, there was this mutant from the 1975 MOA that I discussed in an earlier post:

I don't know if this had a microprocessor, but given that it had a central unit that controlled multiple remote terminals, I'm guessing that it did. Of course, I don't know if it was coin-operated. (though it WAS on display at the MOA). The March, 1976 RePlay reported that the manufacturer (California On-line Computer Systems) was working on a "super machine" that would probably require an attendant rather than taking coins or bills and planned to show it at the California State Fair in August.

First Japanese Video Game - First Game With Human Figures

Another potential first involves another obscure game - Midway's TV Basketball

The October 15, 1986 RePlay made the following claim.

According to this, TV Basketball was the first licensed Japanese video game to be released in the US (a title that is sometimes awarded to Taito's Speed Race, which Midway released around February, 1975 as Wheels.
Of course, this article says that the game was licensed to Atari, which makes the claim a bit questionable. Did they first license it to Atari, are they talking about a different game, or did they just get it wrong.

Here's a blurb from the April 15, 1986 issue

 

This time they say that the game as licensed to Midway, which seems correct. The production number, however, do not. The 1,400 figure for TV Basketball might be correct, but according to Ralph Baer's 1976 figures, Midway sold 7,000 copies of Winner (released April, 1973) and I'm pretty sure that RePlay or Play Meter earlier reported the same thing. I believe Baer also reported that Wheels sold 7,000. Play Meter repeated the claim about TV Basketball was the first Japanese game in America but that one as also from 1985 and I haven't found any earlier evidence supported this.

 

If the game was licensed from Taito, what was the original?

It must have been Basketball.

 

 

 

I have not confirmed the February, 1974 release date but TV Basketball is generally listed as a 1974 game, so it probably did come before Wheels. And speaking of Speed Race/Wheels, the main evidence that it was the first Japanese game in America seems to be a comment from designer Tomohiro Nishikado, who only said that he THOUGHT it might have been the first Japanese game in the US, not that it definitely was.

 

And speaking of TV Basketball, could it have been the first game to depict human characters onscreen? Off the top of my head, I can't think of another that came out before February, 1974 but I haven't given it a lot of thought.

 

BTW - if you haven't played TV Basketball, you can do so on the DICE emulator. It's really just a ball-and-paddle game with human-shaped paddles, however.

 

 

 

 

The First Coin-Op Video Game Popularity Chart?

December 1, 2013, 9:24 pm

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Today's post is a quick one. It's obvious from reading this blog how invaluable I think trade journals like RePlay and Play Meter are to any student of coin-op history. One of my favorite features of these magazines is the annual operator survey or state of the industry survey.

They were usually published in the November issue, sometimes with another one in the spring. They contained a trove of statistics covering things like weekly earning by machine type, total number of games on location, market share, player demographics, new equipment buying patterns, total number of street locations and arcades, average number of games per location/operator, top operator complaints, and more.

My absolute favorite feature of the polls, however, was the list of top games for the year. I have always been an inveterate lover of lists and charts. I used to spend hours poring over things like the Baseball Encyclopedia and Joel Whitburn's Billboard books, so these were right up my alley.

 

Today, I'd thought I post the earliest such list I could find.

It appeared in the April, 1976 issue of RePlay and listed the top "arcade" games in the country. Note that while the term "arcade" games, when used in RePlay, normally did not include pinball games, table games (foosball, air hockey, pool tables), wall games, or ball bowlers/shuffle alleys - in this list, it appears to include any game that was found in arcades.

 

 

 

Chasing Down Rabbit Trails - Fun and Food, Cartrivision, and Mad Man Muntz

December 7, 2013, 6:44 pm

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“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-  Bilbo Baggins

Bilbo may well have said the same thing about studying history.

One of the most enjoyable, if sometimes maddening, aspects of research, is that you often get sidetracked onto rabbit trails that have little, if anything, to do with the topic at hand. While these can be great time wasters, they occasionally prove quite rewarding. Not only do you discover connections you never knew existed, but you sometimes learn about things you might never have found on your own.

I have had this happen again and again when researching video game history. In this post, I will discuss three such instances, each of which took me a little farther afield than the last

1) Fun n Food – the original Pizza Time Theatre?

OK. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but stay tuned.

I found out about this one when I was reading an article in the March, 1982 issue of RePlay about the opening of the first Sgt. Singer’s Pizza Circus – one of the many Pizza Time Theatre imitators that sprang up in the wake of the chain’s success.

 

I had never heard of Sgt. Singer’s before, or its founder Craig Singer (who also founded the Dallas-based Nickels and Dimes chain), but that’s not what intrigued me the most about the article.

What I found most interesting was the following:

 

 Some have claimed that Nolan Bushnell originated the concept of combining food and arcade games, and he might have been. Ted Dabney says the he and Nolan talked about the idea for a pizza restaurant with singing barrels in their Ampex days and even scouted out some locations, and I believe it included the idea of arcade games, but I'm not sure and in any event, they never really put the idea into practice
Could this have been the first attempt to actually do so?

Of course, the article omits the important details – like when, exactly, this occurred.

Luckily, the December 14, 1968 issue of Billboard supplied some missing details.

 

I don’t know if Bilotta was the first to come up with the idea or not, but it is an interesting forgotten chapter of coin-op history.

2) Cartrivision

Recently, I was discussing Nutting’s Wimbledon with Marty Goldberg and Marty sent me the following excerpt from an article in Electronics, Volume 47, from 1974:

“The TTL processor, reports Miel Domis, Nutting's project engineer, controls the three guns of the color tube to simulate the motion of the rackets and ball on the colored field.  The players move sliding resistance controls, one for each racket.  Control positions are stored in registers while the controls change the trigger setting of timing circuits, Domis explains. The timing changes vary the rate at which the electron guns are gated by the data words representing the rackets and ball,on the colored field, making them appear to move as the guns sweep across the field.  If the ball hits the racket, a rebound vector is started by a flip-flop output.  If not, or if the ball goes out of bounds, a point is scored and displayed”

While the technical details are somewhat interesting, what really caught my eye was the fact that it looks like we have the name of the game’s designer – Miel Domis.

I was hoping to try and track down Miel to ask some questions, but was unable to locate him (or her).
I did, however, come across this linkabout Cartrivision, in which a Miel Domis says the following

“As an electronics engineer I was hired in 1971 by Peter Berg to become a member of the product development team that took the Cartrivision product into production.  My primary responsibility was product engineering and cost reduction of the servo system and machine control logic under Don Loughry.  I was one of the last 120 employees who stayed with the company till the final demise.  The audio clip tells you about the spirit and loyalty that the last employees had towards the concept, the product and the company.  It was my first job in my career and I am grateful to have been a member of the team that developed the very first consumer video colorplayer/recorder”

While this may be a different Miel Domis, the unusual name, the nature of the work, and timing of Catrivision’s demise make it highly likely, IMO, that this is the same person who worked for Nutting.

The rabbit trail here, however, is Cartrivision.
What is Cartrivision? It was one of the very first consumer VCR’s made in the U.S. (three years before Sony’s Betamax) and the first in the world to offer prerecorded movies for rental.
If you Google Cartrivision, you will find plenty of info. A couple of examples can be found here and here.

Here is a photo of the unit and one of the rental cassettes (you actually couldn’t rewind them yourself. If wanted to watch them again, you had to take them back to the dealer and pay them another rental fee to have them do it).

 

 

Cartrivision went bankrupt in mid-1973, so Domis could well have moved from there to Nutting.

What really makes this interesting is that it wasn’t the first time I’d come across the name Cartrivision in my research. While reading Steve Wozniak’s account of his work at Atari in iWoz, I learned that he actually had a Cartrivision:

“Another project I did was for a company that came out with the first consumer VCRs…It was called Cartrivision, and the VCR had this amazing motor in it with its own circuit board that spun as it ran the motor…Well, at HP I heard a rumor that this little company had gone bankrupt and they had about eight thousand color VCRs for sale, cheap… we’d take a bunch of engineers down there and buy them for, like, $60. This became a huge part of my life almost right away. I studied the kinds of circuits the VCR used, how it worked, went through all the manuals. I tried to figure out how they processed color, how color got recorded onto tape, how the power supply worked. This was all information that came in really handy when we did the color Apple computers.”

--Wozniak, Steve (2007-10-17). iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (p. 138-139). Norton. Kindle Edition.

 Even more interesting is that it played a (very) minor role in video game history.

One well-known story about Woz is that he built his own version of Pong using 28 chips, and even took in to Atari to show off.
Steve first encountered Pong at a bowling alley and was immediately captivated. He also immediately knew he could build his own version.

Here’s why:

“I knew the minute I started thinking about it that I could design it because I knew how digital logic could create signals at the right times. And I knew how television worked on this principle. I knew all this from high school working at Sylvania, from the hotel movie system, from Cartrivision, from all kinds of experience I’d already had.”

--Wozniak, Steve (2007-10-17). iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (p. 140). Norton. Kindle Edition.

So one little article takes me from Nutting’s Wimbledon to an early VCR to Steve Wozniak and Pong. I love it when that happens.

3) Mad Man Muntz

This one really took me off the beaten path. I was going through Sega’s annual reports one day, when I came across the following in their 1976 report:

 

For those who don’t remember (and that’s probably most of you), back in the late 1970s, Sega decided to get into the widescreen TV market (which they were sure was about to explode) with something called Sega-Vision. The venture was a flop (guess the world wasn’t ready for a projection TV yet) and they shut it down in 1978

But who was Muntz Manufacturing? I decided to check. Good thing I did, because it led me to yet another fascinating rabbit trail. Muntz Manufacturing was founded by Earl “Madman” Muntz, who actually created one of the first projection-screen TVs.

 

But that’s only the beginning. I’ll let you look up the details on your own but Muntz was probably the prototype for the manic used car salesman that later became ubiquitous (“Get here now to take advantage of my low, low prices before they declare me legally insane!!!””). He started selling used cars back in the 1930s and later began promoting them through a series of radio and TV ads featuring his “Madman Muntz” character as well as a number of wacky stunts (he once promised to smash a car to pieces with a sledgehammer on camera if he didn’t sell a car by the end of the day). His used car lots were once the 7^thmost popular tourist attraction in southern California. Muntz also sold the first TVs in the U.S. to retail for under $100 (he did so by stripping them down to their bare essentials – a process that became known as “Muntzing”)

As I said, I’ll let you read about the rest on your own.

Bonus Section

Since I mentioned Pizza Time Theatre and Wimbledon, I thought I’d follow up on a few things I mentioned in my earlier posts.

 a) Pizza Time Theatre

As with many stories involving the early years of Atari and Nolan Bushnell, there are various accounts of the origins of Pizza Time Theatre and Chuck E. Cheese (did Bushnell get the idea in 1973 when he was in a Pizza & Pipes restaurant, was it originally called Coyote Pizza or Rick Rat’s etc. etc.)

I won’t get into those here, but I did want to include a few photos I found that may bear on the issue.

The first, which I’ve posted before, is from the June, 1976 issue of RePlay:

 

At this point, the concept was known as The Big Cheese (which I believe came after they dropped the Rick Rat name).

I thought that was the earliest photo I had of the character, but then I came across this one from an interview with Bushnell that appeared in the June-July 1975 issue of Play Meter:

 

Atari Inc. had a number of early photos of Rick/The Big Cheese but they weren’t dated, so I don’t know if any were from prior to June, 1975 (I suspect they were).

 b) Wimbledon

Finally, I wanted to report on some more information I’ve found on the timing of Wimbledon and Atari’s Color Gotcha.

I earlier wrote that these were the two leading contenders for the first true color video game but that I was pretty sure Color Gotcha came first.

I still think that’s the case, but it looks like it may have been closer than I thought.

While most sources list Wimbledon as a 1974 release, its release was actually announced in the December, 1973 issue of Vending Times and the December 8, 1973 issue of Cash Box.

It was also mentioned in the November 24, 1973 issue of Cash Box reviewing the recent MOA show (I believe it even had a photo, which I've since lost).

So it looks like Wimbledonwas released around November of 1973 (though we can’t be sure exactly when).

Color Gotcha(like Gotcha) was supposedly released in October, 1973. Previously, I had not seen a flyer for the game and wasn’t sure if it really was released, but Marty supplied me with a used game price list from 1974 confirming that it was.

One thing I did run across, however, was the following from the November 10, 1973 issue of Cash Box.
 

It indicates that the regular version of Gotcha, may actually not have been sent to distributors until the second week of November. The same issue has the following, however indicating that had given some away as door prizes:

Of course, that's Gotcha, not Color Gotcha, but you'd think that if one came before the other, it would be the former.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 5

December 14, 2013, 2:14 pm

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By late 1979 Allied Leisure Industries was having a rough time of it. They had lost money in five of their previous six years and were desperately in need of help. In June of 1979, that help seemed to have arrived when Allied was purchased by Brighton Products, a designee company of the Milton Koffman family and their Koffman Group of Industries conglomerate. The Koffmans had absolutely no knowledge of the coin-op industry but what they did have was a reputation for turning failing corporations around. Doing so with Allied would require whole scale changes, and the Koffmans began to make them. As part of the sale, Allied’s officers and directors, including Dave Braun, had been forced to resign, with Braun’s resignation effective immediately (June 1) and the rest effective at the company’s shareholder’s meeting on August 22. To replace the departed executives, Allied’s new owners brought in a new team (though Dave Braun stayed around in a consulting role for 3 years). The team had their work cut out for them. Allied had a myriad of problems. Perhaps the biggest was the technical issues that had plagued the company’s games for years.

[Bill Olliges] Allied had a bad name in the industry because of the quality of the product that they manufactured. They did a lot of their own metal work internally and none of the operators or distributors really liked it because it had sharp edges. They also had terrible reliability.

Reliability wasn’t Allied’s only problem, however. Even the games that did work were often uninspired, with the possible exception of their electromechanical games. The era of electromechancial games, however had passed. Video games had all but taken their place and Allied hadn’t had a truly successful video game since Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney back in 1973. The company also struggled with financial problems, sluggish management, and production issues. Among the new arrivals was Ken Beuck, who was brought in to head up the company's materials/manufacturing. He arrived to find a mess. One of his first acts was to send out a survey asking what each of the 400+ employees did. Some reported that they just showed up every week to pick up their paychecks. He also found a host of other issues. While the company hadn't seen much in the way of profits they had turned out plenty of different games. The problem was that every time they started a new game, they ordered the materials from scratch, despite the fact that they had a warehouse full of unused parts. In addition, they insisted on making everything themselves - including items like coin doors that could be made more efficiently and cheaply by companies that specialized in them.
            Fixing all of these issues wasn’t going to be a quick or easy process. In the meantime Allied somehow had to keep its doors open. Beuck, who had previously worked at Atari, Cinematronics and Vectorbeam, was able to secure a contract to build Space Wars games for the east coast market and to produce some consumer products for Atari. As the year ended, things were still in chaos as Allied. At the 1979 AMOA show, Allied introduced four new video games but only one (Clay Shoot)appears to have made it out the door. It really wasn’t until mid-1980 that things really began to improve.

 

 

            By then, Allied had recruited a pair of coin-op veterans to head the newly reorganized company and change its focus – Ed Miller and Bill Olliges, president and vice president, respectively, of Taito America. Miller had been Taito America’s president since its earliest days. Olliges had formerly worked at Universal Research Labs and then his own company called American Digital, which was purchased by Taito America in 1978. In early 1979, Olliges served as president of the short-lived Astro Games, an Elk Grove Village manufacturer that had been formed by Robert Anderson and Bob Runte after their Fascination Ltd. went bankrupt. By mid-1979 Astro Games was bankrupt as well and Olliges joined Miller at Taito America. While it appears that Allied Leisure had begun negotiating with the pair in 1979, it seems that they didn’t actually arrive at Allied until spring of 1980[1]. Miller would serve as president of the newy reorganized company and Olliges as Executive VP of Engineering. Other executives would include Milton Kaufman as CEO, Ivan Rothstein (one of the few holdovers from Allied Leisure) as VP of sales, and Thomas Jachimek as VP of Engineering.
            Allied, however, didn’t just get a new executive team. In July, the board of directors met in Miami. On July 29^th, to mark the company’s new direction and distance themselves from the Allied Leisure name and its “Allied Loser” associations, the board voted to rename the company Centuri. There are differing stories as to how the name came about. As Ken Beuck remembers it he, Miller, and Larry Leppert (an engineer who had formerly worked with Beuck at Vectorbeam and Meadows) decided that since two of them were former Atarians they would now be Centurions. Ed Miller claimed that the name "signified the forward thrust of the company into the 21st century"[2]. The company’s annual reports attribute the idea for changing the name to Milton Koffman and claim that the name itself was chosen by an ad agency.

            While the name change was a significant symbolic gesture, a number of more substantial changes were also made. Pinball production was halted and the company began to concentrate almost exclusively on video games (with one notable exception). With the company in such disarray, they were initially unable to produce games of their own so they instead turned to licensing. The first video games bearing the Centuri name were licensed cocktail versions of Cinematronics’ Rip Off (ca July, 1980) and Exidy’s Targ (ca September) [they later made a cocktail version of Gremlin’s Carnival].

            Allied Leisure may have had a new name, but Centuri still had to convince skeptical distributors that it wasn’t going to be just more of the same. On September 12-14, they held a lavish promotional meeting at the swanky Doral Country Club and Resort in Miami, even bringing in Peaches and Herb, whose “Reunited” had topped the pop charts in 1979, to provide musical entertainment. After an opening cocktail reception on the 11^th, Centuri introduced its new product line to an audience of about 150 distributors. In addition to Rip Off and Targ, they debuted Eagle (probably a licensed version of Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta) and an in-house designed game called Killer Comet. The big news, however, was the company’s entry into the jukebox market with the Centuri 2001. For a company looking to rebuild confidence in its brand, moving into an area in which they had no previous experience might seem risky, but Centuri believed there was an untapped market waiting to be exploited. Existing jukeboxes used mechanisms that had been developed 25-30 years earlier and were expensive to maintain. Centuri had developed a jukebox using up-to-date technology that they hoped would save on labor costs. In addition, the unit featured a built-in dollar bill changer, a pair of inexpensive “passive radiators” for improved bass response, allowed operators to access bookkeeping totals by entering a 3-digit code, and offered an optional portable printer. To head up their jukebox division, Centuri had brought in John Chapin, former president of Seeburg. Centuri planned to introduce the unit in early 2001, but only time would tell if it would be a success.

