The Coin-Op Amusement Industry Year-By-Year: 1978

April 12, 2014, 12:27 pm

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I haven't done one of these in a while. This time, I'm only going to do a single year because I consider 1978 to be the last year of the "Bronze Age" (1979 was kind of a transition year).

1978

RePlay’s annual review said of 1978 "Video games…disappointed this past year. Unfortunately, they were off in both sales and route collections in all parts of the country. It was probably the most disappointing year in the history of this college-bred phenomenon of the coin industry." They also noted that the year was "less than a banner year" for the coin-op industry in general (outside of pinball and foosball). The main issues were over saturation and poor quality control. Video games did increase their collections for the third straight year, but at a much slower rate than previously. The European market for American video games was actually stronger than the domestic one. In RePlay's fall poll, 47% of operators said they planned on purchasing fewer upright video games versus just 28% who planned to buy more. For cocktail video games, which had been stung by the appearance of the "blue sky" operators, things were even worse with just 3% saying they planned to buy more versus 90% who planned to buy fewer. The variety of new video games continued to increase in 1978. After wowing at the 1977 AMOA show, Cinematronics'Space Wars went on to become the biggest hit of the year, topping both the Replay and Play Meter charts. This marked the first time a game not made by Atari or Midway was ranked #1. Indeed no non-Midway, non-Atari game managed to rank in the 6 in any of the four previous polls conducted by the two magazines. Space Wars also introduced the vector display to the industry.

Pinball and Other Coin-Op Games

The big news in the industry continued to be the rise of pinball and especially solid state games. Replay noted that "Pinball is 'all the rage' in virtually every type of location. It's even beating out 'King pool table' in bars as the top coin-grabber in this year's poll ... a hard thing to believe…" Another issue declared that "Flipper games are the darling of the business right now." According to Play Meter average weekly collections from pinball games rose from $44 in 1977 to $62 in 1978. Replay reported in 1985 that 53% of income in street locations in 1978 and 42% of arcade income came from pinball. Bally introduced seven different pinball machines during the year that sold more than 10,000 copies, led by Playboy with 18,250 (though it wasn't released until December) and Mata Hari with 16,260. Outside of pinball and video games, Williams released its first solid state shuffle alley Topaz. Arachnid debuted English Mark Darts (which would eventually spark the electronic darts revolution). The AMOA allowed gambling games on the convention floor for the first time and distributors started to handle more than one brand of jukeboxes, breaking a long tradition.

Statistics:

# of Different Video Games Released: ca 110

Top Games

Replay: 1. Space Wars (Cinematronics), 2. Sprint 2 (Atari), 3. Sprint (Atari), 4. Sea Wolf (Midway), 5. Breakout (Atari), 6. Super Bug (Atari), 7. Starship 1 (Atari), 8. Sea Wolf II (Midway), 9. Smokey Joe (Atari), 10. LeMans (Atari)

Play Meter: 1. Space Wars, 2. Sprint 2,3. Sea Wolf, 4. Sea Wolf II, 5. Super Bug6. Starship 1 (Atari), 7. Circus (Exidy), 8. Breakout, 9. Night Driver (Atari), 10. Sprint 1 (Atari)

Significant Firsts:
First Cockpit Game: Star Fire (Exidy)
First Game To Record High Scores and Initials of Top Players: Star Fire (Exidy)

Top machine types, average weekly earnings:

Replay: Pins $51.50, Pool Tables $44.25, Upright Video Games $43.75
Play Meter: Pinball $62, Pool Tables $53, Jukeboxes $52, Video Games $50
Vending Times (no figures for jukeboxes): Pinball $48, Pool Tables $41, Video Games $36

Total coin-op collections
Vending Times: $2.2 billion (does not include jukeboxes)

% of collections by game type (RePlay)

Street locations: flippers 53%, pool tables 18%, TV games 17%

Arcades: flippers 42%, TV games 31%, group games 12%

# of machines on location (in thousands):
Vending Times (no figures for jukeboxes): Pinball (573), Pool Tables (184.9), Video Games (164.6)
Play Meter: Pinball (737.6), Arcade Games [includes video games] (469.4), Jukeboxes (447), Pool Tables (268.2)

Total dollar volume of collections, by machine type (in millions):

Vending Times: Pinball $1,430, Pool Tables $394, Video Games $308

% of total equipment, by type (Play Meter)
Pinball: 33%, Arcade/Video: 21%Phonographs: 20%

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

Pinball: 21, Video Games: 12, Phonographs: 5, Foosball: 5

Preferred Video Game Manufacturer (Play Meter)
Atari 69%, Bally/Midway 27%, Exidy 1%, Others 3%

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 from the bottom of the screen to the top, 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.

[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.”

↧

More Replay and Play Meter Charts

April 24, 2014, 8:06 pm

≫ Next: The Town that Sent Pac-Man Packing

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

Earlier, I posted some RePlay and Play Meter operator polls from the 1970s. Today, I'm posting some charts from the 1980s. These charts contain a lot more information and some may find them more interesting.

First, here's a chart from the July, 1982 issue of RePlay. Note that the Cocktail Videos charts didn't last very long.

Here's one from October, 1984. Very similar to the above except that the Cocktail chart is gone and they've added a "software" chart (i.e. conversion kits and system games).

Play Meter had a greater variety of formats. Here's one from the May 1, 1982 issue. I find this format interesting because it included actual weekly earnings figures (a practice they stopped after a year or so due to complaints that people might use the information to demand higher taxes/fees from operators etc.)

The next one is from the November 15, 1983 issue:

Finally, here's one from August 15, 1984, when they had six separate video game charts:

↧

The Town that Sent Pac-Man Packing

May 3, 2014, 11:29 am

≫ Next: What Were the First Ten Coin-Op Video Games?

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Since the town of Marshfield, MA recently overturned its famous ban on video games

http://mashable.com/2014/05/02/coin-op-ban-repealled/

I thought I’d do a quick post on the original ban.

This may be a bit dry for some of you, with its emphasis on the legal issues, but if there is interest, I could also do a post on Mesquite.

Any gamer who grew up in the “golden age” of the 1980s likely remembers the furor over video games, and especially video game arcades that flared up mid-decade. The “controversy” (which turned out to be something of a tempest-in-a-teapot) spilled over into the national media with stories appearing on the evening news, the Phil Donahue show and others. A number of localities placed restrictions of the games or (rarely) banned them outright. Of these, the two most infamous were Marshfield, Massachusetts and Mesquite, Texas. The cases were tracked avidly by the video game industry and both were appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

Marshfield, MA

In 1981, Marshfield, Massachusetts was a sleepy seaside resort town of about 11,000 people on the state's South Shore southeast of Boston. During the summer, people would flock to the town to lounge on the beach, fish, or grab a meal at the Green Harbor Lobster Pound. Like almost every other town in the 1980s, Marshfield also had video games – about 60 to 70 of them[1]. Construction workers would stop by Sea Side Grocery in the mornings for coffee and a game. Out of town businessmen would spend their lunch hour zapping aliens at the Marshfield Sports Center. Kids would play a round of Pac-Man after an evening of skating or roller hockey at the Marshfield Family Skateland, which had started back in 1952 as the Marshfield Roll-a-Rink. Not everyone in Marshfield found the games so amusing, however. As the permanent population swelled, concern about video games mounted. The city's rise to infamy began in November of 1981 when the town's counsel informed the Board of Selectmen that the commercial use of coin-op amusement devices was a violation of an existing town zoning bylaw that had been enacted in 1972. In response, the city stopped issuing new licenses for the devices until a new ordinance could be written. At a town meeting on June 15, 1982, the Board of Selectmen proposed a new law that would allow the "accessory use" of up to 4 coin-op machines in eating and drinking establishments and established an annual licensing fee of $100 per machine. The law, however, did not sit well with some – including Thomas R. Jackson, a former narcotics officer and head of the town's vandalism committee. Jackson believed that "the proliferation of these games in town has created a honky-tonk atmosphere" and that for some the games were the first step on the road to compulsive gambling[2]. If that weren't enough, Jackson also claimed that people in the video game business "are all hoods", that the leading proponent of easing the restrictions had been arrested in a recent drug raid, that 89% of games were violent and "designed to be addictive", and that there had been 9 documented deaths due to violence in arcades in 1982[3]. Rather than easing restrictions on games, Jackson proposed banning them outright, including pinball and other coin-op games. Jackson's proposal passed 191-19 and became "General Bylaw 48", which banned all "automatic amusement device(s) whether coin-op or not, except for private in-home use, coin-operated jukeboxes, pool, billiards, bowling, and athletic training devices." Violators would be fined $200 per offense. Some were quite happy with the new law. Resident Jim Judge later opined that "…the fewer distractions of that type, the easier it is to transfer my ideas and values to my youngster", while his wife Betsy noted that ''If we have these things in the town, it draws the wrong type of people and we want to protect our town'[4].

After the meeting, the new Bylaw was submitted to the state Attorney General for approval. Before the AG could rule on the issue, the town Building Inspector sent violation notices to all business owner who had a coin-op game ordering them to stop using them. Nine merchants[5]refused and in August, the Building Inspector initiated court proceedings against them. On September 30^th, the Attorney General upheld the new bylaw and the Chief of Police told the merchants they had three months to get rid of their game before he had them seized. Outraged, the nine merchants hired a lawyer and filed a civil suit in the state Superior Court on October 6 claiming that Bylaw 48 violated the state and federal constitutions. They also applied for a restraining order preventing the removal of the games. When the application was denied, they filed for a petition of relief with a single justice of the Appeals Court. Meanwhile, the Superior Court dealt the merchants another blow when ruled in favor of the town.