Above photos courtesy of Play Meter and RePlay

            All of these changes arrived too late to help in fiscal year 1980 (which ended October 31). While revenues only dropped slightly to $5.9 million, Centuri lost $4.5 million – its worst loss ever. The numbers were a bit deceiving, however. Part of the loss was due to the high restructuring costs, which included increased wages, plus moving and travelling expenses as a result of their recruitment efforts in addition the cost of new products. In addition, with the company preoccupied with reorganization, they had been unable to push enough product out the door to cover expenses. On a positive note, 68% of the company’s revenues had come in the fiscal year’s fourth quarter. Still, in terms of raw numbers, 1980 had not been a good year for Centuri. 1981 would be a different story altogether.

1981

            In fiscal year 1981 Centuri underwent one of the most amazing transformations the coin-op world had ever witnessed. Revenues rose from $5.9 million to an astonishing $61.5 million and the company went from losing $4.5 million to a profit of $7.5 million. After selling just 3,730 games in 1980 (and 4,415 the year before that), Centuri sold 31,451 in FY 1981. While the new management team and the restructuring no doubt helped, the biggest reason for the change may have been simply that the company released some stellar games. Centuri introduced six new games during the fiscal year: Eagle, Phoenix, Route 16, Pleaides, Vanguard, and Challenger.Only Challenger was a dud and three of them would be major hits.



Eagle

            First up was Eagle (actually released late in 1980). Eagle was basically the same game as Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta with slightly different enemy graphics, and may have been licensed from them[3]. While the game was a vertical shooter in the tradition of Space Invaders and Galaxian, it illustrated just how far the genre had advanced in the year since Galaxian had appeared on the scene. The player squared off against four different species of “atomic war birds” that swooped and looped around the screen. First came mantas – a kind of flying donut that split in two when hit. Next came mothlike tegors, followed by “giant prehistoric eagles”, comets, and volars. Every few waves, the player got a chance to dock with another ship, doubling, then tripling their firepower. Eagle was only a modest hit, generating $4.55 million in revenue (which probably translates to 2,000-3,000 units).[4]Compared to Centuri’s recent games, however, it had done quite well indeed. The next game would do even better.

 

 

Phoenix

     
           Like Eagle, Phoenix (January 1981) was a vertical shooter featuring birdlike aliens and also like Eagle, it was a licensed game (in this case from Amstar Electronics). Unlike Eagle, however, Phoenix was a major hit, generating$26 million in sales (probably 13,000-15,000 units), about 43% of Centuri’s total. In terms of revenue in fact, it was probably the company’s biggest hit ever. Phoenix was a five-stage vertical shooter. In the first two waves, the player faced an army of 16 colorful winged aliens. Aliens would occasionally peel off from the formation then tumble towards the player before flying back to join the group (during which time they were worth a hefty 200 points). The next two rounds featured two lines of eggs that grew into giant birds then attacked in wide sweeping arcs. Hitting a bird’s body destroyed it while a glancing blow literally “winged” it, clipping off one of its appendages. Finally, the player faced a huge alien mother ship with an armada of space birds protecting it. The player had to slowly chip a hole through the ship’s hull and a moving purple band to reach the alien boss within. In addition to lasers, the player had a shield that could protect them for a limited time. The ultimate source of the game, and its original name, are a bit unclear. Centuri licensed it from Amstar Electronics. Amstar was relatively new. In early 1980 they had purchased Mirco’s Mirco Games division, which was then primarily producing pseudo-gambling games like Super Twenty One and Hold and Draw Poker. While Amstar initially continued to produce these games, they soon struck a licensing deal with Nichibutsu for a cocktail version of Moon Cresta. In November 1980, RePlay reported that they were developing a “space game” of their own, but also looking to license a game from another manufacturer. Both games were being field-tested in Japan. While some have reported that Phoenixwas originally a Japanese game[5], others report that it was designed by Amstar. As for the name, Ken Beuck recalls that Centuri renamed the game Phoenixin hopes that it would represent the company’s rebirth. All other sources, however, indicate that the game was called Phoenixat the time they licensed it (possibly because Amstar was located in Phoenix, Arizona). If Centuri didn’t choose it, the game’s name was an absolutely uncanny coincidence. The game was the biggest hit the company had had since the disastrous 1974 fire that had laid much of their plant to waste. In other words, Phoenix, like its mythical namesake, was responsible for Allied Leisure’s dramatic rebirth, almost literally from its own ashes.

Pleiades

            Again with the birds. Licensed from the then little-known Japanese manufacturer Tehkan, Pleiades was yet another vertical shooter with similarities to Phoenix (Wikipedia claims it was actually the “official” sequel to the game). The first two stages were actually quite different from those of Phoenix. The player defended a space station from a group of Martian invaders that swooped in from the sides of the screen. If the player did not destroy them quickly, they transformed into creatures vaguely reminiscent of the walkers from War of the Worlds and built a wall of bricks above the player. The next two stages were almost identical to the “giant bird” stages from Phoenix (though given their membranous wings, the enemies may have been bugs rather than birds). The fifth stage was a mother ship stage, but a bit different from that of Phoenix. In the final stage, the player tried to maneuver their way down an ever-narrowing runway, dodging obstacles and collecting flags as they made their way to a control base. While it wasn’t nearly as big a hit as its predecessor, Pleiades generated $9.53 million in sales (probably 4,000-6,000 units).

Emilio Estevez - Pleiades hustler (from Nightmares)

 

 

Vanguard

            The final game in Centuri’s quartet of 1981 hits was Vanguard (ca October). Like Pleiades it was licensed from a then-obscure Japanese manufacturer (SNK - allegedly their first color game) Giantbomb.com reports that it was actually developed by Tose Software, who later developed games for Nintendo’s Game & Watch and their various home systems (most notably the Dragon Ball series). Unlike Centuri’s earlier games, Vanguard was not a vertical shooter nor did it have anything to do with birds (finally!). Instead, it was one of the finest of the early horizontally scrolling shooters, a kind of souped-up version of Stern/Konami’s Scramble.The goal of the game was to seek out and destroy an alien enemy called The Gond in his subterranean fortress located deep inside an asteroid. The player piloted an advanced fighter that could fire in four directions. Gameplay proceeded through six different zones. First came a series of horizontal zones (Mountain Zone, Styx Zone, and Stripe Zone), each connected by a diagonal Rainbow Zone in which the player fought off bouncing clouds. Action then switched to a vertical Bleak Zone where enemies included floating snakes that could capture the player’s ship for points. Finally, the player entered the City of Mystery to face the Gond itself. In addition to firing, the player could fly into energy pods that granted them temporary invulnerability and allowed them to destroy enemies by flying into them. Vanguard was also Centuri’s first talking game. The most memorable feature, however, was not the voice but the music. The introductory music was Jerry Goldsmith’s theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The piece everyone remembers, however, was Vultan’s Theme (from the 1980 film Flash Gordon, composed by Freddy Mercury) - the triumphant tune that played when the player snagged an energy pod. Vanguard was almost as big a hit as Phoenix, likely selling in the neighborhood of 10,000 units. 

---

[1] Exactly when Miller and Olliges arrived is uncertain. Allied’s 1979 annual report indicates that the deal had become effective during the 1979 fiscal year, which ended on October 31. However, the two attended the 1979 AMOA show in November as representatives of Taito America. The 1980 10K report indicates that they signed their employment contracts in April, 1980. The report doesn’t specifically say that the contracts were for Miller and Olliges, merely reporting that Allied had entered into 3 new employment contracts, two of them for five years. The 1981 10K reports that one of the five-year contracts was terminated in June of 1981 – the same time that Olliges is known to have left the company. Olliges does not appear in the list of executive officers at the end of the 1981 report, indicating that his was one of the 5-year contracts.

[2]RePlay, August, 1980.

[3] While none of the company’s literature indicates that the game was licensed, their annual report claims that all of their 1981 games besides Challenger were licensed.

[4] See the appendices for a discussion of how the production numbers were estimated.

[5] Based on a sticker that appeared on some game boards.

 

Video Game Myth Busters - Did the "Crash" of 1983/84 Affect Arcades?

December 27, 2013, 12:15 am

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In recent months, I have come across a claim that I found a bit distressing – that the video game “crash” of 1983/84 was confined to home video games and didn’t really effect the coin-op industry. I first heard this claim on podcast about the crash. The podcast in question is normally quite excellent, so I was a bit surprised but didn’t think too much of it. I’ve heard the claim in a couple of other places since then, however. In the talk section for the Wikipedia article on “The Golden age of arcade video games”, for instance, one editor commented (though the comment is several years old) “The video game crash of 1983 was all about the glut in the home market - I don't see that it had any influence on arcades. I don't think it had anything to do with the end of the arcade golden age…” It appears that the article was revised based on this comment.

I’m not sure exactly what the commentator is trying to say here, but if he is implying that there was no crash in the U.S. coin-op video game market in 1983 and 1984, he’s not only wrong, but very wrong. From reading industry mags and looking at statistics, I can assure you that the industry itself (and the operators in particular) was convinced there was a crash. Perhaps he was thinking that the decline suffered by American arcade video games was more than compensated by Japanese games, which (in his mind) weren’t affected by the crash. This might work if we were only looking at manufacturers (though U.S. manufacturers were certainly affected – not sure about the Japanese). In terms of the coin-op/arcade video game industry, however, what matters is whether or not the arcades and operators were affected since they were the real bedrock of the "industry".

In any event, let’s look at a bit of the evidence. Both RePlay and Play Meter published annual industry surveys and year-end reviews. Here are some typical quotations from Play Meter (I could include similar quotes from RePlay, but they would be redundant). And remember that these magazines covered the coin-op industry, not the consumer industry.

From the November 1, 1983 “State of the Industry” survey:

“It has previously been a pleasure to present the Annual Subscribers' Poll results in our State of the Industry issue. But, for the first time, the task of reporting our findings is one of pain rather than pleasure. As everyone suspected, 1983 hit hard at all industry levels.”

“Average weekly collections at the operator level plummeted nearly 30 percent. Consequently, some 2,000 operators went out of business last year. Although there were just as many or more machines and locations this year as last year, just one thing was missing - about 2.5 billion dollars. That's a total of 10 billion quarters that found their way to other forms of entertainment.”

“Had those 10 billion quarters found their way back into the cash cans of our nation's operators, enough money would have been available to purchase as many or more new games than last year. But that didn't happen, and as a result, the whole industry suffered.”

“As it is now, home video games have all but closed the gap that once existed between the coin-op and home games. You can now play BurgerTime on your home TV set although the coin-op game was released less than 12 months ago. If the manufacturers fail to reinterest the young adult market, our Subscribers' Poll findings may be worse next year.”

“Like an inconstant lover, the video game spread heartache throughout the coin-op amusement industry during 1983”

“Video game operators who sought refuge in other type of equipment found little solace. As unproductive as video games were, they accounted for 85 percent of operator income. Earnings of all major type of equipment were depressed in 1983.”

“The lack of general public interest in this year's crop of new video games and home games hacked away at overall industry earnings. Leaving the national gross take for 1983 at $6.4 billion, off a whopping 28 percent, or $2.5 billion short of the $8.9 billion Americans put into coin-operated amusement in 1982.”

“The dismal returns marked 1983 as the first year since Play Meter started tracking statistics in 1976 that more operators reported profits falling instead of rising”

As bad as 1983 was for the coin-op video game industry 1984 was much worse - at least for video games (unlike in 1983, the bad times in 1984 were largely confined to video games)

From the November 1, 1983 issue

First, a comment from the editorial (titled “The Rape of an Industry” – though the “rape” in question primarily refers to the appearance of video lottery games).

“For the first time in the history of the State of the Industry report, we are not pleased to present the results of the survey. This year's findings are disappointing to say the least. With a few small exceptions, it was a very bad year all the way around. For the operators it was a bad year, for the distributors it was even worse, but for the video game manufacturers it was devastating.”

From the actual operator survey (titled “The Year of the Crunch”)

 “Thedecrease of 7.6 billion quarters in the cash cans of amusement machines nationwide dealt a crushing blow to the coin-operated entertainment industry in 1984.”

“On the brighter side of the coin, all other amusement machines performed surprisingly well despite declining video game revenues. The gross annual collections from all other coin-op amusement devices increased by $400 million in 1984.”

 “For the second year in a row and for the second time in the history of this survey, operators reported a decrease in net profits for 1984. Sixty-seven percent of the operators responding to the survey indicated that their net profits decreased since 1983.”

“The remaining operating concerns found themselves with fewer new video machines on location and considerably more non-video, electromechanical machines that require more service and attention. Likewise for the first time in the history of this survey, the total number of units on location dropped dramatically in 1984. The total number of amusement machines on location in the U.S. fell a staggering 12 percent from last year's record level. A net total of 224,065 amusement machines vanished from the streets of America in 1984. Had it not been tor a resurgence of pinballs, phonographs, and pool tables, that number would have been nearly doubled. Video games were undoubtedly, the hardest hit equipment type. There are slightly more than 400,000 fewer video games on location now than there were one year ago.”

“In 1981, when video games were averaging $140 per week in gross collections, 60 percent of all the video games on location were new games. Since that time, this percentage has dwindled rapidly. Today only a mere 15 percent of all video games on location are new games purchased within the past 12 months…”

“The video game glut of '82 and '83 has finally taken its toll on the industry's manufacturing community. Sales of new video games (including lasers) plummeted 44 percent down to 168.508 units in 1984. Comparing that figure to the industry’s high water mark of 563,000 units set in 1982, results in a 70 percent decline in new video game purchases over the past two years…”

Finally, the December 15, 1984 issue included an article reviewing the year titled (significantly) “1984 – Even Orwell Couldn’t Predict How Bad it Was”

The article opens:

“1984 - the year of the crunch.  Much worse than the devastation of 1983, the crash penetrated not only the operating sector but the distributing and manufacturing as well.”

Quotes are one thing - let’s look at some statistics:

First, some statistics on the industry in general.

CAVEAT: Bear in mind that these stats mostly come from the RePlayand Play Meter operator surveys, which were usually published in the November issues. Thus, they usually covered the period from late summer/early fall of one year to late summer/early fall of the next rather than coinciding with the calendar year.

Total Coin-Op video game dollar volume (in millions – Vending Times)

1978: 308
1979: 968
1980: 2,811
1981: 4,862
1982: 4.363
1983: 2,900
1984: 2,500
1985: 2,350
1986: 2,340

Note the huge drop from 1982 to 1983

Overall coin-op amusement industry dollar volume (in billions - Play Meter)

1980: 7.15
1981: 8.2
1982: 8.9
1983: 6.4
1984: 4.5
1985: 4.5
1986: 4

The 1982-83 drop isn’t quite so bad as the previous list, but the 1983/84 drop is similar.

# of video games on location (in thousands)

1978: VT 164.6
1979: PM 430.65, VT 232.8
1980: PM 540, VT 540.6
1981: PM 780, VT 1,100
1982: PM 1,375, VT 1,200
1983: PM 1,491.4, VT 1,150
1984: PM 1068.5, VT 1,001.6
1985: PM 1,095.4, VT 980
1986: PM 971.5, VT 920

This list, doesn’t look quite so bad (the total actually increased in 1983), but remember that this includes all video games – even old ones that weren’t making the distributors or manufacturers any money (and, as we shall see, operators probably weren't making much money either).

A better gauge is the number of NEW video games purchased:

# of new video games purchased per operator (Play Meter)

1981: 52
1982: 47
1983: 29
1984: 19

Here again, we see a huge drop-off.

Here are a couple of other lists that don’t seem so bad:

# of arcades (Play Meter – note that Play Meter defines an “arcade” as any location with 10 or more coin-op games)

1982: 23,687
1983: 25,092
1984: 19,565

# of street locations (Play Meter)

1982: 385,494
1983: 392,175
1984: 358,899

Here, we again see a rise in 1983, followed by a somewhat modest decline in 1984, but this does not tell us whether the locations were actually making money on their games.

Bear in mind that the coin-op business was largely an operator’s business. They were the “front line” troops and whether or not there was a “crash” from the industry’s perspective, largely depended on whether or not operators could money.

So here are some more operator stats:

Weekly Earnings Per Game – Video Games (R=RePlay, PM=Play Meter, VT=Vending Times)

1975: R $43
1976: PM: $40, R $42 (arcade), $35 (street)
1977: PM $44 (arcade games), R $54, VT $37
1978: PM $50 (arcade games), R $44, VT $36
1979: PM $64, R $58, VT $80
1980: PM $102, R $128, VT $100
1981: PM $140, R $110, VT $85
1982: PM $109, R $108 (arcade), $86 (street), VT $70
1983: PM $70, R $62, VT $48
1984: PM $53, R $60, VT $48
1985: PM $57, VT $46
1986: PM $57, VT $49

Note again, the huge drop from 1982 to 1983.

Estimated # of operators (Play Meter)

1977: 6,000
1978-1980: 7,500
1981: 9,000
1982: 12,000
1983: 11,000
1984: 9,000
1985: 6,000
1986: 4,000

Here, the decline in 1983 is modest and is followed by a much sharper drop from 1983-1986. Again, however, remember that these numbers do not mirror the calendar year.

Finally, from a different source, let’s look at the effects of the crash on three of the largest U.S. manufacturers.

Warner/Atari’s losses for 1983 and 1984 are quite well known, but I omit them because they were largely the result of the performance of the consumer division.

For Bally, Williams, and Centuri, however, home games comprised a very small percentage of their business.

For each company, the numbers given are revenues to the left of the slash and income (i.e. profits) to the right. Figures are in millions and the source is company annual reports.
NOTE that negative numbers (i.e. losses) are in parenthesis.

First, let’s look at Bally (fiscal year ended 12/31)

1980: $690/$54
1981: $885/$82
1982: $1,285/$91 – video game and pinball revenue: $435
1983: $1,176/$5 – video game and pinball revenue: $99
1984: $1,349/($100) – video game and pinball revenue: $67
I don’t know about you, but I’d call going from a $91 million profit to a $100 million loss (their first loss since they went public in 1969) in two years a “crash” if there ever was one. Yes, Bally had other product lines, but video games were largely responsible for their losses. You can see why Bally president Robert Mullane said in a January 1985 interview in the Chicago Tribune"The industry didn't decline. It fell off the cliff."