The single justice, however, said that the trial court was not the proper place to address the constitutional issues that had been raised and ordered the parties to seek a speedy hearing in the Superior Court. To make their case, the merchants had relied on three things. One was the 1982 case Turnpike Amusements Vs. City of Cambridge, which said a licensing board couldn't arbitrarily make a determination. on whether coin-op devices could be operated but had to judge each location individually. Another was the fact that the bylaw would include items clearly protected by first amendment (such as coin-op peep shows). The most important, however, may have been a nine-minute videotape that the merchants’ lawyers showed featuring footage of five different video games (Ms. Pac-Man, Tron, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, and Kangaroo) and also showing what went into the making of a video game. Like many of those who had supported the bylaw, the justice had never seen a video game before and the videotape convinced him that there was a potential First Amendment issue in the case.

Whatever hope the justice’s decision may have granted the merchants was dashed on June 13, 1983 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court once again ruled in favor of Marshfield. This Superior Court judge wasn’t nearly as impressed by the video tapes as the justice had been, denying that video games had "sufficient communicative expressive elements" to merit protection under the First Amendment and declaring that they were “in essence, only technologically advanced pinball machines.” The court also rejected claims that the bylaw violated equal protection, noting that the right to pursue one’s business had never been considered a protected right meriting “strict scrutiny” and thus had to be judged by the less stringent “rational basis” test. Under this standard, the court found that the city had a legitimate interest in controlling the crowds and noise that video games might cause during the busy summer months. While the court agreed that a less-restrictive law (i.e. one banning games only during the summer) might have been more efficient, they could not declare a statute unconstitutional just because the means to achieve its purpose were “…rough, illogical, or not the best available.”, noting further that “legislative bodies are not required to convince the courts of the correctness of their legislative judgments.” The one novel claim in the case, that the law was overbroad, was also rejected. While Marshfield had lost the battle, however, there were hints that video games would ultimately win the war. The most significant thing to come out of the decision may have been the court’s acknowledgment that in the future, video games might advance to the point where they contained sufficient communicative and expressive elements to warrant First Amendment protection (Ira Zaleznik, lawyer for the plaintiff later opined that laser disc games might represent just such a case).

That was in the future, however. For the present, Marshfield had lost yet again. The ruling came as a relief to Marshfield attorney Robert Marzelli, who had warned that a victory for the video game industry "would create the right to play trivial arcade games as one of the cornerstone freedoms of our society. Such a decision would not only degrade the First Amendment; it would surely start a torrent of litigation on the question of which kinds of automatic amusement games were protected, which were not, and the nature of the protection accorded to each." The merchants, however, had one last chance. They appealed their case to the Supreme Court. On July 12, 1983 the merchants got another reprieve when Supreme Court justice William Brennan issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the removal of the games until the court weighed in on the issue. It turned out to be just a tease, however. On November 28, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 (with only Brennan and Byron “Whizzer” White in dissent) not to review the state Supreme Court’s decision. It was the end of the line. The merchants had lost and all the video games in Marshfield were carted off in trucks in December. Marshfield Family Skateland was converted into a restaurant. The Marshfield Sports Center went out of business The Marshfield saga was over.

But it wasn’t. Over the years, as other communities eliminated restrictions on video games, Marshfield remained steadfast. The town even achieved a kind of notoriety as the only town on earth where video games were illegal. In April, 2011 the town made national headlines again when they once again voted to repeal the ban. The measure was defeated 655-544. Finally, in April, 2014 Marshfield voted 203-175 to overturn the now 32-year-old bylaw. By then, however, coin-op video games were as rare as dodo birds (at least in the eyes of the press) and the story generated little interest.

[1] Various sources have given different figures for the number of games in town. The 60-70 figure appeared in a newspaper article as well as a Play Meterarticle. A later Play Meter article gave a figure of 70 while other articles in Play Meter and RePlay gave figures of 35, 53, and 200.

[2]Boston Herald, June 17, 1982

[3]Play Meter, August 1, 1983

[4] Clara Germani, "The parents of Marshfield win their battle to ban video games", Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 1983.

[5] Marshfield Family Skateland, Marshfield Sports Center, Sea Side Grocery, two other stores, a restaurant, and three taverns.

↧

What Were the First Ten Coin-Op Video Games?

May 17, 2014, 7:50 pm

≫ Next: The (Pre) Hisory of Night Driver - Part 1

≪ Previous: The Town that Sent Pac-Man Packing

Way back when I started this blog, one of the first articles I thought about writing was on the first ten coin-op video games to be released. Unfortunately, back then, I didn’t have enough information to write a definitive article, since the sources I had at the time were too late. Play Meter didn’t publish its first issue until December of 1974 and RePlay didn’t start until October, 1975. Cash Box and Vending Times were covering the coin-op industry in 1972 and 1973, but I didn’t have access to those issues. My library has a nice long run of Vending Times but it doesn’t start until February of 1974 and I didn’t have any access to Cash Box at all.

Since then, things have gotten better. I haven’t been able to look at the late 1972 and 1973 issues of Vending Times but I know someone who used to be an editor there and he was kind enough to make a trip to their New York offices and look through the issues for me. Then I found another library that had a run of Cash Box starting in July, 1973. The bad news was that it was 500 miles away in El Paso. On the other hand, El Paso was one of few Texas cities I hadn’t been to yet so I planned one of my annual road trips around El Paso and included a stop at UTEP to peruse their issues. I was also able to purchase a number of the earlier issues from E-Bay. More recently, I’ve been buying early issues of Marketplace, an industry newsletter published by Bill Gersh (who also published Cash Box (NOTE that Billboard had basically stopped covering the coin-op amusement industry – other than jukeboxes – by 1972).

Unfortunately (again), despite all the new info, I still don’t have the info I need to write a definitive article on the first ten coin-op video games. The sources that covered the coin-op industry in 1972 and 1973 just didn’t report video game releases nearly as frequently as they did in subsequent years, so I still don’t have good dates for many of the games.

Nonetheless, here is my stab at listing the first ten coin-op video games, based on the information I currently have.

1. Computer Space (Nutting Associates, Inc.) – debuted 10/15/1971 at MOA show; released November, 1971; first? field tested in August, 1971

2. Galaxy Game (Computer Recreations, Inc.) – first? placed on location at Stanford in September, 1971

Which was first, Computer Space or Galaxy Game? This is probably the most controversial point in this article. For many years, almost every history of video games listed Computer Space as the world’s first coin-op video game. Contrary to what some think, Computer Space was not unknown to early video game historians. A number of articles and books touching on video game history were published in the early 1980s and almost all of them mention Computer Space.
Galaxy Game was much less known (one day I may do an article specifically on the historiography of video games and cover this in more detail). Now that Bill Pitts’ game is more widely known, a kind of consensus seems to have formed that it, not Computer Space, was actually the true “first” coin-op video game.
This is likely based on the fact that Computer Space was “released” in November, 1971 while Galaxy Game was “released” the month before and thus was the "first" coin-op video game.
This is not really accurate, however. Computer Space was supposedly "released" in November. But what does “released” mean? For me, “released” means when the manufacturer started shipping the game to distributors (or at least when they were ready to ship it), and I'm assuming that's what it means here.

When comparing Computer Space and Galaxy Game, I think release dates are really a moot point. Galaxy Game was a one-of-a-kind game and wasn’t built by a manufacturer and thus never shipped to any distributors and was never really "released" at all. According to available sources, it was placed on location at the student union in Stanford in September, 1971, so that was when the general public first (at least those at Stanford) got to see it. This was also basically when the game was “field tested”. According to Goldberg and Vendel, Computer Space was first placed on location in August, 1971 at The Dutch Goose so in terms of when the public could actually drop a coin into an arcade video game, Computer Space appears to have been first and since Galaxy Game wasn’t really a released product, I think that this is the best criteria we can use to determine priority. (Of course, we could also ask which one started development first. Normally, this kind of info is rare for coin-op video games, but in this case the info available indicates that Computer Space was started long before Galaxy Game so by this criteria, Computer Space is still #1)

3. Star Trek (For-Play Manufacturers) – Released September, 1972??

This one is really interesting. It was a clone of Computer Space, thus making it not only possibly the third coin-op video game ever made but the first bootleg game (Galaxy Game wasn’t a bootleg of Computer Space, though both were versions of the mainframe original). It was supposedly released in September of 1972 (or at least that what I have in my notes). I am not sure, however, exactly where I got that date and haven’t been able to track down its source since then. I have a vague memory that it came from one of Bill Kurtz’s books on arcade video games but that is only a vague memory and Kurtz isn’t the most reliable source. The game’s flyer on The Arcade Flyer Archive has a date stamped on it of “Sep 19 1972” but that doesn’t prove that it had been released by then (for one thing, flyers often came out a month or so before a game shipped and for another, someone could have stamped that date on there later).
OTOH, the company was incorporated on July 20, 1972 and according to RePlay/Play Meter it was formed specifically to get into the video game business.

4. Pong (Atari) – Released November, 1972

Not much to say about this one. The date comes from the well-known internal document that has been circulated about the web. I am not actually sure if the dates on said documents are “release” dates or not, but they seem to be (they could be the date the game went into production, but games generally went into production the same month they started shipping).

5. Paddle Battle (Allied Leisure Industries) – Released March, 1973

The date here is taken from Allied’s annual report. It is actually the date the game went into production but as I mentioned above, this is generally the same months as the release date. While it appears that at least two other games were released in March, 1973, I’m guessing that Allied Leisure was the first of them. Paddle Battle was probably the best-selling of all the early Pong games (yes, including the original) – though that is not certain. If so, its early release date was likely one big reason (see my Allied Leisure history for more info).

6. Rally (For-Play Manufacturers) – Released March, 1973?

For-Play strikes again – and with another clone. Not sure exactly when it was released but the release was announced in the March 17, 1973 issue of Cash Box. Note that For-Play also released a one-player version of the game in June. Note too that For-Play’s games were also sold and distributed via a company called ACA.

7. Volly (Ramtek) – Released late March, 1973?

Like Allied Leisure, Ramtek had a leg up on the competition. In this case it was because one of the company execs had a financial interest in Andy Capp’s Tavern and got an early peak at Pong (supposedly the day after it went on test). Not sure of the exact date it was released but in an interview in the June/July, 1975 issue of Play Meter, Nolan Bushnell claimed it came out in “late March”.

8. Winner (Bally/Midway) – Released April, 1973?

Unlike most Pong clones, Midway’s version was actually legit. In March, 1973 they actually licensed the game from Atari (according to some, it was one of three companies to do so) and released their version a short time later. There may have been other games released in April, but I haven’t been able to find any firm dates.

9. ????TV Ping Pong and/or TV Tennis (Chicago Coin) – Released ca April 1973??

Not sure of the release dates on these. TV Ping Pong was shown to distributors on March 30, 1973 but I’m not sure when it was released. My notes say that the release of TV Tennis was announced in the April, 1973 issue of Vending Times, but it wasn’t announced in Cash Box until the October 27, 1973 issue so the earlier date may have been referring to TV Ping Pong.

10.????Paddle Ball (Williams) – Released May, 1973?

Once again, I’m not sure of the exact date, but the game’s release was announced in the May, 1973 issue of Vending Times. It was also mentioned in the April 14, 1973 issue of Cash Box (though it didn’t say it was released)

The “????” before the #9 and #10 games indicates how sketchy the information I have on games released after March, 1973 is (and really, even the earlier dates aren’t as nailed down as I’d like). It’s quite possible that some other company released a game before some of the games on this list. Here are some candidates (in order by manufacturer)

Allied Leisure – Tennis Tourney (July, 1973). This was Allied’s four-player version of Pong and its second video game.

Amutronics – TV Ping Pong. This one appeared in the July 7, 1973 Cash Box catalog issue, meaning that it had been released sometime in the past year. It may have been released prior to some of the games on the list above.

Arizona Automation – Champion Ping Pong. TAFA lists this as a 1973 game. Arizona Automation planned to show it at the November MOA show that year, but I don’t know if they did. Arizona Automation became Mirco Games shortly thereafter.

Atari – Pong-in-a-Barrel?? Only about 20 units of this one were produced and I’m not sure exactly when (note, this game is not to be confused with Barrel Pong) as the game. Their next “officially” released game after Pong was Space Race in July, 1973.

BAC Electronics – Tele-Soccer. Shown at the 1973 MOA show (November 9-11). According to Ralph Baer they had another game called Tennis but I have found no other reference to it.

Nutting Associates – What was Nutting’s next game after Computer Space? Probably the 2-player version of the game, which was mentioned in the June 6, 1973 issue if Cash Box. If you don’t consider that a separate game, their next game was probably Computer Space Ball, which was mentioned in the same issue. TAFA lists this game as a 1972 release, but that is almost certainly wrong. Note that in Kent’s Ultimate History Steve Bristow is quoted as saying that Nolan Bushnell got a look at Missile Radar “before he started” Atari, but this also seems to be clearly wrong.

PMC Electronics – TV Table Tennis. This one also appeared in the July 7, 1973 Cash Box catalog issue (indicating it was released at some point during the preceding year).

Sega – Pong Tron. Release dates for early Japanese games are even harder to come by than U.S. games (at least for a non-Japanese researcher). Arcade-History.com lists this one as a July, 1973 release.

Taito – Elepong. This was Taito’s first video game but I have no release date info on it.

U.S. Billiards – TV Tennis. The first reference I found to this one was a flyer in the November, 1973 issue of Vending Times. Normally, I wouldn’t have included it but there is a slim possibility that it came out much earlier.

UBI (United Billiards, Inc.) – TV Table Tennis. Ditto this one. It was mentioned in the October 16, 1973 issue of Cash Box.

Volly Industries – Volly was (supposedly) an offshoot of Ramtek that released Ramtek games in Canada (usually under a different name). TAFA lists Hockey, Scoring, and Tennis as 1973 releases, as does the website on the company’s history (http://www.ccjvq.com/slydc/topic/volly/volly.htm)

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The (Pre) Hisory of Night Driver - Part 1

June 2, 2014, 6:58 pm

≫ Next: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 2: Night Racer

≪ Previous: What Were the First Ten Coin-Op Video Games?

In earlier posts, I’ve made brief mention of Reiner Foerst’s Nurburgring and Micronetics’ Night Racer as predecessors to Atari’s Night Driver. Today I thought I’d begin to flesh out the story of these games, as well as a number of others that appeared around the same time.
(NOTE that much of the information on Nurbrugring came from the Lance Carter’s History of Racing Games at historyofracinggames.wordpress.com)

Of all the many video game genres, perhaps none (other than the ball and paddle game) is more venerable, or popular, that the driving game. The first driving video game was probably Atari’s Gran Trak 10 (March, 1974). It was followed by a number of similar games between 1974 and 1976, including Taito’s Speed Race/Midway’s Wheels, Electra’s Pace Car Pro (perhaps the first true color driving game), and a dozen more games by Atari/Kee (including 1975’s Hi Way, which included a built-in seat that allowed the player to sit down while playing). These games, however, all featured a top-down perspective rather than the first-person perspective that later became de rigueur. First-person driving games had actually been around, in electromechanical form for years (and driving games in general had been around for even longer – the first may have been Canova and Thompson’s two-player bike racing game Automatic Cycle Racer in 1897). In 1941, the International Mutoscope Corporation (more famous for its peep shows) released Drive Mobile– a driving game that included a rotating plastic drum with the images of a two-lane road clogged with traffic. The player used a steering wheel to maneuver a small plastic car to avoid the traffic while an electronic map of the U.S. tracked his cross-country progress. The following year the company released a two-player variant called Cross-Country Race with the display showing the progress of the two cars on a twisting route from New York to Los Angeles. The early fifties saw the appearance of games with display screens showing 8 mm movie footage of actual traffic such as Capitol Projector's Auto Test (1954 - some sources say 1959) and Turnpike Tournament (1959). In the 1960s, in games like Chicago Coin’s hugely popular Speedway the player maneuvered a plastic car along the projected image of a track produced by shining light through a transparent plastic/nylon disc.

Above images courtesy of Pinrepair.com

The first-person driving video game would have to wait, however. Ask people what the first such game was and many would probably mention Atari’s Night Driver (October, 1976). In truth, however, Night Driver was preceded by at least four other games with almost identical game play. The granddaddy of them all was actually produced not in America, but in Germany and was started three years earlier: a game called Nurburgring by Dr. Ing- Reiner Foerst.

In 1971 Reiner Foerst (then 38) took a job as director of a German wire-manufacturer called Trakus. At the time, companies had just begun to explore the use of driving simulators in research. In 1965, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers had published a report describing such a simulator that used color film footage along with realistic sounds and vibrations to reproduce the driving experience. The system, however, was not interactive. In 1966, the Human Resources Research Organization designed a similar system. With a background in simulation, Foerst decided to capitalize on this growing market by creating the best driving simulators in the business. To do so, however, he needed money and to do that, he decided to create a coin-op driving game. Examining the patents of other companies he found that Volkswagen and British Petroleum had both created simulators. The BP system, however, used a projection screen system and Volkswagen used a large oscilloscope (along with a motion system that allowed limited movement), both of which were too expensive for a game.

(supposedly) Volkswagen's early 1970s driving simulator
courtesy of historyofracinggames.wordpress.com

Frustrated, Reiner slapped together a prototype using light bulbs to create a crude display, but the resulting product didn’t work very well. When Pong exploded onto the scene in 1973, Foerst knew he'd found a better solution and by the end of the year he was at work turning his prototype into a video game (that same year, he filed or a US patent on a tic-tac-toe like game). The first version was finished in May of 1975 and placed on location in an arcade in the university town of Giessen where it did well. Encouraged by the success of the prototype, Trakus provided more funding and the first two production units were completed by March of 1976 (when they were shown at the International Exposition for Coin-Op Games in Berlin). Production began soon after at a rate of one machine per week. Dubbed Nurburgring 1 (after the famed German race track built around the mountain village and castle of Nurburg in the 1920s) it featured almost 1,500 components, including a rack stuffed to the gills with a whopping 28 circuit boards. While the visuals were sparse (consisting almost exclusively of a series of white posts along the side of a virtual road, the first-person perspective gave the game level of realism unseen in a video driving game. Adding to the immersive experience were the game’s sounds, which included the roar of the engine, air whistling by the car, crashes, and screeching tires. The engine sounds grew louder the faster you drove and more hollow when the brakeswere applied.

A peek inside the original Nurburgring

Realistic as it was, the game was also expensive, and complicated, which is why Foerst could only afford to produce one machine a week – even though he realized this would allow other coin-op games to copy his idea. Before long, Foerst’s fears were realized. It started when Foerst paid a visit to a bowling alley to check on one of this games. While there, he met a young video game technician from America named Ted Michon. The meeting would change the course of video game history (but that story will have to wait until part 2)

A page from one of Reiner Foerst's US patents for Nurbrugring (filed May 13, 1976)

Another Foerst patent - for a "game board with color distinguishable" - filed December 19, 1973
Note that this may have been for a game called Ring-O-Bang

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The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 2: Night Racer

June 7, 2014, 3:44 pm

≫ Next: The (Almost) Untold Story of TV POWWW - The Original(??) Video Game TV Game Show

≪ Previous: The (Pre) Hisory of Night Driver - Part 1

In Part 1, we told the story of Reiner Foerst and his creation of what was likely the first first-person arcade driving video game. We ended with Foerst’s chance encounter with an engineer named Ted Michon in a German bowling alley. What was, an American video game technician, doing in a bowling alley in Germany? For that, we have to to discuss a company called Micronetics. And to discuss Micronetics we have to discuss a company called Digital Games.

Digital Games

In the three years immediately following Atari’s introduction of Pong, a veritable forest of video game manufacturers sprung up like weeds in the warm California sun. While most of them were located in Silicon Valley, not all of them were. Digital Games for instance, was located far to the south in San Dimas about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. The company was founded in early 1974 by Bill Prast and Steve Holder.