How about Williams (the #3 U.S. manufacturer of the early 1980s) – Fiscal Year ends September 30

1980: $80/$4.8
1981: $149/$19
1982: $136/$16
1983: $92/$9.8
1984: $57/($14)

Once again, note the huge loss in 1984.

Centuri’s numbers aren’t quite so clear, since they were losing money even before the crash (In addition, they changed their fiscal year from October 30 to December 31 in 1983).

1980: $6/($4.5)
1981: $61/$7.5
1982: $21/($2.9)
1983: $108/$2.8
1984: $135/($2.2)

Note too that in 1983 and 1984, a good amount of the total revenues came from Outdoor Spots Inc. More significantly, in December of 1984, Centuri’s board of directors voted to drop video games entirely, a clear indication of how poorly they were doing.

Finally, while reliable production runs for individual games are hard to come by, the numbers we have indicate that the top selling coin-op video games from before 1983 sold far more copies that those in 1983/84. Since it is public, I'll use Wikiepedia's list rather than my own (though I feel mine is more complete). Of the top 25 games on that list, 18 were released between 1979 and 1982, 6 were released after 1990, and one was released in 1986. The top selling game released in 1983 27th and sold just 16,000 copies. Sure, some of the 1982 releases were still collecting quarters in 1983 and 1984. And Pole Position was basically a 1983 game (I'd guess it was the bestselling 1983/84 game, with around 21,000 produced), but to me that only illustrates the fact that the "golden age" was over. 

In summary, then, I don’t see how anyone could plausibly claim that there was no crash in the arcade video game industry in 1983 and 1984 – though maybe I’m not looking at it the right way.

 

 

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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 6

December 30, 2013, 6:56 pm

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Route 16, Challenger, Megatack, and Killer Comet

            Less successful were Centuri’s other 1981 games. Route 16 (another Tehkan license – though it was likely developed by Sun Electronics) was a maze game in which the player drove a race car around a map containing 16 different rooms. When the player drove into a room, the screen switched to a close-up view of the room’s interior. The goal was to collect a series of treasures from each of the rooms. While it wasn’t as successful as Phoenix, Vanguard, and Pleiades, it probably sold in the neighborhood of 1,500-2,500 copies.

Meanwhile, Centuri hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of game development. After leaving Taito America, Ed Miller had managed to lure five of its designers away to work for him at Centuri where they designed Challenger, Killer Comet, and Megatack. Challenger was another vertical shooter, but with a few twists. Rather than firing strictly upwards, the player’s ship was equipped with a kind of laser shotgun that fired in three directions at once – straight upwards and diagonally to either side. Enemies mostly consisted of a series of multicolored geometric rings (though a snake like “space bogey” would occasionally appear). In addition to their shotgun, the player had a warp button that would teleport them to a random location along the bottom of the screen, and a superbomb that would destroy multiple enemies. From time to time, a “bonus bug” that looked like an AT-AT walker from The Empire Strikes Back would walk onto the screen, allowing the player to connect to its nose (?) and suck up (eww!) bonus points. While the gameplay was actually somewhat interesting and the sounds were nice, the game’s graphics paled in comparison to those of other games on the market and Challenger probably sold only a few hundred copies. Megatack was basically a takeoff on the same theme with the addition of more enemies. Killer Comet featured the same basic gameplay but allowed the player to move freely about the screen. While the player could still only fire in the same three directions as Challengerand Megatack, they could control which way they fired with three fire buttons. Strangely, the game only awarded the player a single point for each enemy destroyed (which may be one reason why it wasn’t a hit). While all three games were designed in-house, Challenger was the only one released under the Centuri banner (though they may have produced Killer Comet for a short time[1]). Killer Comet and Megatack were both licensed to newcomer Game Plan.

Centuri 1981
         

            1981 had been magical for Centuri, with the company generating more revenue in a single year than it had in its entire 12 ½ year history combined. Essentially the entire amount came from video games (another first for the company). The results were enough to make Centuri the 5^th largest video game manufacturer in the country, behind Bally, Atari, Williams, and Stern[2]. Centuri’s peak may have come in December of 1981 when they landed three games in the Play Meter’s top ten - Pleiades at #9, Phoenix at #7 and Vanguardat #1.

            Perhaps the most amazing thing is that they did all this while cutting their staff from 400 to under 200. Despite the smaller staff, Ken Beuck recalls that Centuri went from producing 10-15 games a day to around 350. The company's existing facilities combined with the licensed games had made production much more, well, productive. Things like PC boards, harnesses, and power supplies were now being provided by other companies. According to Beuck, the Koffman Group actually owned a number of manufacturers and wanted Centuri to buy their components from them. When Centuri asked for quotes, however, some of the companies didn't provide them until weeks after the deadline, by which time Centuri had already bought them elsewhere. While the owners didn't like this at first, they backed down when the new management team told them to let them do the job they'd been hired to do, pointing out that the company had been losing money up to now.

One person who wasn’t around to fully enjoy Centuri’s newfound success was Bill Olliges. In June, he left the company (reportedly on amicable terms) and his contract was terminated. He later formed a new development company called Techstar in Miami (who designed games like Eyes for Rock-Ola as well as a number of other games for various companies). Olliges’ contract with Centuri had included a bonus of 1.5% of the company’s pre-tax income in excess of $500,000. For fiscal year 1981, this would have amounted to just over $100,000 (more than his $75,000 base salary). Whether he forfeited his bonus is uncertain, but Centuri did cancel his stock options, though they apparently paid him around $100,000 and received first refusal rights on any games he might develop over the next two years. Ed Miller, meanwhile, was to receive a 2.5% bonus (about $175,000 for 1981). In July, the amount was amended to 1% of all income (in excess of $500,000) up to $7 million and 1.5% after that, with additional stipulations[3]. Miller himself would leave in 1982 and form his own company called Telko Properties, which worked with Techstar to secure licenses for their games. Centuri eventually brought in another coin-op veteran – Arnold Kaminkow – to replace Miller as president.

The Leisure Time Connection
[NOTE - See my earlier post for more on Leisure Time Electronics]

            On October 19, 1981 a company called Leisure Time Electronics filed suit against Centuri in Indiana charging them with delivering defective goods and making false and fraudulent warranty claims and seeking $3.15 million in damages. Nine days later, a company called Fascination International, Inc. filed suit against Centuri in Illinois for largely the same reasons. Both Leisure Time and Fascination (which trade magazines report were essentially the same company) were examples of what were called “blue sky” operators. Blowing into town for a weekend, they would set up shop in a local hotel or convention center then blanket the local media with ads promising easy profits in a “no cash” business. Potential customers were shown misleading media articles including exaggerated claims of the earning power of coin-op video games. Those who took the bait were sold substandard games at inflated prices, which often didn’t work and earned only a fraction of the advertised figures. Some even offered bogus services to help scout locations, only to fail to deliver once the customer left. Some failed to deliver any goods at all. In June of 1981, after a number of complaints, the California Attorney General took action against Leisure Time, Fascination, and another company called Potomac Mortgage, eventually fining them (see the chapter on legal issues for more details). By 1982, Leisure Time and Fascination were also under investigation in Iowa and Denver. At least some (and perhaps all) of Leisure Time’s games were made by Centuri. In an article in the November 15, 1981 issue of Play Meter Centuri’s marketing manager Ivan Rothstein claimed that Leisure Time was "a reputable company". Asked if the games Leisure Time sold could earn the promised minimum of $80-100 a week, Rothstein said "Oh, that should be no problem.”
            What Centuri games was Leisure Time selling? One possibility is that they were the three games that Centuri introduced at the 1979 AMOA show, but apparently never released (Battle Star, Space Bug, and Lunar Invasion) but the descriptions of those games[4] do not match up with the games Leisure Time is known to have sold (Space Ranger, Moon Lander, and Astro Laser - knockoffs of Taito’s Space Invaders, Lunar Rescue, and Space Laser respectively). The bigger question is how Centuri ever got involved with Leisure Time in the first place. The company had been running their scam since at least January of 1981, so the deal appears to have been struck before Allied’s amazing transformation, when it was still struggling to make ends meet.

 Issues

While the Leisure Time deal may have occurred in the past, there were other causes for concern as 1981 came to an end. The scheduled January release of the Centuri 2001 jukebox had been pushed to May, then pushed again, and ended up not being released in 1981 at all. The problem, yet again, was technical issues (a disturbing development given Allied’s history). For some, the fact that Centuri was so reliant upon licenses, particularly Japanese licenses, was another cause for concern, leaving them vulnerable if the Japanese’s companies ever tired of the skimpy licensing fees they were receiving and decided to manufacture games on their own. All in all, however, things were going quite well indeed at Centuri as 1982 got underway and the company seemed poised for bigger and better things. The industry, however, was about to change.

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[1] They showed the game at the 1980 AMOA show and Play Meter/RePlay catalog issues list it under both companies, though no flyer exists for the Centuri version, nor was its release by Centuri announced in any trade magazines.

[2] At the time, the top 6 video game manufacturers controlled 95% of the U.S. market.

[3] Again, this is all assuming that the two contracts mentioned in the 10K reports were for Olliges and Miller. It should be noted that I did not discuss the matter with Bill Olliges. The additional stipulations were that “…payment of bonus for 1981 is subject to an offset to income of $3,245,000 and bonuses for 1981 and 1983 were deferred subject to the company obtaining certain net sales in fiscal year 1982.”

[4] According to Play Meter, Lunar Invasion involved the player shooting down “traveling space mines while attempting to land his craft” while Battle Star was a more sophisticated game “based on the same theme.” Space Bug was a competitive game in which “two players attempt to push a series of 24 value squares up the monitor and into a larger square.”

Century Electronics/CVS

January 11, 2014, 3:55 pm

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            Since I haven’t posted in a while, this one is going to be a long one. Sadly, it will not be a very in depth one since I was unable to interview anyone for it.

            During the mid-1980s, as the arcade video game market began to decline, many operators began looking for new ways to make money off of their fading old titles while not breaking the bank buying new games. One solution that became increasingly popular was convertible games. Convertible games came in two major variations: conversion kits (which allowed the user to change one game to another by swapping out the hardware) and “system” games (which included a standardized main board and games that could be swapped out by replacing a tape, small daughter board etc.). Two of the earliest, and best-known such systems were Gremlin’s Convert-A-Game and Data East’s DECO Cassette System. One of the most prolific system game makers, however, was Century Electronics and their CVS system. Unfortunately, the system has received little attention in gaming histories and few remember it today.  

          Perhaps this post will go a (very small) way towards correcting that. Unfortunately, I was unable to find much info on the company or track down anyone who worked there. Nonetheless, I did find some interesting (at least to me) info that I thought I’d share. First, I’ll give an overview of the company’s history. Then I’ll take a more in-depth look at their games.

Beginnings

In January of 1981, Century Electronics Ltd. of Oldham England introduced its CVS Convertible Video System at a private showing at the ATE in London. Century had been founded in 1979 (possibly by Peter Robinson and David Jones) and development on the CVS system had started around summer of 1980. The system consisted of a Signetics 2650-based mother board (designed by Philips Electronics) and a 5.5” x 8” x 1“ “program module” that could be swapped (along with a marquee) when the operator wanted to install a new title. The system also included a separate sound board with speech capability. While only two titles were available at the time of its debut (Dark Warrior and Cosmos), more were in the works and Century planned to release a new title every six weeks. To create them, Century had a staff of 12 designers using a $1.5 million development system made exclusively for them by Philips in the Netherlands.

 

Coming to America – Tuni Electro Services

 

             While the system was available earlier in Europe, it wouldn’t make its way to America until 1982. Around December of 1981, Tuni Electro Services of Tempe, AZ inked a deal with Century for exclusive North American rights to the system. At the time, Tuni was all but unknown in the U.S. coin-op industry, though they had a 12,000-square-foot factory in Arizona capable of turning out 100 video games per day as well as a 13,000-square-foot factory in Vancouver, Washington. Century chose to deal with the tyro manufacturer because (they said) they wanted to work with a young, aggressive company that would be dedicated to pushing their games. And Tuni was aggressive. They initially planned to spend $800,000 (upped to $1.6 million by April) to launch the system in the U.S. and Canada and ordered 10,000 modules. By this time, two more games were available (Space Fortress and Radar Zone/Outline?), and Tuni planned to order 10,000 more modules after the first half of the year. While Century supplied the game modules (which Tuni panned to offer for $350 each, or $250 with a trade-in), Tuni would manufacture the cabinets and circuit boards.

            The first two titles for the system were a pair of vertical shooters, Dark Warrior and Cosmos. Other early titles included Space Fortress (a color version of Asteroids), Dazzler (a maze/climbing game in which the player avoided pursuing vultures while feeding bananas to a gorilla), Video8-Ball (a video version of pool), and Radar Zone (a kind of combination of Amidar and Qix). It seems that Tuni initially had high hopes for the system. In the summer of 1982, it announced that it was expanding its R&D department with an eye toward developing new CVS games in conjunction with Century. Engineering VP Tom Opfer was appointed to head a staff of ten programmers and technicians and Tuni spent $100,000 on development equipment with plans to spend even more. They also sent Opfer to England to learn the ins and outs of the system.

            Things apparently went downhill quickly, however and by the end of the year the relationship between Century and Tuni had soured (to put it mildly). According to Tuni marketing director Patrick Reed[1], the trouble started when Century complained that Tuni wasn’t selling enough of its games (Play Meter reported that they sold only 700 complete systems by January of 1983[2]). Reed, on the other hand, said it was because Century didn’t furnish them with the number of new titles they’d promised (they had delivered only 3 since the system launched[3]). Whether because of this or the lackluster quality of the games they did offer, Tuni was already in trouble by the fall of 1982 and in September, Arizona’s E.T. Marketing (another company headed by Reed) bought up Tuni’s assets, which they felt included the rights to the CVS games. Century, on other hand, disagreed, maintaining that they had terminated their contract with Tuni in August and that the rights to the games now belonged to Century’s U.S. branch, (recently established in Great Neck, NY) which had signed an exclusive contract with Century on September 1. In addition, Century sued Tuni for copyright infringement for selling the games Wall Street and Logger, which they had shown at the 1982 AMOA show. Century also launched separate suits to collect outstanding debts from Tuni. Reed, on the other hand, claimed that Tuni had never even signed their contract with Century, because of “problems with language…that would have required Century to come up with a new game every six to eight weeks that would be marketable in the United States[4]” Instead, the two companies had made individual licensing agreements for each game. In addition, said Reed, Century owed Tuni $240,000 for electronic parts. He further claimed that he had scheduled a meeting with Century VP Peter Robinson to discuss the issue, but he had never shown up (Robinson, in return, said he wasn’t taking any calls from Reed).

 

Convertible Video Systems Takes Over

 

In the end, it appears that Century eventually won out and by summer the games were being marketed exclusively by their U.S., headed by industry vet Mickey Greenman (E.T., meanwhile, had started marketing a line of video games for children called Moppet video ). Initially, the office sold their kits directly to operators, bypassing distributors entirely but by early 1983 they had changed their policy. By this time, Century was selling its revised base system (which included a new connector board among other enhancements) for $1,095 to $1,295 (depending on whether the distributor installed it) with additional games for $275 ($150 with trade-in). They were also offering distributors exclusive rights to sell the game in their territories. It seemed to work, at least at first, as the company landed three games on the RePlay’s software charts. The first was Video8-Ball, which reached #4 (in 1986, RePlay named it the #36 game of 1982). The last was Heart Attack (aka A-Maze-ing), a maze game in which the goal was fill the floor with dots rather than eat them. Despite its crude graphics and lackluster gameplay, Heart Attack game somehow managed to make a sole appearance on RePlay’s software chart in September, 1983.  Century’s biggest (or at least most well-remembered) hit was probably Hunchback, which appeared on the RePlay software chart five times and peaked at #2 in July, 1983 (it had reportedly reached #1 in Europe). The game was a multi-screen jumping game that cast the player in the role of Quasimodo in an attempt to rescue the beautiful Esmeralda.  Other CVS games included Raiders (another vertical shooter) and Gold Bug/Digger (a digging game).

The End of Century

None of these games, however, matched the success of Hunchback (though Outline reportedly sold well) and Century didn’t last much longer. In mid-January, 1984 they scheduled a distributor showing where thy debuted three new products: a shooting gallery[5], a quiz game, and a children’s video game series. While the games were well-received, they were never produced (at least not by Century). The next week, on January 18, Century declared bankruptcy (ironically, the previous month, Tuni had been pulled out of bankruptcy and taken over by Enter-Tech).

 

CVS was not completely finished, however, at least not yet. Century’s U.S. branch was not affected and soon began to work with other companies to produce their games. Around May, Crown Vending of Corona, New York announced that they would be producing new Game-Paks for the CVS system. Headed by Steve Hochman, who had started his coin-op career as a soda machine operator in Queens in 1965, Crown Vending was one of New York City’s largest distributors. In mid-1983, noting the growing success of Hunchback, they had sold a kit called Playpak that allowed operators to convert games with Galaxian/Scramble hardware to CVS base systems. In 1984, they released a pair of new titles for the system. Both were (apparently) developed by Century (though the first, at least, was manufactured in California) and both proved to be solid hits (though mostly as conversion kits for other games). First was the motorcycle racing game Superbike (April, 1984), which was available as a CVS module as well as a conversion kit for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong, Jr. Despite gameplay that was derivative of title 2-years out-of-date, Superbike reached #1 in Play Meter’s conversion kit chart for street locations in November of 1984. Almost as successful was Hero in the Castle of Doom (aka Hero), in which Quasimodo made a return appearance (this time without the green tunic) in a maze game where he once again had to rescue the fair “Ezzmerlda”. Released in November, 1984 Hero in the Castle of Doom debuted at #1 on Play Meter’s conversion kits chart for street locations in February 15, 1985.