Bill Prast and Skip Kahn - from RePlay, March, 1976

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Bill Prast was raised in Brooklyn. In 1968, he served as an Air Force pilot in Viet Nam, where he developed a lifetime love of aviation. After the war, Prast returned to Brooklyn and started his coin-op career as a route service technician for Harold Kaufman's Musical Distributors. After two years, he worked his way west, toiling for a number of operating companies along the way. In early 1974 Prast and Steve Holder established repair shop in Los Angeles called Amusement Device Engineering. One day an investor named Ken Berger came in and asked the pair to build some cocktail video games for him (cocktail Pong games were all the rage at the time). They talked to an acquaintance named Bill Bailey, Jr. who pointed them to the Los Angeles distributor Circle International for whom he had manufactured some video games (In 1976, Bailey would cofound a video game company called Bailey International with his father, Bill Sr.). After talking to Circle, Pratt and Holder acquired some manufacturing space in San Dimas and incorporated as Digital Games in June of 1974[1]. Digital started out making cocktail Pong clones, but were unable to sell their games to traditional distributors and had to turn to direct sales.

[Steve Holder]When we first started, we couldn't provide the 30-90 days credit required from conventional distributors. We weren't in a position to carry 'paper' on even 30 machines for any length of time. We needed the cash and the direct-sales people provided it.

While “direct-sales people” had something of an unsavory reputation in the industry, Digital eventually began selling games nationwide through Seeburg and then to traditional distributors.

Digital Games' PC Board Assembly room - from RePlay, March, 1976

Air Combat

The company didn’t last long. Like most companies of the time, Digital made their fair share of ball-and-paddle games, including Tennis, Hockey, Knock Out (1975), Dual (1975), and Combo (February 1976). At the October, 1975 MOA show, the company debuted Heavy Traffic, a motorcycle game followed early in 1976 by the jet fighting game Air Combat. By the end of the year, the company had exited the video game field. Ted Michon, was on hand for the company’s rapid demise. Michon had graduated from Cal Tech in spring of 1975, intending to return the following year to get a second degree. What was supposed to be a summer job at Glendale’s Comtal turned into a full-time project designing a “Digital Vidicon Scanner System” that allowed the CIA to reduce the time it took to digitize spy satellite photographs from three hours to one minute. By the time Michon finished the project, Comtal was on the verge of extinction and Michon was let go. Looking for a new way to pay the bills, he came across an ad for an electrical engineer opening with a company called Digital Games.

Unsure exactly what the company did, Michon interviewed with Wayne “Skip” Kahn, Digital’s VP of engineering. As the interview ended he found that Digital made video games. Michon got the job, little knowing that would lead to a new career as a video game designer. When he arrived at his new job, Michon was in for a surprise:

[Ted Michon] I quickly learned that I had arrived in the middle of a big mess. Digital had started as a garage shop and rode the wave of the cocktail table craze. They were immediately into big money and grew like mad but, from what I saw of the product designs, they knew very little about engineering. It seemed to me that the designs were created by someone with a Popular Electronics knowledge of engineering: they knew what they wanted and figured they could just put together a pile of parts to get it. Their designers had no conception of system timing or load factors and took no systematic approach to what they did. The result was that, through a lot of trial and error and guesswork and luck, they could get a design to work, but there was no guarantee it could be replicated.

Michon soon discovered that the company’s management was also in disarray. After a nasty quarrel, the founders split up and one left the company, taking most of the design staff with him. Bill Prast was president of the company and one of the few executives who hadn’t already left by the time Michon arrived Prast was an enthusiastic and flamboyant man who enjoyed high-priced toys and owned his own jet (he insisted Michon learn to fly and even paid for the lessons). Prast’s wife (who also worked for Digital) also enjoyed a good prank and would sometimes call up the departed executives and leave the phone off the hook just to tie up their phone lines. Chaotic as it was, the situation at Digital Games was, in reality, not much different than that of any of a half-dozen other Silicon Valley game manufacturers and despite their inexperience, they were apparently still making money:

[Ted Michon] I heard tales of amazing excesses in times of plenty. One story I heard is that the company would send every employee to the annual MOA show in Chicago, each with a 100-dollar bill tucked into their pocket.

Michon tried to ignore the chaos around him and get down to business. The first problem he encountered was with the company's latest hit.

[Ted Michon] They had a huge order for their new Air Combat game, designed by the infamous now departed amateur designer. Bill [Prast] had already had the cabinets and PCBs made and stuffed. Only the thing didn't work. When I arrived, all the techies were huddled around PCBs trying, almost literally, to make things fly. Documentation was a mess. The prototypes were a mess. The problems were that (1) no one understood how it worked and (2) it didn't work.

After investigating, Michon discovered that the problem was a timing issue with the game’s circuitry. In an effort to solve the problem, someone had installed capacitors to slow down the signal, not realizing that this could cause the signal to degrade, destroying its predictability. When Michon took a look at one of the game prototypes, it had over 50 capacitors. Now that he’d identified the problem, Michon quickly solved it and Prast dispatched a load of 50 games to West Germany. There was only one problem – he had forgotten to include the PC boards. Michon grabbed a tool kit and was sent to Dusseldorf to get the games up and running. Things went from bad to worse. When he arrived at the customer’s site, no one spoke English. When he finally found the (very unhappy) man in charge, things turned out to be even worse than they already seemed. Not only did the machines not work, but they had all been damaged in transit due to poor packaging. Some monitors were scratched, others had completely imploded. Michon got most of the machines in a presentable state, only to find that the PC boards were being held at customs and now he had to persuade the already-irate owner to pay additional customs duties to have the boards shipped to him.

Air Combat games on the assembly line - from RePlay, March, 1976

Night Racer

Michon’s visit lasted two weeks, leaving him plenty of free time. During a visit to a nearby bowling alley he got a glimpse of a game unlike any he’d ever seen.

[Ted Michon]. . . the most interesting thing of all was a one-of-a-kind video machine in the bowling alley’s arcade called Nurburgring (named for the famous German racetrack). It was the first game I ever saw that attempted 3D in any form. It showed a road at night delineated by white poles and a white center stripe. The player/driver had a steering wheel and gas pedal. The object was to stay on the course and complete the race in the shortest time. I learned that the inventor was coming to check on the game and I was able to meet him just before I left for L.A. He was on vacation with his wife and children. This was his first video game. He gave me a tour inside. There was a rack filled with at least 20 circuit boards containing a huge number of analog parts. It was all done in analog. I realized immediately that this design would not be economically reproducible and I tried to explain that to him. HE, however, was confident that one of the American companies he had been talking to would license the game just as he’d designed it. I told him that my company would still be interested in the concept, but that the implementation was impractical. His son even gave me his copy of another of his dad’s inventions, a make-5-in-a-row game called Ring-O-Bang.

The inventor, of course, was Reiner Foerst. On Lance Carter's History of Racing Games website Foerst gives his account of the story. According to Foerst he had taken his sons to the bowling alley to see his game where he met Michon, who made some suggestions on improving the game. After the two bowled together, Foerst claims that Michon then called his boss and became

[Reiner Forest] …very nervous, very frustrated and told us that he was sorry, but he had no choice than to end the conversation. Then he left the building.
<historyofracinggames.wordpress.com/installment-three/>

After returning to a hero’s welcome at Digital (and a raise to $20,000, a figure Michon remembered as the salary for a doctor in Milton Bradley’s Game Life), Michon began to work on a completely digital version of Foerst's game. Feeling he needed to design the game around a microprocessor, he approached management with the idea, only to be told it would take too long and was too expensive. Instead, Michon was forced to design the game using MSI Logic and PROMs. As a result, the system was unable to perform the multiplications required to draw objects in proper perspective and Michon was forced to use scaled logarithms and anti-logs to perform the multiplications via addition.
After he’d designed a prototype, Michon showed the game to Bill Prast, who liked it so much that he brought in Midway co-founder Hank Ross for a look. The two companies soon struck a deal whereby Midway and Digital would co-release the game, with Midway paying royalties to Digital. Michon named the game Night Racer. His wife Susan (an art major) produced the artwork and helped assemble prototypes and Prast himself even pitched in by designing the game’s sound effects.

Micronetics

Meanwhile, Digital Games was experiencing more than its share of financial difficulties. On Friday, June 25, 1976 the company shut its doors and a company named U.S. Medical Industries purchased their entire inventory in a public auction. The following Monday, the employees reported to a new building where they went back into business as Micronetics (a company that had been started by Skip Kahn). Micronetics disappeared almost as fast as they had appeared, but they did manage to release Night Racer in December of 1976, possibly because, if they didn’t, Midway would not have had to pay them royalties. Michon left the company before the game’s official release to form his own company, Techni-Cal (later Technical Magic), but not before sending a letter to Reiner Foerst telling him what was happening with his creation. Technical Magic would later go on to design a number of important video games, including Star Fire, Fire One!, and Kreepy Krawlers for Exidy and the unreleased Last Starfighter for Atari. Bill Prast went on to form American Datacom where he designed Telex communications equipment. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2011.

Fist page of Digital's articles of incorporation

[1] RePlay (January, 1976) reports that Digital Games was founded in April of 1973 and incorporated in June of 1974, though they may have been referring to Amusement Device Engineering. Digital’s articles of incorporation list Stephen R. Landau, Melinda Morgan, and Sharan Folds as directors.