            In late 1984, another company began producing titles for the CVS system. First came H.B.’s Olympics (aka Hunchback Olympic and Herbie at the Olympics). Designed by Century/Seatongrove, the game was built by Magic Electronics of Cranston, RI and marketed by Montgomery Vending. The game, once again, featured our old friend Quasimodo. Sporting his original green tunic from Hunchback, Quasimodo competed in seven different Olympic events. Priced at $375, the game was also available as a conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Scramble. It reached #12 on Play Meter’s conversion kit chart for street locations in December, 1984 and #14 on RePlay’s software chart in February, 1985. Montgomery/Magic also had a minor hit in 1985 with another CVS release called Eight Ball Action, whichwas also released as a conversion kit.

            With Eight Ball Action, CVS and Century disappeared into the mists of arcade history. Exactly how many games Century sold is uncertain. In May, 1984, Play Meter reported that they had sold 20,000 CVS systems overall and about 10,000 in the U.S. and they likely didn’t sell many more systems after that point (though they continued to sell games). Despite this, the company and its games (except maybe for Hunchback) have largely been forgotten by video game fans today and have drawn scant mention in video game histories. There are number of possible reasons for this. While the system did produce some minor successes, it never had a hit on the order of magnitude of a Burgertime or a Mr. Do! In addition, the few hits it did have came during the nadir of arcade video games’ popularity. The fact that the company was British may have been a factor as well (at least in the U.S.). The biggest reason, however, was probably the lackluster quality and derivative nature of the games themselves.  Nonetheless, CVS remains one of many interesting footnotes that litter the pages of coin-op history.

THE GAMES

Now let’s take a brief look at the actual games, in rough order of when they were released.

NOTE – For various games on the list, I note the original game that they ripped off. I suspect, however, that all of their games may have been rip-offs, so if anyone knows of one I missed, let me know.

 Dark WarriorTuni/Century

 

Released: 10/81 (MAME), though it was likely not available in the U.S. until around December. Play Meter mentioned the game in their 9/15/81 issue. It may have been shown at the 1981 ATE show in January.

Rips Off:??? This one does look familiar, but I can’t think of an actual game it copies.

A fairly straightforward vertical shooter in which the player protects a line of fuel tanks from a variety of invading alien ships. In addition, walking aliens (called “dogs” in one issue of Play Meter) would appear on the horizon and begin moving toward the player, launching an attack when they got too close. If the MAME sounds are accurate for this one (and lord hopes they’re not), this gets my vote for wussiest firing sound in the history of video games (it sounds like an anemic chicken peeping).

CosmosTuni/Century

Released: at the same time as Dark Warrior

Rips Off: Astro Invaders (Gremlin/Sega) – big time

This is one of the top candidates for Century’s most blatant rip-off. They copied everything from the laser temperature gauge to the fuel gauge to the speech to the docking. All without much of the charm of the original (I’m not sure, for instance, if they copied the bonuses – one of my favorite features of Astro Blaster).
Somehow, this managed to be chosen as one of five games for the famed That’s Incredible tournament/Video Game Olympics (the one won by Ben Gold).

Space FortressTuni/Century

Released: ???, I believe it was available by the time Tuni started selling the system around December, 1981. It was shown at the AOE show in March, 1982.

Rips Off: Asteroids

 This one isn’t nearly as blatant a rip-off as Cosmos. While it had the same basic gameplay as Asteroids, it also added a number of new features, including color, a fuel supply, a damage meter, speech, sensors, and a stage where the player defended a space fortress. The game also included a second stage that was sort of similar to Dark Warrior (complete with a firing sound that is, if anything, even more annoying – at least in MAME)

 

DazzlerTuni/Century

Released: 1/82 (MAME), 5/82 (DRA Price Guide), ca 4/82 (Play Meter), shown at 1/82 ATE show

Rips Off: Donkey Kong (level 1) and ???, The MAME history filed describes this as “cross between Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Jr.” but I don’t really see it, other than that it was a maze game and had locks and a gorilla.

This one combined a maze game and a climbing game. In the former, the player opened a series of 13 locks, collected bananas, and fed them to a purple gorilla. The player also had to avoid vultures (or distract them with snakes). The second level was a version of the first level of Donkey Kong with some amazingly crude graphics for an arcade game in 1982 (or even for a computer game in 1979).

 Video 8 BallTuni/Century/CVS

Released: 4/82 (RePlay catalog), shown at AOE in 3/82

Rips Off: ???, this one was similar to Konami/Dynamo’s Video Hustler/Li’L Hustler but I don’t think I’d call it a “rip-off” since most video pool games were necessarily similar

Charts: RePlay software chart, #4, (1983)

Not much to say here. A video version of pool. It made the charts a long time after its debut, so CVS may have produced another version.

Radar Zone/Outline (??)Tuni/Century/CVS

Released: Uncertain. This one was listed on the original Tuni flyer and Play Meter says it was available at the time the system was released in the U.S. but the July, 1982 issue of RePlaysaid that it would be available shortly as the sixth CVS title.

Rips Off: Amidar

I’m not positive this is the same game as Outline, but I think it is. Trade magazines refer to both games and never intimate that they are the same. The first mention I found for Outline was in February, 1983. After the New York office took over, they said it was one of their two biggest sellers (along with Video 8 Ball) so they may have renamed it.

The game itself was kind of a more boring version of Amidar without the gorillas and the jump button (i.e. the fun stuff). The enemies looked kind of like the sparx from Qix. The player’s main defense was a button that created a temporary gap in the maze outline. Later levels included enemies that fired at the character and “asteroids” levels (with colored asteroids in the background).

LoggerTuni?/Century

Released: ???, Tuni/E.T. showed it at the 1982 AMOA show in November

Rips Off: Donkey Kong (big time)

Another candidate for Century’s most shameless rip-off. I’m not sure how this one got by Nintendo’s lawyers (maybe it didn’t). This was basically a carbon copy of Donkey Kong with a lumberjack instead of a carpenter, logs instead of barrels, and a giant bird instead of Donkey Kong. Oh, and of course, substandard graphics and gameplay.

Wall St./Wall StreetTuni/?Century

Released: ??? Tuni/E.T. showed it at the 1982 AMOA show in November

Rips Off: ??? If this one ripped off something else, I’d LOVE to know what it is. The only trampoline game I can think of off the top of my head is Exidy’s Trapeze/Taito’s Trampoline, but that’s nothing like this one.  The second phase was quite a bit like Tutankham.

I may be alone here, but this one almost makes up for all of Century’s earlier games put together. This has to be one of the strangest classic era arcade video game concepts ever in terms of sheer bat-poop craziness. Would-be suicide victims leapt out the windows of a skyscraper while the player used a trampoline to bounce them into a waiting ambulance in an attempt to keep the Dow Jones Index (represented by a bar at the bottom of the screen) from reaching zero. All while jaunty music played in the background. In the second stage, the player maneuvered through a bank collecting bags of money while tanks (!?!) tried to blast him to smithereens.

RaidersCentury?/CVS?

Released: ???

Rips Off: ???

Another vertical shooter somewhat like Astro Blaster or Astro Fighter. The player could move vertically as well as horizontally and had both bombs and lasers. There was also a wave where you faced a kind of mother ship with three ports as well as a docking stage.


Gold Bug/DiggerCentury/CVS

Released: ???, first mentioned in RePlay in 3/83

Rips Off: ???

A rather boring digging game with typically crude graphics. The player collected gold nuggets while avoiding bugs. As they dug out the ground, mine carts filled with ore.

Heart Attack/A-Maze-ZingCentury/CVS

Released: July, 1983 (RePlay catalog)

Rips Off: One hopes nothing. Though it has some similarities to the Atari 2600 Maze Craze cartridge.

Charts: #2 RePlay software charts, 1983

Oh man, what a turkey. This one gets my vote for worst graphics of any game made after 1980. Crude doesn’t even begin to describe them. As far as the actual game, the player had 20 seconds to complete each of the 99 game’s different mazes while avoiding pursuing “chasers” (which could be “frozen” once per level, causing the maze walls to disappear for seven seconds). This thing actually appeared on RePlay’s software charts five times. How? I have no idea. Even worse, Century claimed that it was “rapidly becoming one of the top three games” in European test locations. Please tell me they were exaggerating. Then again, maybe there’s something I’m missing.

HunchbackCentury/CVS

Released: 9/83 (MAME, Play Meter), though it was previewed at the ATE in January, 1983 and mentioned as shipping in the 6/15/83 issue of Play Meter

Rips Off: ???
Charts: #2 RePlay software chart

This is the big daddy as far as CVS was concerned. Their flagship game. And, surprise, surprise, it was actually pretty darn good. The goal was to guide Quasimodo across a series of screens to rescue the fair Esmeralda. The main character was (reportedly) originally supposed to be Robin Hood (hence his green tunic) but was switched to Victor Hugo’s famous bell ringer during development. To accomplish his task, Quasimodo had to make his way across a castle wall, leaping over pikemen, crenellations, arrows, and other obstacles or swinging over a fiery pit to ring a bell on the other side. In a second phase the player had to climb a pair of bell ropes and remove plugs from a series of wall sections (shades of Donkey Kong’s rivets level) before reaching the princess. In addition to the CVS version, Hunchback was offered as a conversion kit for Donkey Kong (what was it with Century and Donkey Kong?). While the gameplay is nice, it’s the main character that really makes the game for me. Thankfully, we haven’t seen the last of him.

 

Superbike

Century/Crown Vending

Released: 4/84 (Play Meter catalog)
also as conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr.

Rips Off: Moon Patrol

Charts: #1 Play Meter conversion kit chart for street locations 11/15/84 (appeared 11x)#10, Play Meter conversion kit chart for arcade locations 10/15/84 (appeared 9x) 

 

This might look like a contender for Century’s biggest hit but I suspect that most of the units sold were the DK/DK Jr. conversion kits rather than the CVS version.

While the game was described as a racing game, it was essentially Moon Patrol with a motorcycle. Instead of Moon Patrol’s boulders, Superbike had trees. Potholes replaced craters and the main “enemies” were balloons (the one new wrinkle was a series of ramps that they player could use to jump obstacles).

 

Hero in the Castle of Doom/Hero/Hero in the Temple of Doom

Century/Crown Vending

 

Released: ca 11/84 (RePlay), shown at 1984 AMOA show

also as conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr.

 

Rips Off: Tutankham

Charts: #1 Play Meter conversion kit chart, street locations 2/15/85

 

This one may have done better than Superbike on the charts, but I think Superbike sold more. Again, it probably sold best as a conversion kit. It was developed by Seatongrove.

The game featured (once again) Quasimodo’s attempts to rescue Esmeralda (or, in this case Ezzmerelda). This one is basically a rip-off of Tutankham (though not a blatant one). Interestingly, the original flyers for the game referred to it as Hero in the “Temple” of Doom and featured the image of an Indiana-Jones-like character, complete with fedora (one wonders if they changed the name and character in an effort to avoid litigation). 

H.B.’s Olympics/Hunchback Olympic/Herbie at the OlympicsCentury/Montgomery Vending/Magic Electronics

 

Released: ca 7/84 (RePlay), ca 10/84 (Play Meter), possibly earlier for other versionsalso as conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Scramble
Rips Off:: Track & Field (big time)

Charts: #12 Play Meter conversion kit chart, street 12/84, #14 RePlay software chart, 2/85

Quasimodo’s back, and with his original green tunic. The one was another shameless rip-off, this time of Track & Field. It featured five of the six events from the Konami/Centuri original (all except the hammer throw) and added the discus and shot put. God help me but I like this game. Yes the gameplay was virtually identical (and inferior) to the original and the graphics were much worse but there’s just something about a hunchback doing the high jump that tickles me. Another one that probably sold better as a kit.

Eight Ball ActionCentury/Montgomery Vending/Magic Electronics

Released: ca 7/84 (RePlay), ca 10/84 (Play Meter), possibly earlier for other versions
also as conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Scramble

Rips Off:: ???

Charts: #6 RePlay software chart, 3/85, #37, Play Meter 10/15/85

Another video pool game.

Other CVS Games
Pharoah (mentioned in RePlay in March, 1982 but either it was never released, or it changed its name).

Voyager - a flyer for the game exists, though it does not include a picture of the cabinet. It is described as "the ultimate sea battle game". The player controls a Nimitz class aircraft carrier equipped with radar, sonar, bombs, torpedoes, cruise missiles, submarines, and 200 aircraft. Enemies included destroyers, subs, battleships, helicopters and aircraft.
While the painting on the flyer shows a spaceship, it appears that the actual game (if it existed) was a naval combat game.

The following are listed on a British flyer for Century's games, but the flyer shows only a marquee. I’ve found no other references to them.

Horizon
Outlaw
Super Shoot

The following are listed at arcade-history.com but no other info is given and I’ve found no other references to them.

Space Warp

---

[1]Play Meter, January 15, 1983.

[2]Ibid. The figure may have been a misprint. Mickey Greenman later (in the May, 1984 RePlayi) claimed that there were 7,000 CVS units on location in the U.S. while Crown Vending’s Steve Hochman (in the May 1, 1984 Play Meter) estimated that 10,000 CVS units had been sold in the U.S. and about the same number in Europe. If the 700 figure is accurate, it would mean that the overwhelming majority of units were sold after Century severed their relationship with Tuni (which is certainly possible, given the issues between the two and the fact that the biggest hits came in 1983). It is possible that the “700” was a misprint for “7,000” but this seems unlikely too, since it would mean that CVS sold almost no more units after 1982. It is also possible that the 7,000 and 10,000 figures refer to the number of game modules sold rather than base units (though this also seems unlikely).

[3] In the Play Meter article, Reed claimed “We were supposed to get a new game every eight to 10 weeks, but we have received a total of seven since January.” He cannot mean that they received seven new games (since that would have actually been more than they were promised) so I’m assuming he meant they received seven in total, including the four that were available at the time they signed the deal.

[4]Ibid

[5] This may have been the video game Shooting Gallery, which was developed by Seatongrove and licensed to Buhzac International and Zaccaria.

The Tangled History of Omni/Glak/Eagle/Magic Electronics (Part 1)

January 16, 2014, 6:58 pm

≫ Next: Video Game Mythbusters - Was Rally-X the Hit of the 1980 AMOA?

≪ Previous: Century Electronics/CVS

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            Magic Electronics of Cranston, Rhode Island is little remembered today but in 1984 and 1985, they released over two dozen video games, a few of which were minor hits. Their most well-known games were probably The Glob, Super Glob, H.B.'s Olympics, 8 Ball Action, Driving Force, Samurai (Nichon Ichi), and Special Forces: Kung Fu Commando, all of which made the RePlay and/or Play Meter charts. Most of these games have been forgotten today as had Magic Conversions. There are a number of reasons: they made only conversion kits, they released their games at the height of the industry crash, and their games were designed by or licensed from other companies and are thus not associated with Magic.

            Nonetheless, Magic had a fairly interesting history. Tracing that history, however, can be difficult since it is intertwined with the history of a number of other companies and tangentially related to even more. In fact, I could have called this article "the tangled history of Ferncrest Distributors/Omni Video Games/Glak Associates/Eagle Conversions/Magic Conversions/Epos Corporation/Cardinal Amusements/Montgomery Vending/Magic Electronics" but that doesn't really roll off the tongue.

            The main connections between Magic and its direct ancestors were two men: Frank Gaglione and Kevin McIntyre, who served as President and VP of most of them. Their history starts with another Rhode Island company called Omni Video Games.

Omni Video Games, Inc.

 

            Of all the companies associated with Magic Electronics, Omni Video Games is the most famous, largely because of their role in the Stern v. Kauffman case, one of the most influential and important cases in video game history. Omni was headed, and likely founded, by Frank Gaglione. Little is known about Gaglione’s early life. It appears that he may have been born in 1913. On April 2, 2013, the Rhode Island Senate passed a resolution honoring Frank Gaglione of Providence on his 100^th birthday (http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText13/SenateText13/S0805.pdf).

Given the name and the fact that Gaglione’s business were all in the Providence area, it seems likely that this is the same person (a Frank Gaglione who died in Buffalo in 1997 appears to be a different person). By 1980, Gaglione had established a company called Ferncrest Distributors in Warwrick, RI to distribute slot machines and video games for Universal and other coin-op companies. I am not sure exactly when Omni was founded but it appears to have been around 1980. According to the records of the Rhode Island Secretary of State, Omni Video Games, Inc. was incorporated on June 24, 1980 as Omni Gaming Systems, Inc. The incorporation record claims that the name was changed to Omni Video Games. Inc. in 1993, and lists Barbara Maggiacomo listed as president (whose address is listed as 123 Shadow Brook Lane in Warwick). It also claims that Omni filed the fictitious name of Elm Manufacturing on 3/12/84. I'm not sure this is the same company, but given the name and the Warwick association, it seems likely). Frank Gaglione's name doesn't appear on the summary of the incorporation record on the Sec. of State website, but it might appear in the actual articles (articles of incorporation generally include officers of the company)

Omni produced at least a dozen-and-a-half titles between 1980 and 1982. A number of them seem to have been legit. The licensed a number of games, for instance from Artic Electronics/ATW USA, including Mars and Devil Fish (I believe that Artic Electronics is a different company from the Artic International that was sued by Williams and Midway. I read that they actually changed the name of their US branch to ATW to avoid confusion with the other Artic). Other Omni games, however, were anything but legitimate. Midway sued them over their bootleg versions of Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Rally-X.

 

Stern v. Kaufman

            The 1981 case Stern v. Kaufman brought Omni its most lasting fame. It was not, however, the first time they’d tangled with Stern in court. In November, 1980 Stern had filed a complaint against the company over a bootleg version of Astro Invader called Zygon and succeeded in shutting production on the game down. Omni was unfazed. In April, 1981, just four weeks after Stern released Scramble (like Astro Invader, it was licensed from Konami), Omni released their own version (called either Scramble or Scramble 2), selling it for $650 less than Stern. Stern filed a complaint almost immediately.

The “boring” stuff

            First, the stuff that many will find boring (though I actually think it’s interesting) – the case itself.  I don’t have time to go into all the details here (that could take up an entire post) but the case hinged on a few provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 (incorporated into Title 17 of the U.S. code), which protects "… original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression ". The act then goes on to list examples. The list does not include video games specifically, but it does included literary works, and audiovisual works, and video games were generally registered under one of these two categories. Rather than registering the code as a “literary work” Stern had registered a video tape of the actual gameplay as an audiovisual work. One reason might have been that registering the code might not prevent someone from creating an exact copy of the game with original code. Registering the gameplay, on the other hand, protected the game even if someone duplicated it with new code. According to George Gerstman, Stern’s lawyer in the case, there was another reason. Gerstman had earlier worked on a case called Data Cash Systems v. JS&A group that involved a copy of an electronic chess game. In that case, the judge had ruled that game code embedded on ROMs was not copyrightable since the code wasn’t “readable”. As a result, the copyright office stopped granting copyrights for programs on ROMS or PROMS (after the trial, Gerstman was able to persuade them to change their policy and the Data Cash decision was apparently later overruled).

            The idea of submitting a videotape of gameplay had come up in the Astro Invader case and Gerstman himself shot the video. To do so, he had to lug his “portable” VCR to the Stern factory (which consisted of a camera and a base VCR unit that he had to strap to his back). In addition, neither TV monitors nor VCRs were common in courtrooms at the time (not even in New York, where the Kaufman trial took place) and Gerstman had once again haul his VCR to court.

            In the trial, Omni claimed that Konami//Stern’s Scramble did not meet the copyright act’s originality requirement because what happened in the game depended on the actions of the player. The video tape wasn’t original either, because it depended on the ROMs and the underlying code, which Stern had not registered. The judge disagreed and issued a temporary injunction against Omni. On appeal, Omni tried attacking the “fixation” requirement of the copyright act claiming that the game was not “fixed” because it was different every time you played it. They also claimed that each act of playing the game constituted an original work, while the video tape only showed one particular instance. Omni lost again.

The not so boring stuff

            Some aspects of the case were a bit more exciting. One was that Frank Gaglione himself was called to testify. Of course, that itself is not very interesting, but the reason he was called is. As Gerstman explains in his book “Clear and Convincing Evidence”:

“The president of Omni, Frank Gaglione, was present at the hearing. Judge Nickerson had recently been the judge in a federal criminal case concerning the New York mob. Without impugning Frank’s character, let’s just say that he was wearing a dark red shirt, a dark suit and a light tie. Frank was a tough looking guy. I wanted to be sure that Judge Nickerson knew that Frank was Omni’s president. I called Frank to the stand as an adverse witness. Frank had not expected this. Although I had not taken his deposition earlier, I was confident that I would be able to get useful testimony from him.”
[George Gerstman (2013-04-02). Clear and Convincing Evidence: My career in intellectual property law (Kindle Locations 1913-1917). AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition.]

            Also interesting was that two weeks after Stern filed a complaint against Omni for copyright infringement, Omni filed a complaint against Stern for trademark infringement. “What gives?” you may well be asking. As it turns out, in December of 1980, Gaglione ordered 10 marquees bearing the name “Scramble” from a company called BCA posters (Konami had already showed Scramble in Japan, so the title was known in the video game industry). Gaglione slapped five of the marquees on three other Omni bootlegs that were already in production (Space Guerrilla, Space Carrier, and Rally-X) then filed for a trademark on the name “Scramble”. It was a rather shameless attempt, but you have to admire the guys’ chutzpah. Thankfully, the court didn’t buy it for a second.

 

            A final amusing (in retrospect) incident occurred after the trial. Despite the judge’s order, Omni continued to produce their bootleg Scramble game, this time under the name Air Shuttle. In October, Stern found out about some copies of Air Shuttle that had been sold in Tulsa, OK and got a court order allowing them to seize the games (they even got the judge to fast track the process). Gerstman himself went to Tulsa and, aided by a US Marshall, helped confiscate games from 14 different locations. They later found more bootleg games in Brooklyn. This time, however, things didn’t go so smoothly. Gerstman and another US Marshal went to a convenience store to seize five games. After loading three of them on their truck, 8 men walked in with Doberman pinscher’s on leashes, then locked the door behind them and threatened to turn the snarling dogs loose if the games were not returned posthaste. Gerstman and the Marshall (wisely) decided to comply. As the left, they were pelted by rocks from kids lining the rooftop.

            In any event, the judge was none too pleased that Omni had continued producing their games in violation of his order and brought criminal contempt charges against Frank Gaglione (to expedite matters, the charges were later dropped). Not long after the case, the Omni Video Games disappeared from the trade magazines (though the company didn’t go away entirely. In 1986 they were assigned rights to a video game scoring system developed by Wing Company, Ltd (which served as the basis for a 1991 lawsuit). Frank Gaglione, meanwhile, went on to form another company, this one in Providence, called Glak Associates - but that will have to wait for part 2.

Games Made by Omni

            I don’t really have a good list of games made/distributed by Omni, since I don’t really track bootleg games, but here are some titles I’ve come across:

·         Devil Fish (licensed? from Artic Electronics)
·         Mars (licensed? from Artic Electronics)
·         Packman (Pac-Man bootleg)
·         Piranha
·         Pool Hustler? (Omni registered a trademark on this name, but I don’t know if they ever made a game)
·         Rally-X (bootleg)
·         Red UFO(appears on flyer, may be same as Artic’s Defend the Terra Attack on the Red UFO)
·         Scramble/Scramble 2 (bootleg)
·         Space Carrier
·         Stand-Off (Omni registered a trademark on this name, but I don’t know if they ever made a game)
·         Super Sphinx (Omni showed this game at the 1982 AOE show in March)
·         Uniwars
·         Zygon (Astro Invaderbootleg)
·         Golden Poker (licensed??? Bonanza)

 

Video Game Mythbusters - Was Rally-X the Hit of the 1980 AMOA?

January 23, 2014, 7:18 pm

≫ Next: The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 7

≪ Previous: The Tangled History of Omni/Glak/Eagle/Magic Electronics (Part 1)

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            There are number of well-known legends associated with various arcade video games of the 1980s. Perhaps the two games with the most are Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. With the latter there are legends about the origin of the game’s name, the main character’s name, the involvement of Ikegami Tsushinki, the game’s Popeye origins etc. With the former there's the pizza legend (discussed earlier), the release date, the question of when and if the enemies were referred to as ghosts and so on. One story about Pac-Man that has oft been repeated is that when it debuted at the 1980 AMOA show in October, the industry pundits liked Namco’s other game Rally-X better. In fact, the story goes, Rally-X was the hit of the show. Here’s a typical version from Steven Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games:

“Buyer and analyst response at the October AMOA show further confirmed that Rally-X was the best game in the group. Of all the video games at that show Rally-X received the most favorable comments.”

Note that the “group” mentioned here refers to the four games introduced by Namco: Pac-Man/Puck-Man, Rally X, Tank Battalion, and King & Balloon. There are actually two (or three)  separate claims here: 1) that Midway liked Rally-X best of the four Namco games and 2) that Rally-X was the hit of the 1980 AMOA. Both stories are often used to illustrate either the myopia of industry executives or the revolutionary nature of Pac-Man (a third claim is that the industry in general preferred Rally-X to Pac-Man)

Let’s look at claim 2) first. This one should be pretty easy to check. I have the relevant issues of RePlay and Play Meter, the two premier industry journals of the time, so if we want to know what the industry thought, those are the key sources of information.

First, however, a word about the 1980 AMOA show, and the show in general. For those who don’t know, the AMOA (Amusement and Music Operators of America) expo was the premier industry show in the U.S. in the 1980s (and probably from the 1960s to at least the 1990s). The 1980 show was a pretty interesting one in terms of coin-op history. Other than Pac-Man and Rally-X, games making their debut at the show included Battle Zone, Berzerk, Defender, Crazy Climber, Spectar, Star Castle, Space Panic, and Moon Cresta.

So, which games were considered the hits?

Play Meter covered the show in its 1/15/81 issue, which actually had three separate articles, reviewing the show.
First was an article by Dick Pearson titled "Play Meter plays the games"
Unfortunately, Pearson didn't name a standout game, noting "But since Space Invaders, we have seen something new added to the games, which makes it all the more difficult to pick a 'Game of the Show." He then goes on to further discuss how difficult picking standout games is and doesn't name a game of the show.

Nonetheless, he does discuss the following games as among the standouts: Battlezone, Berzerk, Star Castle, Defender, Spectar, and Space Tactics, and also mentions Radar Scope, Zero Hours, Uni War S, Space Panic, and Crazy Climber.
Here's his take on Pac-Man and Rally-X

Hmm. He doesn't seem to favor one over the other. Plus he also mentioned a lot of games, so this article may not be of much help.

Later in the same issue we have Dick Welu's show diary. Welu is much more forthcoming with what games he liked and disliked.
He calls Star Castle a "honey", was lukewarm on Space Panic, and liked Battlezone.
His pick for game of the show?

OTOH, he did pick a Bally/Midway game as "sleeper" of the show. Which one?

Yep, he picked Space Zap (!!???) as sleeper of the show. Now don't get me wrong, I loved me some Space Zap back in the day, but sleeper? Really?

Finally, we have the article "An Independent Review: Standout games at Chicago Show" by Tony Licata. Ahh. This is just what we're looking for. He actually picks four standout games of the show.
And they are....
Battlezone

...

Bererk

...

Star Castle

....

and

...

wait for it

...

Deep Death.


...

Deep Death?

...

DEEP DEATH!!??!!?!

That's what he picked. Pacific Novelty's Deep Death (which was subsequently renamed Shark Attack).

OK, so it looks like Play Meter didn't consider Rally-X the standout game of the show, or even significantly better than Pac-Man.
What about RePlay?

Here's a review of the show from the 12/80 issue
:

 

 

 

No Rally-X there, but he does mention Pac-Man and (once again) good old Space Zap.

Here's another review from the same issue.



 

 

I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing any evidence that Rally-X was considered the hit of the show or that it was more well regarded than Pac-Man. OTOH, neither was Pac-Man considered the hit of the show, so the perhaps the larger point still stands.

What about the other claim, that Midway initially liked Rally-X more than Pac-Man? That claim actually does hold water. Midway president Dave Marofske said as much to Kent. When I talked to him circa 1999, he told me pretty much the same thing: 

[Dave Marofske] When we went to Japan there were four games, I believe, that were shown. Atari, ourself, and many others had looked at the games and talked to Namco about licensing them. The one that Mr. Nakamura and company felt had tremendous potential was Rally X, which was a maze driving game. They also had Pac-Man, which they called Puck Man. They also had a tank game, which I think was called Red Tank or maybe just Tank and they had a game that they called Red Balloonsor something similar. They said they were not going to licensing all four to any one company and, in fact, they were leaning towards releasing them to four different companies. Rally X seemed to be the one that kept getting touted but we sort of thought there were two strong games and the other one was Pac-Man. I don’t think anyone on our side, and obviously nobody on their side at that time knew which was going to be the stronger game but we felt they both had strong potential.

Far more interesting was a story that Game Plan exec Ken Anderson told me. First, a little background. In the end, Namco chose to license the four games to two different companies. Midway got Rally-X and Pac-Man, while Game Plan got Tank Battalion and King & Balloon. Ken Anderson was an executive at Game Plan at the time and over the years it seems he worked for half the manufacturers in the industry. How did Midway end up with Pac-Man? Here's what Anderson told me

[Ken Anderson] You want to hear a real story. Dave Marofske was the president of Midway in 1980. Namco had four games and they were going to give Game Plan two and Bally/Midway two. [It came down to] Tank Battalion and Pac-Man. We flipped a coin. I won and I turned down Pac-Man because I thought Tank Battalion was the better game.  So I turned down Pac-Man for Tank Battalion.

Now I don't know if that's true or not and I haven't confirmed it but if it is, it has to be one of the all-time great whiffs (though, of course, it's easy to say that in hindsight).

 

Oh, and did you notice the raves about Space Tactics in the above articles? What's the deal with that one? For those who don't know, it was a huge cockpit game from Sega that used an elaborate system of gears, motors and pulleys to rotate - not the cabinet, or the player's seat, but the monitor (which was actually mounted in the bottom of the cabinet and reflected via a mirror, so they may have rotated the mirror). It also had LED lights to display various player stats as well as a steering wheel with a thumb button, plus six other buttons. One person called it the most over-engineered video game in history.

 

Finally, here's some more pictures form the 1980 AMOA show.

 

Hmm. Is that Namco founder Masaya Nakamura playing Rally-X? I thought so at first, but can't tell for sure. It looks like the game starts with a "T" but it doesn't look like a Tank Battalion cab.

 

 

 


Bonus. Another famous myth.

Earlier, I mentioned Donkey Kong myths. One of the most famous is that it was originally called Monkey Kong and the name was only changed to Donkey Kong due to a translation error (in some versions, due to either a blurred fax or a misheard phone call depending on who's telling the story).
That story is considered "busted". There's even a longish article on it at Snopes.
Recently, however, I came across the following from the October 1, 1981 Play Meter

What? Monkey Kong? So is the "busted" myth not a myth after all? Have I found holy grail of video game mythbuster-busting? Alas, I think not. I'm pretty sure this is just a good old fashioned typo. RePlay referred to the game as Donkey Kong the month before this issue came out and may have done so earlier. But it did give me a brief rush of adrenaline.

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 7

January 29, 2014, 8:51 pm

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            In 1981, Centuri had undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in coin-op history, going from perennial also-ran to major player in a single year. As 1982 dawned, they seemed ready to enter the upper echelons of the industry, but only time would tell if they would be able to do so.

1982 Games (Part 1)

Round-Up

 

            Licensed from Hiraoka[1] (probably the same company that created Phoenix), Round-Up was released in December of 1981. The game was a combination maze/puzzle game with emphasis on “puzzle”. The player controlled a character called “Cowboy” who, despite his name, was more of a ghostly-white version of Pac-Man with eyes, legs, and a pink hat. The action took place in a concentric maze at the center of which was a grid of 9 (later 16) white circles. The goal was replace all the white circles with red ones. To do this, “cowboy” had to “round up” red “knights” then “push” a new red circle into a row or column of the grid. Opposing Cowboy were five “gly boys”: Ugly, Beastly, Ghastly, Homely, and Deadly. Aiding his efforts was King Rompus, whom the player could touch to temporarily freeze all enemies and knights. The game also featured a bonus round in which the player had complete one side of a Rubik’s Cube (which they called an “electronics cube”) so that it matched a target pattern. While the game was certainly innovative, it wasn’t much of a hit and Centuri probably sold around 700-1,200 copies. The game was later released by Taito as Fitter.

D-Day

 

 

            One of Centuri’s sorriest releases was April’s D-Day, licensed from Italy’s Olympia, a company that had been founded by Livio Leante. While Olympia was headquartered in Milan, their games were developed and manufactured at their factory in Bari (supposedly home to the second university in Italy to offer a degree in information science). Olympia produced its first game,Master’s Game (a Breakout-like game) in 1979, possibly under the Leante Games brand. From 1979 to 1983, the company produced at least a dozen and a half titles, many of them knockoffs of existing hits. ­D-Day was their most successful game and the only one to be released in the U.S. Looking at the game’s crude graphics, it’s hard to see why. The game was a shooter in which the player used a single cannon to defend a beachhead from enemies including tanks, ships, planes, and trucks. It was a perhaps Centuri’s biggest flop of the decade and probably less than 100 units were sold.

 

Loco-Motion/Guttang Gottong

 

A bit more successful, but not much, was Loco-Motion (known as Guttang Gottong in Japan), licensed from Japan’s Konami (formerly known for their very profitable relationship with Stern). . The game was based on the ubiquitous 15-piece sliding block puzzle invented by Noyce Chapman in 1880in which the player slid blocks horizontally or vertically within a frame to complete a picture or rearrange the blocks in numerical sequence. In Loco-Motion, the video “frame” contained 15 blocks, each with a section of a railroad track on it. As a train chugged around the track, the player had to slide the blocks to create a path for it and prevent it from crashing. The player also had to guide the train to pick up trackside passengers. If a passenger wasn’t picked up within a reasonable amount of time, they were replaced by a countdown timer and if the player didn’t reach the timer before the time reached zero, A “Crazy Train” appeared that the player had to avoid. While the game was not a hit, it was one of the earliest examples of an arcade puzzle game.

Centuri sold only $576,000 worth of Loco-Motion games in 1982, probably translating to about 300-500 units. In the long run, however, the game may have Centuri’s most important release of the year since Centuri’s relationship with Konami would prove perhaps even more lucrative than Stern’s had been.

 The Pit

 

1982 was an international year for Centuri. Loco-Motion had been licensed from a Japanese company, D-Day from an Italian one, and April’s The Pit came from jolly old England. The game was developed by the British company AW Electronics (aka Andy Walker Electronics, for its founder). In his youth, Andy Walker had served as a shipboard radio operator before spending ten years in the British Foreign Office. In 1977, while working at a government electronics center, he had his first brush with computers when he encountered a Honeywell 316 mini-computer. Instantly captivated, he purchased a kit computer consisting of single board with an 8080 microprocessor, a small amount of RAM, and a set of 8 red LEDs for output (as with the Altair and other early computers, it didn’t support a monitor). The only documentation consisted of a single photocopied page of instructions and a copy the 8080 instruction set. Programs had to be entered a byte at a time via 8 toggle switches. If the user made a mistake, they had to start over again from the beginning. In addition, the computer had no way to permanently store data, so even if a user did enter the data correctly, the program only lasted until they turned the computer off. This led to an amusing (at least in hindsight) incident. Walker entered program after program, only to find that they didn’t work. After spending days trying to sort things out, he finally discovered that to enter a 1 the user had to flip the toggle switch up and to enter a 0 he had to switch it down. This was obvious to American users but not to Walker, since in the U.K. (and most other countries), switches worked exactly the opposite way (to turn a light on, for instance, you pushed the switch down rather than up). Nonetheless, Walker eventually tamed the electronic beast and taught himself how to program in hex code. In 1981, fascinated by the new microcomputers that were appearing on the scene, Walker asked his bosses to send him to a small systems course to learn more about the machines. Convinced that the future was in mainframes and minicomputers rather than micros, they refused. Not long afterwards, Walker’s job changed and rather than relocate he quit and formed a company called Andy Walker Electronics (AWE - aka Slogan Court Ltd.) in the seaside town of Birdlington.