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The (Almost) Untold Story of TV POWWW - The Original(??) Video Game TV Game Show

June 10, 2014, 5:17 pm

≫ Next: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 3: Midway West/Midway California

≪ Previous: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 2: Night Racer

Back in December of 2012 I did a blog post on Starcade, the syndicated video game game show that originally aired from 1982 to 1984. Starcade, however, was not the first syndicated game show involving video games. Back in 1978, a program called TV POWWW started appearing on TV stations across the country (and, eventually, around the world). And it not only featured video games, but it was interactive, with viewers playing live over the telephone (don’t get too excited, it’s not quite what you may be thinking). I don't know if it was the first television video game game show, and some might quibble with calling it a "game show" at all but for its time, it was quite innovative. Surprisingly, I had never heard of the program until recently when I stumbled across a web page that made mention of it. I immediately tried to find out more about it, only to discover that the information on the web is scant. A little digging, however, unearthed a host of new sources information (chief among them a book by Marvin Kempner). While TV POWWW had nothing to do with arcade video games, I thought I'd share the information anyway.

Marvin Kempner

The driving force behind the creation of TV POWWW was Marvin A. Kempner, founder of the syndication firm M.A. Kempner Inc. While Kempner didn't have a direct connection to the coin-op industry, his father did, having been partners in a chain of arcades with Adolph Zukor, who later went on to form his own movie studio (as did a number of other arcade owners) - Paramount. Kempner's work in syndication had started after World War II when he syndicated radio programs like Murder at Midnight and The Tommy Dorsey Show. In a career that spanned six decades, Kempner worked for a number of companies and was involved with a handful of significant firsts. Jingl-Library was a library of advertising jingles created in the late 1940s and sold to radio stations across the country (it was sold to NBC in 1953). Colonel Bleep was a cartoon in which an alien from the planet Futura protected the Earth with the help of his two deputies (the cowboy puppet Squeek and a caveman named Scratch). Running from 1957 to 1960, it was the first color cartoon produced for television. While Kempner helped syndicate the program, it was filmed by Soundac of Miami, an early animation studio. In 1966, Kempner (then working for Mark Century Sales Corp) began selling another Soundac creation called Colorskope - a library of animated opening and closing segments that could be customized for specific television stations for use in news programs, sports reports, movies , and other programming (they also produced a follow-up called Commercialskope that consisted of customized animated commercials). Kempner was also part owner of WINE radio in Buffalo (one innovative promotion consisted of sending live homing pigeons to 50 of the area's top advertisers with a note instructing them to fill out a form and return it, via pigeon express). Kempner was no stranger to game shows either.

Ad for Musical Tune-O, June 1, 1950

In the early 1950s he had syndicated a radio program called Musical Tune-O. Customers would visit participating grocery stores where they would obtain a bingo card with a numbered list of 250 instrumental tunes and a bingo grid with 25 numbers (as well, of course, as advertising for the store in question). When they tuned in to the program, a selection would be played. The customer then had to identify the tune and, if they had that number on their card, claim the appropriate box. Once a customer got five numbers in a row, or filled in the four corners of the grid, they would call the radio station to claim a prize.

Ad for Dollar Derby, January 31, 1952

In 1952, Kempner syndicated Dollar Derby (“the original TV auction”) in which players would receive paper "money" after purchasing items from participating supermarkets then tune in and bid on items using the fake money (Kempner claims the show helped make 7-11 famous in Texas). By the 1970s, Kempner had formed his own company called M.A. Kempner Inc. and the innovations continued. In 1973, Kempner syndicated The Jane Chastain Showmaking Chastain the first nationally syndicated female sportscaster in the country (in 1974 she became the first female NFL announcer). Another Kempner innovation was Time Capsule library of stock footage, cataloged and indexed by subject, that TV stations could use to supplement news stories.

The Creation of TV POWWW

In the spring of 1977, two men (a DJ and a radio program director) approached Kempner with the idea for a new half-hour television game show that involved audience members playing home video games against a celebrity opponent[1].The pair had a commitment from Magnavox (who was then working on the Odyssey 2) for $200,000-250,000 to produce a pilot. The two hooked up a video game console to a television and demonstrated the unit for Kempner[2]. Intrigued, Kempner made an appointment with Phil Boyer, Vice President of Programming for ABC and spent the weekend playing video games[3].

Walking into Boyer's office, video game console under his arm, Kempner set up the unit and described the concept to Boyer, who interested immediately, noting that he played arcade games every night while waiting for his train at Penn Station. While Boyer loved the concept, he didn't like the format. Selling a half-hour program was an increasingly difficult prospect and the airwaves were already flooded with game shows. Instead, Boyer wanted to create a "Dialing For Dollars" of the eighties (the television program in which the host would call viewers at home and award cash prizes if they could give the proper password). Instead of creating a half-hour show with a live audience, Boyer suggested a short call-in program that stations could insert into their local broadcast schedules whenever they wanted. Kempner agreed and took Boyer's suggestion back to the clients. The two ignored Boyer and told Kempner they were going ahead with the half-hour format and asked if he still wanted in. Kempner did and in August, a pilot was produced. Prior to the filming, Kempner met with the Magnavox attorney and was surprised when they seemed uninterested in finalizing the deal. He was even more surprised when he tried to chat with the attorney and Magnavox’s VP on the morning of the shoot and they not only seemed uninterested, but didn't even bother to ask if he wanted a ride to the studio. He soon realized that he had been cut out of the deal.

Fairchild Gets Involved

Furious, Kempner wrote a letter to Wilfred Corrigan, president of Fairchild Camera and Instrument (which had released its Channel F programmable console in November, 1976), on September 6, describing his concept for a game show in which viewers would play games on air and asking if Fairchild could supply them with a game system and develop voice recognition hardware that would allow players to control the game over a telephone line. He wrote a similar letter to Atari. A few days later, Fairchild called back and Kempner made an appointment with John Donatoni, marketing director of Fairchild's video game division (Atari never responded).

During the meeting, Fairchild engineers assured Kempner that they could create his voice activation box. Kempner then asked if they could create hardware that would take the game off the front of the picture tube and broadcast it. Again they said yes, but noted that it would take six months to complete. Kempner and Fairchild quickly signed a contract in which Fairchild would supply Kempner with custom Channel F consoles (at a cost of $2500 apiece) as well as custom game cartridges. The T-shaped custom cartridges were about 3 times larger than the normal cartridges and were also usually simplified for television.

Finding a Market

This Ad For TV POWWW appeared in the September 15, 1978 issue of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Note that TV POWWW appeared as part of the show Zap!

Returning home, Kempner called Phil Boyer who reiterated that ABC wanted first refusal rights on the program for the network’s “O and Os’ (owned and operated stations). He then called Al Flanagan, President of Combined Communications in Denver, and set up a meeting at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas where he could demonstrate his system to a roomful of executives and sales staff. With the final system still in development, Kempner would have to fake it. He set up a pair 21" TVs on stage and connected them to a standard Channel F unit with a shooting gallery cartridge. Next to each TV was a telephone that wasn't connected to anything. As the demo started, Kempner called two executives to the stage and described his idea, which he was temporarily calling "TV POWWW" (a name he didn't particularly care for). He started up the game, then instructed the execs to yell "POW!" into their dead phones when they wanted to take a shot (the Fairchild engineers had told him that they would need to use a strong sound for the voice activation to work). After each "POW!" Kempner would press the buttons on his controller. Despite the somewhat crude demo, according to Kempner "all hell broke loose". Al Flanagan leapt to the stage and loudly demanded an option for all seven of the TV stations he owned. Kempner told him that they did not give options, but instead offered first refusal rights.

Kempner next visited KABC in Los Angeles (the most profitable TV station in the country), where he met with head of programming John Goldhammer, who loved the idea and set up a five-minute meeting with GM John Severino. Instead of five minutes, Severino spent an hour playing with the Channel F and told Kempner he was going to make a million dollars with TV POWWW. Certain that the final system would be ready by March, 1978, Kempner returned to Goldhammer and suggested that he allow Kempner to test the system at the NATPE (National Association of Television Programming Executives) Convention in April. Goldhammer agreed, but suggested that he also demonstrate the system live on A.M. Los Angeles, the popular morning program hosted by Regis Philbin and Sarah Purcell (who later went on to national fame as co-host of Real People). When April rolled around, the Fairchild engineers were still hard at work on the new system. At 7 AM the Monday before the convention (which started on Friday), Kempner and the engineers set up their equipment at KABC for A.M. Los Angeles only tofind that the voice activation didn't work. Despite furious efforts, they had to cancel the appearance at 8:45. Tuesday was more of the same, as was Wednesday. Finally, on Thursday, they got the system to work and demoed it on the air. They did the same on Friday and KABC's phone lines were clogged with people hoping to play the new game. After the show ended, Kempner made his way to the convention and began a pre-show sales meeting in his hotel suite. In the middle of the meeting, Al Flanagan burst in and, in front of the stunned salesmen, offered to buy TV POWWW for all his stations. News of the deal spread across the convention floor like wildfire and before long, program directors and executives were lining up to buy the show for their stations. Each of them paid a weekly fee, plus $5,000 for the modified Channel F unit. Meanwhile, Magnavox was offering its video game show, but (much to Kempner’s delight) no one was interested and it was never produced.

Kempner was not out of the woods yet, however. The show was scheduled to be available on September 1 and Fairchild still hadn't worked out all the kinks. In July, Kempner decided he needed someone of his own to help get things in order and hired Bob Elder, an overweight and alcoholic (though brilliant), engineer in his early 40s. Elder quickly fixed a number of issues but there were others. Realizing he would never be ready for the September 1 date, Kempner called his stations and announced that he was changing the rollout to October 1. Thankfully, Kempner met the new date and TV POWWW went on as scheduled. It was an instant success.