 

 

Deciding to build a computer of his own, Walker acquired a Tangerine Microtan 65 computer (a 6502-based kit computer). After putting it together, he ordered another and began writing programs in assembly language, displaying simple, interactive shapes on a black-and-white monitor. Realizing the system had potential, he hired another programmer named Tony “Gibbo” Gibson from Barnstable in Devon. Meanwhile, he purchased three graphics board (one each for red, green, and blue) and set about designing new hardware that expanded the MicroTan’s meager RAM, sound and graphics capabilities. After persuading a local company to turn his design into actual circuit boards, Walker programmed a crude Defender clone called Andromeda on his new system. Realizing that it was a bit too crude, he trashed the game and started again, eventually bringing in Gibson. Working together in a spare room in their house, Walker and Gibson would write code in assembly language then print it out and pin it to the wall so they could remember the memory addresses the next day. When they added joystick control to the game, they realized they could make a coin-op game. Young and full of confidence, they decided they could create their own from scratch and Walker began designing a cabinet. He ended up creating a multi-game system that allowed operators to swap ROM boards on the fly without turning the machine off (Walker described it as a “video jukebox”). Around this time, a third member joined the team - a graphic designer named Andy Rixon. Before long, the trio had created two additional games for the system: Hunter and The Pit. Oddly enough, it was a bug in Andromeda that led directly to the creation of The Pit.  

[Andy Walker] The spaceship had a fin on the back and it didn’t always rub itself out. It would paint the screen in pixels but then when it went through a second time it would tunnel through them. Ah, there’s a game there.

            <”The Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

With three games completed, Walker and Gibson packed their system into a rented Nissan van and headed to the Cunard Hotel in Hammersmith for the London Previews (a prominent British trade show). They set up a small both next to a major manufacturer (where the near constant music from a Frogger machine nearly drove them mad) and got their system up-and-running, which required loading the operating system from cassette tape - a process that took fifteen minutes or more. Then, five minutes before the show started, an electrician told everyone they were going to turn off the power for a few minutes. Panic set in as Walker and Gibson had to hurriedly reboot their system and wait several painstaking minutes as the first visitors wandered into their booth only to be greeted by a screen with a “loading…” message.
In the end, however, things worked out just fine. They made the acquaintance of Norman Parker, who headed Zilec Electronics in Burton-on-Trent, one of the U.K.’s leading arcade game manufacturers. Parker took a look at their system and was duly impressed. After the show, Walker paid a visit to the Zilec factory and Parker suggested he show his system to Centuri sales exec Joel Hochberg, who was Zilec’s agent (it appears that he had also set up his own company called Coin-It by this time). Hochberg was interested in their system and had them ship it to him in Florida (Zilec actually handled the shipping). During testing in Miami, The Pit proved to be the most popular of the system’s three games and Hochberg quickly licensed it to Centuri, netting AW Electronics a royalty of $136 per machine at a time when the going rate was around $40. Hochberg took a large part of the royalty for himself, but Walker didn’t mind since Hochberg had given him the foot in the door he needed to establish himself in arcade industry. While Hochberg liked the game, the multi-game system proved impractical
 

[Andy Walker] Our (treasured) rack-mounted Tangerine custom hardware worked fine but was really unsuitable for mass-production and Joel suggested that we completely abandon it in favour of Centuri (capable, successful) boards - and he was right. The software guys at Centuri knew their board inside-out and got The Pit rewritten in fantastic time. It was quickly agreed that it should be released as a single game - and that was shown to be right decision too.

Meanwhile, Zilec/Zenitone produced a version of The Pit for English arcades based on the Galaxian board and assigned the task of porting the game to a pair of new Zi       lec engineers – brothers Chris and Tim Stamper (who went on to form their own company called Ashby Computers & Graphics, designed the game Blue Print for Bally/Midway, and later founded the software company Rare).
      The Pit was a digging game – a kind of crude predecessor to Dig Dug, Mr. Do, and Boulder Dash (whose creator, Peter Liepa, named The Pit as a major influence). The player guided a "space prospector" through an underground landscape strewn with boulders in an effort to collect a series of seven gems while avoiding enemy astronauts and falling rocks. Three of the gems were located in a large rectangular "pit" at the bottom of the screen whose ceiling was lined with falling enemies. Other obstacles included a pool of green acid(?) with a disappearing floor above it. While the player collected gems, the "zonker" (a name had chosen for the American version) slowly chipped its way through a mountain protecting the mother ship. If the player made their way back to the mother ship before the zonker "zonked" it, they received a bonus depending on how many gems they collected. As with most games, there were a few features that didn’t make it into the final version. The game was originally to feature additional levels, culminating with a fight against the "Grand Dragon". Despite the fact that the Grand Dragon never made it into the game, it may have influenced a much more popular digging game.
 

[Andy Walker]…when we were at the preview show, we all knew it was a work in progress. We described it as such to some Japanese people who were extremely interested. I think they were from Namco or Atari. We described how you would find the Dragon and blow it up. Not ‘you kill it’ but specifically ‘you blow it up’. The Japanese gave us an old-fashioned look then made expanding gestures, then “boom”. The point being that when we said “blow it up” they thought “inflate.”

          <”The Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

The idea of a dragon that you “blew up” later turned up in Namco/Atari's Dig Dug. Walker claims that when he mentioned the uncanny similarity to Atari, they informed him that THEY were suing HIM for stealing their (or rather Namco’s) idea. Luckily, at Joel Hochberg's suggestion, AW had registered a U.S. copyright on their game in November of 1982, two months before Atari and Namco copyrighted Dig Dug and nothing came of the threat. While The Pit wasn’t a major hit for Centuri, they did sell $2.9 million worth, probably about 1,200-2,000 units[2].

The Pit ended up being AW Electronics sole arcade video game. They did develop a few games that never made it to production, including Stamper (a game in which the player tried to deliver items by foot, plane, or car while avoiding being stomped flat by wandering beasts) and Hunky DoorKey (a maze game in which the player collected keys to open doors). Meanwhile, with their royalties from The Pit, Andy Walker and Tony Gibson purchased some Intertec Superbrain computers and began working on another game called Pipeline. Eventually they formed a company called Tasket and released Pipelinefor the Commodore 64, along with a number of other innovative titles such as Super Pipeline (probably their most popular game), Seaside Special (which involved throwing seaweed at leading U.K. politicians)and Bozo’s Night Out (in which the player guided a character named Bozo on a pub crawl, trying to get as drunk as possible before returning home safely)

---

[1] While the game’s flyer says it was licensed from Hiraoka & Co, the attract screen says it was copyrighted by Centuri and Amenip.

[2] According to Centuri’s annual report, their biggest production run of the year was 2,000 units. If there was only one game per run and The Pit only had one run, that would mean The Pit sold 2,000 units. If there was more than one game per run (the report said that Centuri never had more than two games in production at one time) then the figure would be lower.

BONUS PICTURE

This has nothing to do with Centuri but I was recently discussing Taito America's games and thought I'd post the following. It's a marquee for the ultrarare Taito America game Black Widow that was sent to me by the game's designer, Mark Blazczyk. Some report that the game was unreleased, but Mark recalls that a few copies made it out the door.

 

A Sampler of Coin-Op Football Games - Part 1 (non-video games)

February 10, 2014, 8:13 pm

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I planned to post this on Superbowl Sunday, but obviously didn’t get around to it. In honor of the Superbowl I wanted to look at a few coin-op football games. While there have been dozens over the years (including one made in 1892, thought I don’t know if it featured American Football or Soccer), here are a few that illustrate the variety of coin-op games that existed (mostly) prior to the rise of video games

 1. PlayFootball – Chester-Pollard Amusement Company– ca 1926

OK, this was soccer, not American football, but it was a very cool, and very popular game. The Chester-Pollard Amusement Company was formed in New York by three Chester brothers (Pollard was their mother’s maiden name). Football was an English game that Chester-Pollard bought the rights to for production in the U.S.

You can see the machine in action at this link at this link.

If you are interested in antique coin-op machines, take a look at some of the guy’s other videos. A few of my favorites: Bally Alley,  1901 Rifle Game (love the mechanism), The Locomotive(created in 1885 by William T. Smith, this is considered by some the first American-made coin-op amusement device).

 2. Army- Navy – Rock-Ola – 1934

Rock-Ola made a trio of absolutely ingenious pinball games in 1933 and 1934. First was Jigsaw (aka World’s Fair), in which the player flipped over pieces in a miniature jigsaw puzzle. Next was World Series, which featured a rotating baseball diamond. Then there were Army-Navy, which simulated a football game and even kept score.

I would try to describe it but this video does a better job than words could. Jigsaw sold 50,000+ copies and World Series sold 75,000. Army Navy didn’t sell nearly as well (though maybe it should have). On, and if you didn’t know, these game were 100% mechanical. No electricity at all, just some brilliant engineering.

There were plenty of other pinball games over the years with a similar idea (Gottlieb’s 1973 Pro Football is a good example), but Rock-Ola was there first.

3. Football – Victor Vending – 1950

This one was a gum vending machine.

 

4. Air Football – Mike Munves – 1954

Munves also produced a game called Air Hockey at the same time. This took me aback at first. Air Hockey was supposedly invented by Brunswick around 1972. Could that be wrong? Probably not. It appears that Munve’s game just used air to push the ball/puck across the table. There doesn’t appear to have been a cushion of air that the ball floated on.

5. Quarterback – Genco – 1957

Photo courtesy of pinrepair.com (an outstanding source of info on electromechanical arcade games). Despite the fact that it was called Quarterback, it looks like a kicker to me.

6. Touchdown – Williams – 1965

Another photo from pinrepair.com

This was actually a “pitch-and-bat” game. Pitch-and-bats were baseball games that featured a miniature bat you used to hit a ball and score doubles, triples, homeruns etc. Some of them had a “running man” unit like the one seen here. Others used miniature figures of baseball players. Most of them depicted baseball, but here’s an example of a football variant. Williams produced two more football pitch-and-bat games, both named Gridiron, in 1969 and 1984 (the latter as a conversion kit).

7. All-Star Football – Chicago Coin – 1972

Wall games were a fascinating, short-lived, mutant variety of game that appeared in bars in taverns mostly from about 1970-1975 before video games basically put them out of business. They used light bulbs behind a plastic screen and usually had remote controls boxes with a single button for controls.

 8. Challenge Football – Unknown – 1975

I posted a picture of this one before. I have no other information about it but it sure looks cool.

9. Touchdown Football – Intermark – 1988

A football version of Pop-a-Shot.

10. Football Frenzy – Island Interactive – 1990s??

A football-themed redemption game.

 Next time - back to video games.

 

 

 

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 8

February 16, 2014, 7:57 pm

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Today’s post is part 8 of my ongoing history of Allied Leisure/Centuri. It mostly covers Tunnel Hunt and as such is basically a repeat of a post I did earlier. Sorry for that, but I couldn’t leave the game out of my history.

Tunnel Hunt

 

            While The Pit had a convoluted history, it was nothing compared to July’s Tunnel Hunt. The game, which was actually designed by Atari’s Owen Rubin, started life at Atari as Tube Chase andwas Rubin’s first color vector project. Initially he started with an Asteroidsvector system and used some Night Drivercode to create a simple flying game.

[Owen Rubin] I started the game as a vector graphics project based on the opening landing sequence in the movie Aliens. It did not work in vector, but that took several months to discover. Dave Sherman had an ellipse generator that he thought would be good, so I spent nine months or so and did this great game of flying down tunnels. The tunnels split and merged and you occasionally exited into space where you could fly into one of several other tunnels (worm holes). . .The only way you could slow down was to hit the walls, but that raised the hull temperature. It was a good strategy to bump the wall to hold off a target so that you would not overtake it, especially if your lasers were out. . .  It had a great cabinet. It “wrapped” around you with speakers behind and in front. You stood, not sat, and it blocked out outside noise. The controller was a flight stick for flying with buttons for firing and shields.

The game was play-tested and was ranked a solid #2 or #3 for 10 weeks straight. Atari, however, would not feel comfortable releasing it unless it reached #1 and asked Rubin to make some changes. After Rubin spent another six months working on the game, management decided that it was too expensive.

[Owen Rubin] So we cheapened the hardware to do circles only. This made the split tubes ugly, and the warping of the tunnel effect was lost... It took another four months to make the changes. We field tested it again – #2, solid! They changed the hardware again to make it even cheaper, which allowed only one sorted list of circles and so I had to take out the splits. The game was MUCH simpler now, but still the same basic game play.  [It was] still too expensive, so Dave [Shepperd] did a rectangle generator and I rewrote the game for a square tube. After 3-4 months [we did] another field test – still #2 for another five weeks (at different arcades all the time as well). So after almost two years of screwing around with it, they decided to sell the game to a competitor – something Atari had NEVER done. So, I stated another turn to change the name to Vertigo for Exidy. This was harder than it sounds because I put some VERY elaborate security code in the game to prevent a clone company from being able to copy the game and remove the word Atari from the screen. After all this time, I forgot where it all was. Another three months and they had their game. They field tested it again, but now it was only earning a solid #3. After all, it was OVER two years old and starting to look out of date.

 
In Exidy’s version, the game was packed into a cockpit cabinet. After building a small test run, however, Exidy decided it didn’t want the game after all (though they did go on to develop another, unrelated, game. In a cockpit cabinet bearing the same name). 

[Owen Rubin] About three months later, they rolled the game back into my lab and asked if I could make “just one more change”. This line became a joke because they’d asked this maybe 70 times by now. I changed it AGAIN, this time for Centuri in Florida, and they did build the game. Unfortunately it was now almost three years out of date…The kicker to all this is that after I left Atari, I went immediately to Bally/Sente to work with some old teammates from Atari. When I walked into my new law, there was a Tunnel Hunt with a sign asking if I would make “just one more change”. Of course, they didn’t really want it, but I got a VERY good laugh out of it.                                                                             

While Centuri did release Tunnel Hunt, it was even less successful than The Pit and netted Centuri just $1.15 million in sales (probably less than 1,000 copies). Centuri’s final release of 1982, September’s The Swimmer (licensed from Tehkan), didn’t do much better, netting the company just $1.49 million (though it might have made more money in 1983).

 Centuri – 1982

            After their “annus mirabilis” of 1981, Centuri failed to reproduce their success in 1982. In fact, they didn’t even come close. Centuri’s revenues for fiscal year 1982 (which ended October 31) fell from $61.5 million to $37.6 million and the company lost $2.9 million. It was déjà vu all over again. Centuri sold just 8,682 video games during the year, resulting in $14.1 million in revenue, but losses from video games were $3.1 million, even greater than losses as a whole. Their biggest “hit”, The Pit, according for 21% of video game revenues. With arcade video games in decline, the company began to branch out into other areas. In February, they struck a licensing deal with Atari for home rights to Phoenix, Vanguard, and Challenger (the Phoenix license would be the basis for Atari’s November suit against Imagic over the Demon Attack cartridge). In May they sold $10 million of their convertible notes to a California life insurance company to raise some much-needed cash. The biggest move came In September, when Centuri acquired Outdoor Sports Headquarters Inc., a wholesale distributor of hunting, fishing, camping, marine, and archery equipment with four retail stores in Ohio and Indiana (though the stores accounted for less than 5% of Outdoor Sports’ revenue). In September and October alone, Outdoor Sports generated $20.9 million in revenue (more than video games had for the entire fiscal year) and turned a modest profit of $134,000. In the final two months of the calendar year, Centuri had revenues of $21.2 million and a profit of $72,000 with most of the total coming from Outdoor Sports.

            In response to the decline in their video game business, Centuri also made a number of personnel changes in 1982. In the spring, Ed Miller resigned as president and formed his own company called Telko Properties, which worked with Miami’s Techstar (founded by former Centuri VP Bill Olliges) to secure licenses for their games. A short time later, Centuri brought in another coin-op veteran – Arnold Kaminkow – to replace him. In addition, Centuri laid off a number of workers in their Hialeah plant and shut down their development lab in Bensenville, IL. With the industry crash already underway, things were not looking good for Centuri’s video games, but 1983 would be much different from 1982.

 

Bonus Pictures

First, a few more undocumented games:

 

 

Above photo is from the 1982 AMOA show

 

 

Photo above is from June, 1976

The next one is not a photo, but it does confirm the existence of Shadco's Mister Doodle and Naughty (for which I posted an ad earlier). This one's from August, 1982

Anybody ever seen the following? Wonder if you could put a Moppet game in there?

This one's not a video game, but it's interesting anyway:

Finally, a little peek behind the scenes. Here's a Gremlin IC inserter from 1982:

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The Tangled History of Omni/Glak/Eagle/Magic Electronics (Part 2)

February 25, 2014, 3:47 pm

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In part 1, we looked that the somewhat colorful history of Omni Video games. As we left the story, Omni had all but disappeared after coming out on the short end of the Stern v. Kaufman case. Omni prexy Frank Gaglione, one the other hand, was still alive and kicking in the video game industry.

Glak Associates

 

Around 1982, Gaglione established a new company called Glak Associates, at 25 Eagle Street in Providence. Billing itself as “New England’s largest manufacturer of video games”, Glak had a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, complete with its own cabinet shop and silk-screening department. As with Omni, a number of Glak’s video game seem to have been legitimate, including the same Artic games Omni had produced (some under the Omni brand). Other Glak games included Red Clash (licensed from Tehkan), and Portman (in which the player caught bales of goods off a conveyor belt to fill the hold of a waiting ship). At the 1982 AMOA show, Glak showed Crazy Mazey[1], Woodpecker, and D-Rail (though this doesn’t necessarily mean the games were legit). On the other hand, there were some troubling signs. Glak often sold directly to operators (a somewhat suspicious move in itself). They also dealt with “business opportunity” companies, a term often associated with shady, fly-by-night operators who sold customers shoddy goods at inflated prices. In late 1982, one of these companies (who claims they were actually legit) - Counter Top Amusements of Raleigh NC - terminated their relationship with Glak after a customer complained about a bootleg copy of Frogger they’d been sold.

 

 

 

 

Eagle Conversions

            In any event, by early 1983 Glak seems to have disappeared as well. By then, Frank Gaglione had already set up a third company called Eagle Conversions (for a brief period at the start of 1982 it seems that Omni, Glak, and Eagle existed simultaneously, though Eagle may have just been another name for Glak). Eagle was probably named for its address at 25 Eagle Street, Building 5, in Providence (not coincidentally the same address as Glak). As its name implies, Eagle specialized in conversion kits, in addition to producing most of the same games Glak did (including those ubiquitous Artic titles). Even with his new company, however, Gaglione couldn’t stay out of trouble. In March, 1983 Universal filed suit against Glak for its illegal version of Mr. Do! and on May 16, the U.S. District Court in Providence issued a temporary restraining order against the company ordering them to stop producing the game (in response, Eagle filed suit against Easter Micro Electronics, though they didn’t say why).