Playing the Game

Looking back from the 21st century, the "interactivity" of TV POWWW seems absurdly primitive. Rather than playing games directly, viewers would contact the station (or, more often, the station would contact them) and watch the game on their television set, calling out "Pow!" (or is that "Powww!"?) whenever they wanted to perform an action like firing an onscreen gun. In most cases, it seems, interested viewers would submit their names and phone numbers (with KABC they did so via postcards). Stations would insert the brief segments wherever they wanted. Denver added it to the beginning of The Six Million Dollar Man. Others added it to local news or morning programs. Most commonly, however, stations would add it to their children's programming (WGN in Chicago, for instance, presented it as part of Bozo’s Circus while in Raleigh it was part of a show called Barney’s Army). While some stations initially had a call-in program, many switched to a call-out method, and not always voluntarily. KSL in Salt Lake City, for example, was forced by the phone company to switch to call-outs after the demand for the program knocked out phone service in seven states Not all of the viewers played fair. Some would yell out "POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW" over and over rather than trying to time their shots. For WPIX, Channel 11 in New York, players shouted "PIX" instead of "POW" and the show was called TV PIXXX. According to some sources, WPIX had technicians in the control room pressing the controller button rather than using the voice activation system[4].

Goodbye Fairchild, Hello Mattel

Upon its debut in 1978, TV POWWW was an immediate hit. Almost as soon as it got started, however, the show was hit by a potential setback. In January of 1979, Kempner attended the CES in Las Vegas. Just before they let for the show, Fairchild contacted them and told them to stop by the Fairchild booth as soon as they arrived. They did so, and a meeting was arranged. Thinking nothing of it, the Kempner reps wandered the convention floor until the meeting started. At the meeting, Fairchild dropped a bombshell, announcing that they were going out of business (later that year, they were acquired by Schlumberger Ltd.) Genuinely apologetic, Fairchild offered to send Kempner whatever equipment they had on hand so that they could continue to build units. They also suggested that Kempner pay a visit to the Mattel booth, where they were displaying a new video game console of their own called Intellivision. Despair turned to elation when the Kempner team got a look at the Mattel display and saw that the Intellivision’s graphics far outstripped those of the aging Channel F. That afternoon, Marvin Kempner rushed back to the hotel, called Mattel, and tried to arrange a meeting with the head of the video game division, only to be told that no one was available. As the show was ending, he finally contacted Ed Krakauer, Senior VP of the electronics division and talked him into squeezing a 10-minute meeting into his lunch hour. Halfway through the meeting, Krakauer leapt from his seat and shut the TV off. He was already sold. The ten minute meeting ended up lasting three days. Mattel eagerly got on board, even offering to supply Kempner with a chip they were having trouble getting. It looked like a match made in heaven. Looks, however, can be deceiving. While Mattel initially supplied Kempner with a number of modified games, it eventually became apparent that they were losing interest in video game consoles as they focused on turning Intellivision into a bargain basement home computer with products like the ill-fated Keyboard Component. In addition (at least according to Kempner) Ed Krakauer continually tried to change the conditions of their deal or made promises that he never kept. At one point Metromedia of Los Angeles contacted Kempner about acquiring the rights to a half-hour prime time show on KTTV in which members of a live studio audience would square off against contestants on the phone. Jack Clark, host of the game show The Cross-Wits had signed on as emcee. The show was produced, but ran for just 13 weeks when Mattel proved unable (or willing) to supply Kempner with new games and by the late-1980s, it seems that TV POWWW had largely disappeared.

An ad for the KTTV version of the show, from Kempner's book

Looking Back

TV POWWW seems to be little remembered today – at least by those who grew up after it faded from the scene. It draws scant mention in video game, or television, history. In its day, however, it was quite popular, and surprisingly innovative. At its peak, over 100 stations carried the program and Kempner eventually syndicated the show in Europe, Asia, and Australia. While Marvin Kempner places much of the blame for the show’s untimely demise on Fairchild and Mattel’s lack of vision, it seems unlikely that the game could have lasted much longer than it did, even if those companies had stood behind it, especially given the video game crash and the primitive (by later standards) technology. When Nintendo hit it big with the NES, Kempner paid a visit to its Seattle headquarters to try and revive the program. Nintendo turned him down immediately (as did Sega sometime later). While TV POWWW may not have lasted, M.A. Kempner Inc. did, as did voice recognition technology. Kempner followed up with a number of products using the technology. Telephone Poll allowed companies to conduct automatic telephone surveys, using a synthesized voice to ask callers questions with a binary answer (yes/no, true/false, like/dislike, agree/disagree, for/against, or a/b). They followed up with the ESCAPE 600 (Electronic Synthesized Computerized Automatic Polling Equipment), which could dial numbers at random, had a customizable voice, and could detect busy signals, hang-ups, and pranksters (the Republican Party successfully used it to drum up support for midterm elections in Florida via the computerized voice of Ronald Reagan himself). How long did TV POWWW last? It’s hard to say, given the lack of solid info. It ran until at least 1983 in various US markets and Kempner claims that it lasted 12 years overall. However long it lasted, TV POWWW stands as an interesting sidelight to the history of video games and one that deserves to be better known.

Postscript – Zap???

The Wikipedia article on TV POWWW ends with the following intriguing claim: “Zap aired in the mornings from 1978-1979 on Cleveland, Ohio NBC Station WKYC which had a feature similar to TV POWWW.” Another interactive game show featuring video games that appeared at the same time, and maybe even preceded TV POWWW? Intriguing indeed. Or it would be, if it were actually true. Zap actually did feature a segment that was “similar” to TV POWWW. In fact, it was identical to TV POWWW. In fact, it WAS TV POWWW. Zap was a morning talk/news show hosted by Bob Zappe that ran on WKYC until it was cancelled in early 1979. As the above ad makes clear, Zap actually featured TV POWWW itself, not a “similar” program. Oh well, for a while there, Wikipedia really had me going.

NOTES

The majority of the above info came from Marvin Kempner’s 1998 book Can’t Wait Till Monday Morning: Syndication in Broadcasting (http://www.amazon.com/Cant-Wait-Til-Monday-Morning/dp/0944957730). In fact, it is largely a paraphrase of the chapter in his book dealing with TV POWWW.

Some information was taken from an article on Kempner from the February 6, 1984 issue of Television/Radio Age.

Other info was taken from various web sources

[1] From Kempner's book, it is unclear if this was the original concept. He initially only says that the two brought him an idea for a show using video games and notes that while playing games that weekend he wondered "…

[2] Kempner does not clearly specify what kind of system this was. It seems too early to have been an Odyssey 2 (which, as he indicates, was a year away from production). From Kempner's description, it may have been a Fairchild Channel F.

[3] Once again, Kempner's account is a bit confusing and he doesn't specify what game he played. He mentions that Atari and Fairchild had already released home video game systems. After describing his weekend playing games, he notes "I had read much about Atari, and now had played several of their games...” From this, it sounds like he was talking the Atari 2600. The 2600, however, would not be released until September, 1977.

[4] The Wikipedia article on TV POWWW makes this claim, citing as the source the following article (http://archive.today/sRxpa) which drew its information from a 2008 WPIX retrospective (which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJN9eM84Rq8). While the same claim has been made on other websites, drawing some to conclude that the program never used voice activation, Kempner’s own account makes it clear that this is not the case (unless he is an inveterate liar). Perhaps some stations were forced to bypass the voice activation technology due to its unreliability, or perhaps it only worked with the Channel F version.

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The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 3: Midway West/Midway California

July 4, 2014, 7:27 pm

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≪ Previous: The (Almost) Untold Story of TV POWWW - The Original(??) Video Game TV Game Show

Out last segment of the “Night Driver” story took a look at Digital Games/Micronetics version of the game. Today we look at a version developed by Midway. But, it’s not the one you’re all thinking of. Midway did release their own first-person driver in the mold of Nurburgring, called Midnite Racer/280 Zzzap, but we’ll get to that one next time. Today, we’re going to talk about another version developed by (or, more accurately, for) Midway that never saw the light of day – and it was actually one of the more interesting versions. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Midway had a number of different groups working on video games, including Dave Nutting Associates, Florida’s Arcade Engineering, and the toy design firm Marvin Glass Associates. Lesser known were a handful of smaller groups that developed games for the company. One of these was a group in California, unofficially dubbed “Midway West” or “Midway California”. Located in Campbell, California the team consisted of a pair of former Atari technicians/engineers - Doug Hughes and Bill Arkush – and programmer Al Stock. Hughes and Arkush had previously worked at Atari, in the same division with a young Steve Jobs. Arkush was a service technician with Atari and went on to found a company of his own called Kush "N Stuff that produced a variety of products and training tools covering video game repair. Hughes was a hardware engineer and technician who would later (in the 1980s) go on to work for Taito America where he created the hardware used in Qix and other games. In the mid-late 1970s, having left Atari, the two began doing contract design work for Midway, with Hughes serving as hardware designer and Arkush handling the logistics. Needing a programmer, they brought in Al Stock. While Stock had graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974 with a PhD in Chemistry, he also had extensive experience with various mainframe and mini-computers. After earning his PhD, Stock took a job at the Institute of Advanced Computation at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California where he worked on the ILLIAC IV, that last in a series of supercomputers built at the University of Illinois between 1951 and 1974. One of the first attempts at a massively parallel computer, the ILLIAC IV could support up to 256 processors working in parallel and included 64 arithmetic processing units and a drum memory created from 64 synchronized Burroughs disks. Funded by DARPA and designed by Burroughs Corporation, the ILLIAC IV was completed in 1972. Unfortunately, this was a time of political unrest. The Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970 resulted in a wave of anti-government paranoia at campuses across the country – including the University of Illinois. Students were suspicious about the ILLIAC IV and its defense department ties. Rumors swirled that it had been developed on campus as part of a conspiracy to develop nuclear weapons. The protests reached a head on May 9, 1970 – just five days after the Kent State shootings. There were other security concerns as well. ARPA wanted the machine enclosed in copper to prevent off-site snooping and project member Daniel Slotnick insisted that any work done at the University be published. Because of these concerns, the ILLIAC IV was moved to the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View in 1971. ARPA and NASA jointly formed the Institute of Advanced Computation to support the machine. The group was able to demonstrate the machine’s speed by running a 24-hour weather forecast – a process that normally took 24 hours – in just nine minutes. Unfortunately, after Seymour Cray introduced his own supercomputer, the ILLIAC IV was made obsolete. Looking through the paper, Al Stock saw an ad for a small video game design group looking for a programmer and signed on with Doug Hughes’ team, where he eventually went to work on a microprocessor version of Micronetics’ Night Racer.