Games I’ve seen associated with Eagle Conversions: Ack-Ack, Crazy Mazey, Devil Fish, D-Rail, Espial, Lady Bug, Popper, Portman, War of the Bugs, Dragon Slayer (?? - suspect this one may have been a typo)

Magic Conversions/Magic Electronics

            By late 1983[2], yet another company had appeared on the scene called Magic Conversions. Located in Cranston, Rhode Island, Magic was headed by Kevin McIntyre. Born in Australia, McIntyre had come to Rhode Island from Sydney on a business trip in 1973. While there, he met a client’s niece named Valerie and the two fell in love. The following year they were married and McIntyre relocated to the Providence area. After serving as VP of Omni, Glak, and Eagle, McIntyre decided to form a video game company of his own, specializing in conversion kits. Magic Conversions’ first game was The Glob (September 1983), which the company released as part of its “Magic Conversion System”. The Glob was an extraordinarily cute platform game in which the player controlled a smiling, blue, quivering “glob” with big eyes name Toby. The goal was to guide Toby through multiple floors of a building, scarfing up fruit from the floors. To move between floors, Toby could summon an elevator by pushing the button (though with what is anyone’s guess since he didn’t have arms or legs). Opposing Toby (“the glob”) was “the mob”: gator, froggy, bunny, monkey, and porker. Toby could either avoid his deadly foes or destroy them by using a limited supply of energy to cling to the ceiling, then drop down on them as they passed, engulfing them in his gelatinous body. With excellent graphics and fun gameplay, The Glob reached #13 on Play Meter’s arcade conversion kits chart. While Magic may have been a new company, they still had ties to Eagle Conversions, whom they licensed to produce The Glob as a $325 conversion kit for Pac-Man. The game was actually designed by Epos Corporation, who would later design three more games for the firm. After The Glob came Eeekk (February 1984), a cute/horror-themed game in which the player guided Sidney the Ghost on a quest to rid his haunted, four-story house of the Fantum Gang. The game was licensed from Shinkai Industries (though some say it came from Epos). Next came a follow-up to The Glob called Super Glob (February 1984) that reached #15 on Play Meter’s arcade conversions chart. In June’s Revenger, the player piloted a ship through 48 sectors, searching for intruder bases, and blasting enemies with torpedoes. Intruders who contacted fallout debris were transformed into atomic mutants with enhanced powers. Epos’s final game for Magic was Igmo (August 1984) in which the player tried to rescue the princess Iggy from her island, where she was held captive by The Dragon Sintar. In 1984, Epos began releasing conversion kits of its own under its Cardinal Amusements subsidiary. Their first game was Beastie Feastie– essentially the same game as The Glob. When Epos had sold the marketing rights to The Glob to Magic, they kept the copyrights to themselves. Or at least they thought they did. Unbeknownst to Epos (and without its permission), Magic had registered a copyright on the game, prompting Epos to form its own game company so it could retain the copyrights to its creations)
NOTE – thanks to Supercade author Van Burnham for unearthing the above information about Beastie Feastie. Expect a detailed history of Epos/Cardinal on Van’s forthcoming revival of the Supercade website (supercade.com)

Other Magic offerings during this time included Popper (licensed from Alway Electronics) and H.B.’s Olympics (designed by Century Electronics/Seatongrove). Throughout the first half of 1984, Magic and Eagle continued to work together, with Magic manufacturing games and Eagle often distributing them. By the time of Revenger, Eagle seems to have vanished, along with Frank Gaglione (who, it seems, had never been directly involved with Magic). Around the same time, Kevin McIntyre renamed Magic Conversions to Magic Electronics. With Eagle out of the picture, McIntyre established another company in Providence called Montgomery Vending to distribute his games. With that, it seems that Magic had broken its ties with its shady past and the company seems to have been on the up-and-up for the remainder of its short life. In the fall and winter of 1984, Magic released a number of new games but none of them saw much success in the arcades. By the end of the year, they had produced almost a dozen titles but only three (The Glob, Super Glob, and H.B.’s Olympics had seen any kind of success).

In 1985, that would change as Magic became one of the industry’s most successful conversion kit specialists. Following are the known games Magic produced from late 1984 on (in roughly chronological order)

 

Atlantic City Action– a 6-games-in-1 poker game.

Taxi Driver – just what it sounds like. Drive around a cab around a city and pick up passengers.

Bomb Jack – licensed(?) from Tehkan

Curve Ball – licensed(?) from Mylstar

8-Ball Action – a pool game designed for the bar/tavern market. Conversion kit for Donkey Kong/Donkey Kong Junior. Reached #6 on RePlaysoftware charts.

Driving Force – racing game released as a conversion kit for Pac-Man and marketed as an inexpensive substitute for Pole Position II. Reached #8 on RePlaysoftware charts.

Bull’s Eye Darts – a darts game marketed to bars and taverns. Licensed from Shinkai. Conversion kit for Centipede.

Porky – licensed from Shinkai. This one sounds like one Magic’s more interesting efforts. A pig drove around a city landscape avoiding potholes while shooting wolves with smoked sausages and dodging falling bombs and barbecue forks. For bonus points he could jump into the air to catch flying piglets.

Samurai (aka Samurai Nichon-ichi) – Side-scrolling martial arts beat-em-up licensed from Taito. Reached #18 on RePlay software charts and #11 in Play Meter.

Special Forces Kung-Fu Commando– Designed by Senko Industries. The player controlled a gung-ho super commando named Captain Action in a quest to fight off kidnappers and rescue hostages using commando tactics in one phase and hand-to-hand kung-fu in another. Conversion kit for Donkey Kong/DK Jr./Crazy Kong. Reached #6 in Play Meter.

Field Combat – appears to have been a kind of combination of Xevious and Commando in which the player piloted a UFO over a battlefield fighting off enemy foot soldiers.

Grobda– Sci-fi tank game licensed from Namco. “the great alien invasion of 1985 has ended…the evil Xevious empire has retreated to their native solar system pacmanus…[and] left behind advanced nuclear war tanks known as grobdas”

Wiz (aka The Wiz) – Another interesting-sounding game. I’ve never seen it before, but pieced together some info from various reviews and game descriptions. The player controlled a staff-wield wizard, collecting treasure chests and fighting off enemies like gremlins, snails, and skeletons with his magic powers. The wizard was also “…ever searching for elusive dragons” and avoiding falling into craters. One phase began in an ice-encrusted cavern. At one point the wizard was whisked away in a balloon.

Poseidon (aka Poseidon Sea Fighter) – not much info on this one.

Special Forces II (???)

Son of Phoenix (???)

Hex Pool – listed as “coming soon” in flyers produced in late 1985 but may never have been released.

Nun Chackun – ditto

Magic’s most interesting venture may have come at the 1985 AMOA convention when they tried to revive the “Moppet” game concept with a line of games designed for 3-8 year olds called “Child’s Play”. Magic was convinced that the problem with the Moppet games was that they had been too difficult for their target audience. Magic's games (Sailor Sam, Jumbo Pilot, and Race Ace) were much easier. For further appeal, the cabinets also dispensed "badges" (stickers) to every player. The Child’s Play games don’t appear to have fared any better than their predecessors and, with the Moppets, they stand as an obscure footnote to video game history.

 

          By the end of 1985, things seemed to be going well for Magic. Around November, it consolidated all of its operations into a new 25,000 square-foot facility in Providence. In 1986, however, things went rapidly downhill (or maybe they hadn’t been going so well in the first place). On May 14, Magic petitioned the courts for debtor protection and filed suit against a number of companies for licensing games to Magic that they had no right to. On May 23, Kevin McIntyre (who had reportedly been forced to sell his home) went before the Rhode Island Superior Court to get permission to sell off its assets. The court granted permission and on June 12, Bob Henry of Hi Tech Coin Distributors bought them all (including a number of unsold machines, parts, and equipment) for a paltry $1,000.

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[1] Rotheblog claims that Crazy Mazey was originally developed by Ron Meadows for the Apple II.

[2] The December, 1984 issue of RePlay says that the company was founded in “late 1982”. However, the December, 1983 issue of RePlay claimed it was a new company that had just entered the field. Given the timing of their games, the 1983 date seems more plausible.

BONUS PICTURES

Here a few undocumented games I found in the September, 1988 RePlay catalog issue

 

 

 

This one is documents, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless:

This one isn't a video game:

These are the games I found most interesting. They were developed by Axlon for the Sente SAC-I system. For those who don't know, Sente was a company founded by Nolan Bushnell that started producing video games in October, 1983 (after Bushnell's non-compete agreement with Atari expired). They planned to revolutionize the industry with a "system game" called SAC-I. They had plans for other systems, including SAC-II (a motion cabinet used for the barely released Shrike Avenger), SAC-III (originally a laserdisc system but it later went through a number of changed in concept - at one point it was a crane game with a robot arm), and others (IIRC there was a SAC-IV and SAC-V as well but I don't think they even got around to specifying what they were).

After Pizza Time Theatre got into trouble, Bushnell sold Sente to Bally. When WMS bought Bally in 1988, Sente (or at least its assets) was purchased by Bushnell's Axlon Inc. They announced plans to produce new games for the SAC-I system but I don't know if they ever did (I suspect they didn't).

 
Axlon produced some non-video games (and it looks like they actually made Frenzy, or at least a prototype)

 

 

More Bronze Age Video Game Popularity Charts

March 4, 2014, 4:05 pm

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Several months back, I posted what may have been the first coin-op video game popularity chart, from the March, 1976 issue of RePlay. Today, I thought I'd post some other charts from the 1970s

First, for those who missed the earlier post, here's the March, 1976 chart:

The next chart I have was published in RePlay's October , 1976 issue as part of its annual operators' poll.

Here's the chart from the November, 1977 issue of RePlay

Play Meter published its first chart in November, 1977 (also as part of its operators' poll):

The 1978 charts from RePlay and Play Meter

Finally, the 1979 charts. Note that by this time, Play Meter had started publishing its monthly charts (the first was in June 1979). RePlay would publish its first monthly chart in April, 1980.

If there is interest in these, I could post some from the 1980s (the 1980s charts had a lot more data. Some of the Play Meter  charts, for instance, included average weekly earnings per machine).

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 9

March 15, 2014, 9:22 pm

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Munch Mobile and Guzzler

 

            In 1983, Centuri continued to plumb the licensing market with a pair of games from Japan. Munch Mobile (SNK) was one of the 1980’s strangest driving games. The player controlled am anthropomorphic car with eyes and a long, rainbow-colored arm that it could use collect trash and money bags from the side of the road (it could also grab fish from the occasional river that appeared). In addition, the player had to avoid oncoming cars (usually by pulling off the one-lane road into one of the small pullouts located along the side of the road). Bonus points could be earned by depositing trash such as apple cores and fish bones in roadside garbage cans. Guzzler (Tehkan) was another Pac-Man variant featuring fire-based enemies like fireballs, flashes, and demons. Rather than energizer dots, the player slurped up water from puddles then vomited on his enemies to extinguish them (he more water the player had, the slower they moved). Water may not have been the only things guzzler was guzzling. Intermissions showed the character drunkenly gulping down bottles of liquor, bringing shame to his family. Released as a conversion kit, the game made it to #8 on RePlay’s software charts.

 

Aztarac

Aztarac (October)was Centuri’s sole entry into the color vector market and their last game designed in-house (or at least their last non-licensed game). In the game, the player defended a series of starbases from alien invaders. The most memorable feature was the round, bubble window in front of the monitor. Perhaps more interesting than the game is its designer - computer visionary Tim Stryker. Stryker graduated from Brown University in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in Physics. That same year, a friend and fellow student named Ken Wasserman bought a Commodore PET computer and when Stryker saw it, he ordered one for himself and the two began writing games in BASIC. Before long they were hooking their two computers together and began writing multiplayer games. Since BASIC was too slow for the task, they created their own language called RPL and used it to write a real-time combat game called Flash Attack that allowed two computers to be linked together via a cable. In late 1979, they penned an article about the game and sent it to Byte magazine. Meanwhile, they tried to find a publisher for Flash Attack but no one was interested (Scott Adams of Adventure International sent them a copy of TRS80 modem game Comm*Bat). Puzzled, they decided to sell the game themselves, formed a company called Mach 2 Software[1]in Danbury, CT, and convinced Byte to include a small ad alongside their article when it was published in the December, 1980 issue. After selling only a handful of copies of the game (and even less of their other titles) Stryker moved to Florida and continued to work on games, including his time working for Centuri.

Aztarac was a space combat game set in the year 4031. After a thousand years of peace, robot drones from beyond the Swan Nebula have launched an attack against the 12 Zodiac Starbases. The player controlled a “space tank” using a joystick to control the tank and a spinner to control the gun turret. The goal was to defend each of the starbases in turn from alien attack while collecting energy and power pods to increase the tank’s speed and firepower. While the game featured excellent graphics, including one of the best titles screens in golden age history, it proved another flop. While a number of sources (including the website centuri.net) claim that 500 cabinets were built, from the numbers in Centuri’s annual report, it looks like they may have made 200 or fewer.

After leaving Centuri[2], Tim Stryker served as a consultant for the Florida Solar Energy Center, G.E. and other companies. In 1985 he founded Galacticomm in Fort Lauderdale, FL, which released his most well-known creation, the seminal bulletin board software program MajorBBS (a version of Flash Attack was ported to MS-DOS that allowed users to play via modem). Stryker also began to pursue his goal of creating a society based on compassion and love. Disdaining traditional politics, Stryker began the Superdemocracy movement, an effort to allow citizens to vote and participate in the political process in cyberspace. In 1995 Stryker moved to Utah with his wife and four children. Stryker also suffered from clinical depression. In August of 1996, he pulled off a road in the Colorado hills and shot himself. He was 41.

             While Munch Mobile and Aztarac flopped and Guzzler did only marginally better, 1983 was not a repeat of 1982. This was due almost entirely to Centuri’s other licensing partner, Konami. But that will have to wait for part 10.

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[1] While a number of sources, including Wikipedia, refer to the company as “Mach 1” software, the 1980 Byte magazine by Stryker and Wasserman and an interview with Wasserman refer to it as “Mach 2.

[2] It is unclear if Stryker ever actually worked for Centuri or if he did contract work.

BONUS SECTION

In an earlier post, I mentioned Centuri's connection with Leisure Time Electronics. Here's a newspaper ad for one of Leisure Time's scams, from January 12, 1981

A few more undocumented games:

Demon Castle (from Play Meter, 9/1/83)

Two games from Diversified Entertainment (from Replay, March 1976)

 

 

 

 

 

An ad for an Asteroids kit that I found interesting (from Play Meter, 1/15/81)

 

 



From Play Meter, 5/15/82

 



First part of a review of the game from the January 1982 Replay

Another CGI ad from 10/1/81 Play Meter

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 10

March 22, 2014, 10:01 am

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 Today's post is the final part of my history of Allied Leisure/Centuri

 

            In 1983, Centuri’s licensing arrangement with Konami began to bear fruit in a major way. In prior years, Konami’s games were primarily known to U.S. gamers via the licensed versions produced by Stern, including Astro Invaders, Scramble, Super Coba, Tutankham, Amidar, and others. Centuri’s first Konami-licensed game, Loco-Motion, had not been a major success. That would change in 1983 when the two companies teamed up to produce a string of hits that are among the most well-remembered games of the mid-80s. As part of the deal, Centuri usually produced the dedicated version of the games while Konami released the conversion kit.

Time Pilot

 

Centuri’s second Konami license would feature much more traditional gameplay, and prove to be one of its biggest hits - the free-form air combat game Time Pilot. The concept was fairly straightforward. The player piloted a plane through give different eras, each with its own distinctive enemies: 1910 (biplanes), 1940 (fighters and bombers), 1970 (helicopters), 1982[1] (jets), and 2001 (UFOs). Each era also featured a boss “mother ship” that appeared after a specific number of enemies were destroyed (a blimp, a B-25, a CH-47 helicopter, a B-52). The player could also fly over parachutists for bonus points.

Time Pilot was designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, who would go on to become one of the most prolific game designers in Japanese gaming history, working on games like Street Fighter II. Like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Okamoto started out as a graphic artist. When he took the job, in fact, Okamoto didn’t even know that Konami made video games, and certainly had no desire to work on them. Instead, he chose to work there for a much more practical reason.

[Yoshiki Okamoto] The truth is my wife at the time had something to do with it. I got a job after graduating from school, and the place where I had to work was far away from where…she lived. She told me that it was too far away and that we should break it all off. I didn’t want to do this, so I looked for another job close to where she was living, and it just happened to be a game company.

<http://spong.com/feature/10109663/Interview-Folklore-Yoshiki-Okamoto>

If Okamoto took the job to save his marriage, it didn’t work. He and his wife were divorced shortly after he arrived. In addition to his design skills, Okamoto was known for his zany sense of humor. He always loved a good prank and wasn’t above pulling a fellow employee’s pants down in the street. When he later moved to Capcom, he pulled a more original prank. When a coworker fell asleep during a meeting, Okamoto pulled down the shades, turned off the lights, ushered everyone out of the room, and set the clock to 3 A.M. At Konami, Okamoto started off doing art for posters and flyers used to advertise Konami’s game. He then moved on to designing characters before he was finally asked to design a game of his own (he suspects that this was why Konami had hired him in the first place). Konami wanted him to design a driving game in which a player had to earn their driver’s license by navigating through roads and traffic. Okamoto didn’t want to design a game at all, but if he did, he wanted to create a game that someone like him, a non-video game fan, would want to play. He asked to be allowed to design a flying game based on Namco’s Bosconian. When his boss refused, Okamoto created the game anyway, surreptitiously slipping his code to a data-entry person while showing his boss the “progress” he was making on the driving game he was supposed to be working on. Perhaps Okamoto’s boss should have listened to him. Okamoto’s flying game, Time Pilot, went to be one of the company’s biggest hits, reaching #1 on Play Meter’s charts. Konami also released a sequel to the game, Time Pilot ’84, as a conversion kit for the original (though a few hundred dedicated cabinets were made) and scored another #1 Play Meter hit.