[Al Stock] Hank Ross came to us and asked us to go to southern CA where some guys from Cal Tech had designed an analog version of a game called Night Racer…apparently these guys put together an analog version that would be very expensive but it worked. Hank came to us and said “I want you to look at these guys and see if you can do something with a microprocessor” So we went there and took a look. They were somewhat secretive, but they showed us how the game worked and we came back to [Hank] and he said “Well, how long is it going to take you to do this video game?” and we said it would take six weeks and he said “Well that’s what you’ve always said to us”.

Designing the game and delivering it on time was a challenge. Microprocessors were still relatively new, especially in the video game industry. In its early days, Al Stock had to enter his programs on a teletype machine and “store” them on paper tape. “Debugging” sometimes consisted of manually taping sections of paper together or punching holes in them. Once code was burned to a ROM/PROM, fixing bugs or making changes required reburning and replacing the chip, which was time-consuming and costly. Things got better when microprocessor companies began to release in-circuit emulators that allowed programmers to change code without replacing chip, but it still wasn’t easy. Making things even harder, Doug Hughes (who handled the hardware) would often switch to a new microprocessor for each project, forcing Stock to create new software. For the driving game, Hughes chose the Intel 8080 processor, which presented challenges of its own.

[Al Stock] The 8080 at the time was 1 MHz and I basically could not get enough done at that speed to paint the picture correctly and update it at 60 Hz so I had to use a trick to get the poles to come down properly and to calculate things. So what I did is a mirror image. As the poles came down, whatever was on the right I did a mirror image to make it happen faster because I didn’t have time to calculate two sides.

Despite the challenges, Hughes and Stock managed to get a prototype completed in six weeks. In addition to replacing the TTL hardware with a microprocessor, the game they created offered a number of additional improvements over the Micronetics version. The track was reprogrammable and the game included an attract mode. Perhaps most significantly, at the start of each game, an animated figure would run onto the screen, drop a flag, and run back off. Within a few years such a feature would be trivial, but at the time it was an impressive accomplishment. With the wire-wrapped prototype complete, the team arrange to demo the game to Bally. Then disaster struck.

[Al Stock] We were going to demonstrate to the president of Bally and he was flying in from Chicago and we blew up the whole system…and we had to [replace] every chip because we didn’t have time to figure out what went wrong and we had to go to Intel to ask them to get another in circuit emulator…and by the time he landed we had the thing running again but he didn’t know anything about how we really screwed up and had do get everything back while he was in the air.

Bally liked what they saw, with one exception. The finish line did not line up with the starting line. Nonetheless, Bally asked the group to come to Chicago and demonstrate the game to the rest of Bally management. After Stock fixed the finish line bug, the team did so and Hank Ross told them he had good and bad news. The good news was that Bally liked their game. The bad news was that their hardware was obsolete because Bally had decided to go with the less expensive hardware system created by Dave Nutting Associates for their future games. Bally asked the team to move to Chicago to join Dave Nutting as Bally employees and help port their game to the DNA hardware. The team turned the offer down. For one thing, they wanted to remain independent. In addition, they were frustrated after having spent six weeks to develop the game, only to see it rejected. They also realized that their financial reward for the game would be limited. As Stock remembers it, Bally gave a 5% royalty for the person who came up with a game concept, 5% to the one who designed the hardware, and 5% to the one who designed the software. Since they didn’t come up with the concept and since their hardware design had been rejected, the most they stood to make was a 5% royalty, which wasn’t much for all their work. In the end, they decided to remain in California. The driving game wasn’t the only game the team developed for Bally over the years, however. They also worked on the blocking game Checkmate (though, once again, the game was ultimately created at Dave Nutting Associates) and a tank combat game set against a backdrop of trees.

[Al Stock] As I remember one of the challenges was to develop a method to determine when the bullet hit a tree so we would stop its travel. Also it took some clever programming to make the bullet travel faster than the tank speed. We skipped pixels to give the illusion that the bullet traveled faster than the tank. Too many pixel skips would not look smooth/realistic and could cause problems for the algorithm which determined when the bullet hit a tree. I’m not sure if Midway produced this game.

The team also developed an unfinished game called Cops and Robbers . After their driving game was turned down, the team moved on to other things, including an early smart video terminal that they developed around the same time DEC came out with its VT-100 and TeleVideo produced its first terminals. They also worked a video chip for use in Bally’s home video game system. After breaking up their group, the members went continued to innovate. Doug Hughes later worked for Taito America, and Williams while Al Stock helped found a number of technology companies and create a number of new cutting edge products – though the most impressive to the man on the street may have been the least high-tech of them all. In 1998, Budweiser launched its “Real Men of Genius” ad campaign – a series 60-second spots celebrating the accomplishments of a number of overlooked, and unknown, inventors such as “Mr. Athletic Groin Protector Inventor”. One spot paid tribute to “Mr. T-shirt Launcher Inventor” – the inventor of the “cannon” used to launch T-shirts into the crowds at sporting events. While the spot was tongue-in-cheek there actually was a real “Mr. T-shirt Launcher Inventor”. And it was none other than Al Stock.

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The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 4: 280 Zzzap - prehistory

July 12, 2014, 3:47 pm

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≪ Previous: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 3: Midway West/Midway California

This week, we continue our look at the long prehistory of Night Driver (and its ultimate inspiration, Nurburgring). In my last installment, I discussed an unreleased version of the game developed for Bally/Midway. aThat version was rejected in favor of another version produced for Midway at a group called Dave Nutting Associates. That version was (ultimately) called 280 Zzzap. Before discussing the details, however, let’s backtrack and talk a bit about the history of Dave Nutting Associates.

The history of Bally and Midway will have to wait for a later post (or my book). Bally had its origins in a company called Lion Manufacturing (which was formed from a printing company in Chicago but, as I stated, that’s another story). Bally started producing coin-op games in 1931 with the pinball game Bally-Hoo (which also provided the company with its eventual name) and produced a number of different coin-op amusement machines in the coming years. Midway Manufacturing was formed in 1958 and specialized in manufacturing “arcade” games. Seeking to expand its offerings in this area, Bally acquired Midway in March, 1969. Midway entered the video game arena in March of 1973 when they paid Atari $200,000 to license Pong (one of the few companies that did). The following month, Midway released its version of the game called Winnerand went on to become Atari’s primary rival among U.S. video game manufacturers. While Midway did have internal video engineers and programmers, prior to the early 1980s, they mostly relied on licensed games and games designed by external design teams. The most prominent of these teams was a company called Dave Nutting Associates. By the time of Pong, the Nutting name had already made its mark on video game history. Dave’s brother Bill had founded a company called Nutting Associates in Mountain View California, which had produced the first commercial arcade video game – Nolan Ryan and Ted Dabney’s Computer Space. While Bill had been first, however, it was Dave who would leave the biggest mark on video game history (though one that has been somewhat unappreciated)

Dave Nutting

Dave Nutting - from the cover of his book "Secrets to a Creative Mind"

David Judd Nutting developed his love for gadgets early on. At age 8, he took apart the family toaster to see how it worked and put it back together before his parents found out. Before long, he graduated to designing gadgets of his own. Spurred by his love of model airplanes, Nutting decided to build a toy submarine out of aluminum and Testor’s glue that he could float in the bathtub. He became so absorbed in the project that he failed to notice that his younger brother had caught the bed on fire. After high school, Nutting decided to pursue a career as an industrial designer. After graduating from New York’s Pratt Institute School of Industrial Design, he went to work for Brooks Stevens Design Associates, a Milwaukee consulting firm whose clients included Studebaker, Outboard Marine, and 3M. Founded by industrial designer Brooks Stevens (who coined the phrase “planned obsolescence”), the company made over 3,000 products, including the original Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. During his time at Brooks Stevens, Dave Nutting designed a number of products, including Evinrude outboard motors, Mirro aluminum pots and pans Enstrom helicopters, and (in 1961/62) the Willys Motors Jeep Grand Wagoneer, considered by some the first SUV. He entered the coin-op industry when his brother Bill approached him with an idea for a new kind of game.

[Dave Nutting] By profession, I’m an industrial designer. I kind of backed into [the coin-op] business when my brother came and said he had an idea to take a teaching machine and put a coin slot on it. I completely re-engineered and re-designed it. He then built his version (Computer Quiz) in California and I built mine (IQ Computer) in Milwaukee. He built about 4,000 and I built about 3,500 so between the two of us we made about 8,000. In those days those were big, big numbers. One of the big reasons for its success was that it was a location finder. In other words, a lot of locations objected to putting pinballs in and so on but they couldn’t object to putting an educational type machine in. A lot of operators used it to get into locations and that’s why it was so successful.

Nutting Industries and Milwaukee Coin Industries

In 1967, Dave quit his job at Brooks and went into partnership with his brother Bill, who established a company called Nutting Associates in Mountain View, California. The original plan was for Dave to design and manufacture games in Milwaukee while Bill marketed them in California. When Bill’s wife threatened to divorce him if he didn’t end the relationship with his brother, Bill told Dave to close down his Milwaukee operation. Instead, Dave formed his own company, Nutting Industries, to manufacture coin-operated quiz/educational games. The first was I.Q. Computer[1]and they followed up with Dual I.Q. Computer(a 2-player game), Golf IQ (a sports-themed trivia game), The Puzzler, and Sensorama (1970, learn-to-bowl game featuring 13 audio-visual bowling lessons from pro bowler Dick Ritger).