Gyruss

           

While Time Pilot was a hit, Yoshiki Okamoto didn’t get a chance to bask in its success. After refusing to let him work on the game, Okamoto’s pass pulled a “Larry Tate” (Darren’s boss on Bewitched), claiming he’d like the idea all along and taking credit for the game himself. Despite Time Pilot’s success, Okamoto still didn’t want to make video games. 

[Yoshiki Okamoto] "I don't want to make games," I told them, "but fine, I will make another one. But after that I want to make a poster." I mean, I was hired as an illustrator, and that's what I was hoping I could do there. So they said I could work on a poster when the game [Gyruss] was finished.

<1up.com/features/republic-yoshiki-okamoto-interview>

In addition to promising to allow Okamoto to return to poste work, Konami also gave him carte blanche to create whatever kind of game he wanted. Despite his reluctance, Okamoto came up with another winner - the classic shoot-em-up Gyruss, a game that has often been described as a combination of Galaga and Tempest. The description is accurate (though it’s more of the former than the latter). The player controlled a ship that moved in a circle around the edge of the screen, firing at a host of enemies that moved outward from the center. The goal was to fight your way through a series of planets: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and finally Earth. Each planet featured a number of “warps” (levels) that had to be completed before reaching the planet. There were “2 warps to Neptune” and 3 to the remaining planets. After reaching each planet, the player faced a “chance stage” that was essentially the same as the “challenge stage” in Galaga. Other similarities to the Namco/Midway classic included enemies that flew into formation from off-screen and bonus enemies that appeared in groups of three. Similarities aside, the game was a classic. The pulse-pounding gameplay was supplemented by a driving, rock version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Gyruss provided Centuri with another hit, but due to the decline in the video game industry, it didn't sell as well as Time Pilot. Despite this, Osaka left the company shortly after the game was released. There are varying accounts as to why. In an interview with VideoGameSpot, Okamoto claimed that he asked the company for a raise, vowing to quit if they didn’t meet his demands. The next day, he said, they fired him. In his 1Up interview, however, he tells a different story, claiming that he left because Konami broke their promise to let him go back to designing posters.

[Yoshiki Okamoto] But after it [Gyruss] was done, they didn't keep their promise. They wanted me to continue to make more games. That's when I quit working at Konami.
<1up.com/features/republic-yoshiki-okamoto-interview>

 After leaving Konami, Okamoto moved to Capcom where he designed the classic shooter 1942.   

Track and Field/Hyper Olympic

 

            Meanwhile, the industry downturn had begun in earnest and many were pinning their hopes on laserdisc games to pull the industry out of its doldrums. The 1983 AMOA show was jam-packed with laserdisc games, including Konami’s own Badlands (more on that one later). To the surprise of the industry, however, the hit game of the show turned out not to be a laserdisc game, but another Konami offering – the sports-themed Track & Field. The game was known as Hyper Olympic in Japan (Centuri supposedly changed the name because Atari owned exclusive rights to use the word "Olympics" in a video game in the U.S.)  According to RePlay magazine[2], the idea for the game had come from Centuri president Arnold Kaminkow during a January dinner meeting. With the Olympics approaching, Kaminkow suggested that Konami create a sports-themed a game that put the player in the role of an Olympic athlete.

            That’s just what Konami did. The game featured six Olympic events: 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, 110-meter hurdles, hammer throw, and high jump. Controls consisted of a pair of “run” buttons and a “jump/throw” button that controlled the timing and angle of jumps and throws. The player had to qualify in each event to move on to the next. While the game featured a score, it also tracked the top three “world record” times or distances for each event.  Each event had an Easter egg that could earn a 1,000-point bonus (throw a javelin at maximum angle, for example, and you spear a bird). What most people remember about the game is its adrenaline-pumping action. Track & Field was a real button-pounder. To build up speed (as most events required), the player had to alternately pound (and pound, and pound…) the run buttons as fast as was humanly possible. Top players had a variety of techniques to accomplish this exhausting task. Some used the "double tap", hitting the buttons alternately with their index and middle fingers. Others placed a pencil across the two buttons, over one finger and under another creating a kind of see-saw that they could hammer rapidly on one end. In the documentary Chasing Ghosts, two players reveal an ingenious method that involved the use of disassembled electric knife. While Centuri had a major hit in the U.S. with the game, Konami did even better. By January of 1984 they had sold 38,000 Hyper Olympic boards in Japan[3].

Hyper Sports/Hyper Olympic ’84, Circus Charlie, and Mikie
 

            Konami followed up Track & Field/Hyper Olympic with Hyper Sports (Hyper Olympic ’84 in Japan). While it used the same basic concept as Track & Field, Hyper Sports featured a much more eclectic lineup of events, some of which relied on timing rather than button-mashing: 100m freestyle swimming, skeet shooting, long horse (vaulting), archery, triple jump, weight lifting, and pole vault. A less successful (though still fun) variant on the Track & Field theme was 1984’s Circus Charlie, which replaced the track and field events with circus-themed competitions: fire rings (jump through flaming hoops riding a lion), tightrope (jump over monkeys while walking a tightrope), ball walk (hop from one rolling ball to the next), horseback (leap from a moving horse to a springboard and back to the horse), trampoline (bounce across a series of trampolines while avoiding jugglers and fire-breathers), and flying trapeze. 

            The final Centuri/Konami game was Mikie (aka Mikie: High School Graffiti). The player took the role of an “average high school boy” named Mike who moved through a school collecting messages (hearts) from his girlfriend. Action started in home room class, where Mikie had to bump his classmates out of their chairs with his butt while avoiding, or head-butting, the teacher, all to a bouncy version of “A Hard Day’s Night”. The action then moved to a locker room, where Mikie had to head-butt open lockers to collect more hearts. In the cafeteria, Mikie had to avoid pies tossed by angry cooks. Mikie finally found his true love in the girls’ gym class where the gym teacher was none too pleased by his intrusion. Finally, hand-in-hand, the two lovers made their way through the courtyard to Mikie’s car while avoiding football players. While Mikie was a (very) minor hit, by the time of its release, Centuri was on its last legs and much of their inventory of boards ended up being sold off to other companies.

Centuri 1983 and 1984

             Thanks in part to their profitable relationship with Konami, Centuri rebounded in 1983. Revenues for the year were $141.8 million and the company turned a profit of $2.6 million. While over 2/3 of revenues came from Outdoor Sports, video games accounted for 40% of net income and 93% of operating income. Of the $32.5 million in revenue generated by video games, 72.3% came from just two games: Gyruss and Track & Field (and the latter was still going strong at the end of the year). The company even won in the courts. In October, the company won a $5.25 million settlement from Atari in a case involving the 1982 licensing deal they had struck with the company.

                 Once again it seemed that Centuri had turned a corner. And once again, it didn’t last. 1984 revenues were $124.8 million, but the company lost $2.2 million. While Track & Field and Hypersports did well (accounting for 87% of video game revenues), the video games division lost $3 million – more than the company overall (the other divisions were profitable). By fall, with their long and lucrative relationship with Konami coming to an end, things looked bleak. At the 1984 AMOA convention Centuri dropped a bombshell when they announced their new "Direct Connections" marketing program – an attempt to sell directly to operators, bypassing the distributor. The announcement was the talk of the show and drew heated commentary pro and con. Some distributors were outraged. Others didn't like the move but understood why Centuri felt they had do it. Still others felt it was a desperation move by a company on its last legs trying to unload its inventory before they went under. In an interview in the December 31, 1984 issue of Play Meter, Centuri president Arnold Kaminkow denied this, claiming that the idea had come up in February and the decision to go ahead with it had been made in July. In Kaminkow's view, the distributor just didn't fit into the video game picture anymore – especially with the rise of conversion kits and system games. Operators and location owners didn't need a middle man. Service could be handled via UPS or over the phone (unlike pinball games and jukeboxes). Kaminkow also pointed out that direct sales were more the norm in Europe and Japan.

In any event, distributors didn’t have long to stew on their outrage. In December (just as Kaminkow's interview war appearing in operator mailboxes) Centuri’s board of directors voted to discontinue the video games division entirely. The company's video game assets were snapped up by other companies. Wico, the joystick and control manufacturer, got the customer service stock and some complete games. Jon Daugherty of United Artists Theater Amusements got the 50 remaining Badlands (with plans to put them in theater lobbies). The rest of the stock - 540 Mikie boards plus around 700 older kits - went to Video Ware, Inc., a company founded by John Hibbs that billed itself as "America's largest PC board dealer".

By the time of the decision, Centuri was already on its way out of the coin-op biz. Outdoor Sports Headquarters was the company’s leading revenue generator and they had begun expanding into other areas as well. In 1981 they had invested in a contract electronics firm called IEC. In 1984, they purchased the Virginia Capes Seafood Company and in 1985 they acquired Poloron Homes of Pennsylvania Inc. – a manufacturer of modular housing[4].These new investments would take Centuri into the 1990s, by which time video games were a distant memory.

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[1] 1983 in the Centuri version, as it was released in 1983 in the U.S.

[2]RePlay, December, 1983

[3]RePlay, January, 1984.

[4] They also owned a boat repair company, but that was sold off in 1984.


BONUS PICTURES

Here are two pictures of Allied's facilities in 1974 (sorry for the poor quality)

A photo of the wives of Atari executives, ca November, 1976

Speaking of Konami, here's a picture of the Mega Zone kit, produced by Konami and Interlogic.

Finally, some more undocumented games

 

 

 

 

Hologram Time Traveler - The Revolution That Wasn't

March 28, 2014, 10:40 pm

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At the September, 1982 JAA show in Japan, Sega had had introduced Astron Belt, often cited at the first laserdisc game (though Electro-Sport’s Quarter Horse had actually preceded it). The game’s actual release, however, didn’t occur until late 1983 allowing Cinematronics to beat them to market with the Rick Dyer-designed Dragon’s Lair. Laserdisc games ultimately proved not to be the savior of the industry that many predicted (or at least hoped) they would be, but they were an interesting side note to video game history that made use of an innovative new technology.

            At the ACME show in March 1991, Sega would try again with another new technology – holography – when they introduced Time Traveler, billed as the first game to make use of hologram technology (it also used a laserdisc). Sega coin-op president Tom Petit called the game the “most radical departure in coin-op technology in 15 years” and said the game represented an entirely new class of machine “as different from conventional video games as pinball and redemption”. And this time, Sega knew that Rick Dyer wouldn’t beat them to market since he designed the game. Dyer was, if anything, more enthusiastic than Petit, predicting that the game would spark a degree of interest not seen since Pac-Man. As with the laserdisc game, however, the “hologame” (as Sega called it) failed to take the industry by storm – and for many of the same reasons. But before discussing the details, let’s take a quick look back.

A (Very) Brief History of Coin-Op Holography

Holography was nothing new in the coin-op world. It had been tried before, but had never really caught on (despite being proclaimed a key technology in the future of the industry since at least the early 80s). Perhaps the first holographic coin-op game was Kasco’s Gun Smoke, a western-themed gun game with a “holographic” target that debuted in late 1975 (though the game actually used a non-laser “hologram” rather than a true hologram – which involves shining a laser through special film or other recording media). The game was licensed to Taito America for U.S. distribution, who showed it at the 1975 MOA show. While the unit was a hit in Japan (reportedly selling 6,000 units), it flopped in the U.S. (with just 750 sold). Nonetheless, Kasco followed up with Samurai and Bank Robber (the latter, which used 8 different “holograms”, was shown at the ATE in London in January, 1977)

            Around July of 1976 came another holographic gun game – Midway’s Top Gun (which used a true laser “drum” hologram). Once again, however, the unit failed to sell. Some sources claim that artist Peter Claudius created the first X-rated holographic game in the 1970s (they may be referring to the erotic holograms created by Claudius shown at the New York Museum of Holography in 1978). At the 1977 IAAPA show, a Dallas-based company called Bacchus Games showed a machine called Morganain which a holographic, floating face dispensed fortunes.

 

 

            What about video games? While a number of companies looked into the technology in the late '70s and early '80s, none were able to release a game (at least not an arcade game), and it is not certain if they even developed one. In 1978, Meadows Games was purchased by Holosonics, a Washington-based company that had bought up 90% of the patents in the field of holography. Not long after the deal, Meadows announced plans to produce a holographic video game, which was slated for release in early 1979, but Holosonics went bankrupt, Meadows Games folded, and the game was never produced. After producing the 3D game Dark Planet, Stern was reportedly at work on a holographic game, but it too was never released an no other information on it has ever surfaced. On the consumer front, of course, Atari produced Cosmos – a console that made use of holographic technology, but neither Atari nor anyone else is known to have produced a holographic coin-op video game. About the closest thing came in 1980 when a company called Lazeworld (founded by John Foy) produced a holographic overlay for Asteroids that produced multi-colored special effects when an enemy was destroyed (Foy also produced “pinball glasses” – a pair of glasses with holographic lenses that a player was supposed to wear while playing pinball to enhance the experience).  

The Creation of Time Traveler

It would be 1991 before a holographic game finally made its way into arcades. The genesis of the game came when Rick Dyer read a story in the February, 1990 issue of RePlay about a product called the Del Vision Micro-Theater that created 3D “holographic” images. The Del Vision was made by company in Chatsworth, California called With Design In Mind , though the technology had actually been invented (and patented) in Japan by Dentsu, Inc. – an advertising and PR firm that had been founded in 1906 and had produced the first newspaper ads and TV commercials in Japan. Dentsu used its holographic technology for advertising and point-of-purchase displays. It licensed the technology to With Design In Mind, who used it to create the Del Vision Micro-Theater (invented by Steve Zuloff and Barry Benjamin). The Micro-Theater debuted at the 1990 winter CES, where it wowed the audience with a demo that included multi-colored fish and jellyfish floating in space and a tiny ballerina that seemed to dance across a glass surface (RePlay said that the product “could almost be called the hit of the show”).

 

At the time, Dyer was working for a company called Allen Design in Carlsbad, California. After reading the article, he immediately contacted With Design In Mind and within a week, had inked a deal with the company (Capcom and Leland also tried to license the technology for use in video games, but Dyer beat them to the punch). Allen Design and With Design In Mind formed a partnership called Hologram Ventures and began designing a video game using the Micro-Theater technology. In truth, the Micro-Theater (and Time Traveller) did not use true hologram technology. Instead, it used a parabolic mirror shaped like a quarter sphere to project an image from a video monitor into space.

 

 

Unlike a true laser-based hologram (which allowed viewers to see an image from different perspectives as they walked around it), the mirror technique produced the same perspective from every viewing angle. One issue that Dyer’s team had to solve was the mirror, which, according to Dyer, had cost $7,600 per unit when used in Japan (a prohibitive cost for an arcade video game). To solve the problem, Dyer subcontracted the creation of the mirror to an aviation firm that made canopies for fighter jet cockpits who was able to produce the mirror at a much lower cost. Nevertheless, development of the game was still expensive. Dyer’s team worked 24-hour shifts for the last 10 months to get the game ready for the ACME show (Dyer claimed it was one of the biggest R&D commitments in the history of the industry). Meanwhile, in late 1990, Sega had signed on as a partner to manufacture and promote the game. While Time Traveler used a laserdisc to store the game’s footage, unlike Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, the game used live action rather than animation. 1,000 actors auditioned or the game’s 36 speaking parts. Actor and professional Hollywood stunt coordinator Steve Wilbur landed the role of the game’s hero Marshal Gram. Las Vegas aerobics instructor LeAnn McVicker played Princess Kyia-La and Robert Mannigan (a struggling actor who was producing a cable access show in San Diego) was cast as the game’s villain Vulcor. Filming in San Diego, a crew of about five people headed by producer director Mark E. Watson, created about 30 minutes of footage for use in the game, complete with full digital soundtrack.

 

Time Traveler  on display at the ACME show in 1991

 

 

The Game

In the game, Kyia-La, Princess of the Galactic Federation, travels back in time from the 26^th century to the wild west to recruit the hero Marshal Gram (a sutble pun on “hologram”) to track down the renegade scientist Vulcor, who has “disrupted the time continuum of the universe”. To stop the dastardly Vulcor, Gram has to travel through 12 different eras of time (though from YouTube videos, there appear to be only 7), from 50,000 BC to 2552, squaring off against a host of enemies including ninjas, knights, cavemen, punk rockers, archers, the devil, and a 300-pound Amazon queen (played by actor Kevin Mein in drag). The action consisted of a series of short segments in which the Marshal used a joystick and buttons to either outdraw his enemies, or duck and jump to avoid their deadly weapons. To aid him on his quest, Gram had a limited supply of “time reversal cubes”, which would turn back the hands of time after the Marshal’s untimely death to give him a second chance (additional cubes could be purchased from a sultry female "trader" by inserting more quarters). While the game may sound interesting, generated a lot of buzz, and met with initial success (grossing a reported $18 million), it ultimately failed to deliver on its promise and disappeared even more quickly than Dragons's Lair and Space Ace. Part of the problem was its insane level of difficulty, which frustrated a number of players. A bigger issue, however, was that many felt the game itself just wasn’t very good. Like Dragon’s Lair and the other laser disc games of the 1980s, it was little more than a reaction meter/memory test in which the player merely had to learn the correct sequence of moves and then repeat them. Likely in an effort to alleviate this problem, the game chose randomly from five different scenes per era and also included a few additional elements (like a scene in which the player gambled with the devil for his life) but the basic gameplay was sparse. The various scenes largely consisted of an enemy or two running in from the left or right to attack the Marshal, who then had to shoot them (sometimes jumping or ducking a few times first). Most were less that 30 seconds in length. Once the novelty wore off, there wasn't much of a game left. In addition, the game was soon overshadowed by the genre-defining megahit Street Fighter II, which debuted around the same time. In an attempt to cash in on the fighting game craze, Sega produced a follow-up to Time Traveler called Holosseum in 1992 that combined a fighting game with hologram technology but it lacked real interactivity and fared even worse than Time Traveler and holographic arcade games died an even quicker death than laserdisc games had. Nonetheless, Time Traveler stands as a fascinating sidebar in video game history.