Nutting Industries lasted until 1971, when Nutting formed a new company called Milwaukee Coin Industries (MCI). MCI’s main business was the manufacture of projection screen games, crude ancestors to the laser disc games of the mid-80s that used images from a semi-transparent disc projected on a screen to create a realistic background for arcade games. MCI released a number of them, including Desert Fox (1972), Red Baron, Flying Ace (1973),and U-Boat (1972). They also made a few oddities such as Airball (in which the player maneuvered a small ball around the field with a column of air) and The Safe (in which the player tried to find the combination of a safe before time ran out). As were many of MCI’s games, The Safe was designed by Jeff Frederiksen. According to Frederiksen, in fact, the game’s dial mechanism (which consisted of a geared disk and two optical sensors) later became the basis for the mouse (though most sources credit Douglas Engelbart of with inventing the mouse at Stanford in 1963).

Jeff Frederiksen

Jeff Frederiksen had studied math and physics at St. Thomas College in St. Paul, Minnesota before leaving in his junior year to join the Air Force as an electronics technician. While stationed in southern Turkey, Frederiksen came across an interesting new machine:

[Jeff Frederiksen] …they had a Burroughs 36-bit mainframe computer system

primarily fed with a card reader. I was in maintenance and had no access to the computer, but one of the computer techs gave me a programming book and I started to program error detection for the maintenance cards I was inputting. I couldn't get access to the compiler, so I programmed in binary machine code. Before using my checker program, the error rate on maintenance records was about 10%. After implementation, it went to 0% except for 1 blank card at the beginning of a deck in the 1st month.

   Shortly thereafter, AF headquarters sent a team to investigate what had

happened. After explaining what I did, they didn't know whether to

reward or court-martial me. They finally left recommending I submit the entire package as a suggestion to headquarters in Washington[2].

A short time later, Frederiksen left the Air Force and returned to Milwaukee to finish his degree then went to work for MCI. While MCI primarily designed electro-mechanical games, on at least one occasion they allegedly dabbled with video games in an effort to see how the machines worked.

[Keith Egging] They did do a very limited run of a Pongtype of a game of some kind that was copied IC for IC. In those days people would just scratch off the IC and you’d have to figure out how they worked. At the time the sales manager – his last name was Ancona said “Boy if somebody every put a steering wheel on something like that they’d make a fortune”.

MCI wasn't long for the video game world. One of their customers was Aladdin's Castle, a series of arcades being opened in shopping malls. MCI's investors wanted MCI to get into the mall arcade business, they shut down the video game division and started their own arcade chain called Red Baron, with 20 locations. Nutting wanted no part of it so he and Frederiksen took two MCI techs and formed their own design firm called Dave Nutting Associates.

Dave Nutting Associates

Even before leaving MCI, Nutting had been looking for a new game to revive his flagging sales. Pinball was popular, but was dominated by giants Bally, Gottlieb, and Williams. To have any hope of competing, Nutting would need an edge[3]. At the time, he was buying transistors from a company called Intel. One day an Intel rep stopped by and showed Nutting a company bulletin describing a new Intel product called a microprocessor. Realizing this was they edge they were looking for, Nutting and Frederiksen attended an Intel seminar in Chicago where they learned that Intel was creating 50 product development kits for its new 4040 processor. Claiming they represented the entire coin-op industry, they convinced Intel to sell them one.

[Dave Nutting] I was tracking the microprocessors from Intel. When Intel came out with their first development system for the microprocessor, which was the 4040 – a 4-bit processor, I convinced them to sell us one of the first microprocessor development systems. I told them that this was the whole future of the coin business and that they should give us one of the first ones, which they did. We then did the first pinball and as soon as the 8-bit processor came out we jumped on doing the video game.

Around this time, Nutting signed a consulting agreement with Bally to create novelty games. Dave Nutting was quite familiar with Ballly. MCI’s primary distributor had been Empire Distributing, which was owned by Bally. Nutting’s first microprocessor project for Bally, however, was not a novelty game or a video game but a pinball game. Nutting and Frederiksen took an electromechanical Flipper pinball game and converted it to use a microprocessor. It was one of the first attempts at a solid-state pinball game (the first was probably Atari’s 1973 Delta Queen prototype). Again, we don’t have time here to tell the full story of Flicker, but in brief, Bally passed on the game and Nutting and Frederiksen took the idea to an Arizona foosball manufacturer called Mirco Games who created what is generally considered the first commercially produced solid state pinball game called Spirit of ’76 in 1975.

That wasn’t the end of Nutting’s relationship with Bally, however, far from it. While Bally had passed on Nutting’s microprocessor pinball game, they did contract Nutting and his group to produce the first microprocessor-based video game: Gun Fight. Nutting and company followed up with a number of other video games, including Sea Wolf, Tornado Baseball, and Amazing Maze. One of these games was a version of Nurburgring. But that story will have to wait for next time.

[1]Cash Box lists the game as an October, 1968 released but it was mentioned in Billboard as early as December, 1967.

[2] From a September, 2011 interview with Frederiksen for the Bally Professional Arcade newsletter Bally Alley(http://www.ballyalley.com/ballyalley/interviews/Jeff_Frederiksen_Interview.txt)

[3] In his Secrets to a Creative Mind, Nutting indicates that this all occurred when sales of IQ Computer slowed, but this seems to be far too early as his account gives the impression that he formed Dave Nutting Associates immediately after IQ Computer.

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Update On First Ten Arcade Video Games

July 19, 2014, 1:48 pm

≫ Next: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 5: 280 Zzzap

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Recently, I did a post on the first ten arcade video games. While doing some research on Nutting Associates, I came across some info that led me to make a significant revision to my list. It is far from certain, but there is evidence that the first Pong clone may have actually been Nutting’s Computer Space Ball, and not Allied Leisure’s Paddle Battle. I have seen Computer Space Ball listed with a 1972 release date before, but that seemed clearly impossible to me given that Pong was released in November, 1972. I figured that the date was erroneous (as other Nutting dates are) and that Computer Space Ball had come out in 1973, but was unsure exactly when. The earliest reference I found was an article in the June 16, 1973 issue of Cash Box mentioning that the game was still “going great guns”. While this likely indicated that the game had been out for a least a month or two, and possibly longer, I still wasn’t sure exactly when it appeared.

Recently, however, I came across an interview in the August, 1976 issue of Play Meter with Vic Leslie. At the time of the interview, Leslie was the chairman of Cherry Group, which distributed and/or operated Atari games in England. In the interview, Leslie mentioned how he had first gotten into video games when he encountered Nutting’s Computer Space at the MOA show and thought it was a revolutionary game. He also mentioned how he had met Nutting VP Rui Lopes. His next meeting with Lopes provided an interesting quote:

[Vic Leslile] At the ATE in 1973, the London Exhibition, Rui and I bumped into each other again. Actually he approached me and said that he had a different type of game: would I be interested in marketing it in England?...I believe he shipped the machine, which was called Nutting Computer Space Ball, but was Rui's version of Pong. Pong had just been invented a month or two prior to that and hadn't come to England at all at that time

The ATE was usually (and, AFAIK, always) held in January. This fits in with Leslie’s claim that Pong had “…been invented a month or two prior to that…” If Leslie’s dates and recollections are correct (and they seem to be) and the ATE was in January (as usual), this would indicate that Computer Space Ball appeared very early indeed. It is unclear if the game had already been released in the US at the time of the ATE, but if it had, then it was surely the first of the Pong clones. I’d need some more solid information to pin this down, but I’m highly doubtful that any will appear.

And if the game was out by January, I wonder how Nutting built it so quickly. AFAIK they didn't license the game from Atari (would Atari have licensed it that early anyway?). I think that Steve Bristow had already left Nutting by that point (from what I remember, he left in the fall of 1972 to go back to college).

BTW, Leslie’s opinion of Computer Space is also worth noting.

[Vic Leslie] I was pretty bowled over by a machine there called Nutting Computer Space. I thought it was the most fabulous game I had ever played; I couldn't tear myself away from it. I felt at the time it was going to revolutionize the industry. However, I didn't feel it prudent at that time to purchase because of the technology involved in the game: it was way beyond anything we could handle in England. Even people here in America who were better judges than I were pessimistic about it.

On another note, last time I mentioned that Larry Rosenthal gave a talk at the recent CAX 2014. Well, the talk has been posted to YouTube and everyone who reads this blog should check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apg3W7yXULY

The introduction is missing, as are the last 15 minute or so but you can see the latter, along with talks by the Defender Team, Warren Davis, Jerry Lawson, and others here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRqRArfKpjY&list=UU_hFUQHaI7gbKYpzUMJJ2IA&index=7

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The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 5: 280 Zzzap

July 24, 2014, 10:18 pm

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

≪ Previous: Update On First Ten Arcade Video Games

In our last segment, we took a very brief look at the early years of Dave Nutting Associates and their work on some of the first microprocessor games. Developing games on microprocessors, however, requires programmers, something DNA initially didn’t have. To remedy the situation, they quickly hired two programmers from the University of Wisconsin computer science department – Tom McHugh and Jay Fenton.

Jay/Jamie Fenton

NOTE – Around 1998, Jay Fenton transitioned from male to female and is now Jamie Fenton. To avoid anachronism, I will refer to “Jay Fenton” in the body of this article while referring to her as Jamie in the quotes.

Jamie Fenton in 1982 and today

Born in Brunswick, New Jersey in 1954, Jay Fenton started programming at age 13 after teaching himself FORTRAN. His father, a chemist for Proctor and Gamble, would take his programs to work to show to his impressed coworkers. By 1970, Fenton’s family had moved to Wyoming, Ohio where Fenton taught himself BASIC programing. Programming wasn’t Fenton’s only interest. In 1972, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin as a film major but maintained his interest in computers. During his freshman year, he snuck into a FORTRAN programming class despite not meeting the prerequisites and was chastised for writing unauthorized programs. The incident eventually led to a job as research assistant in Professor Richard Allen Norhouse’s AI lab, where Fenton created a robot (Northouse wrote a book in 1972 titled A Computer Controlled Vehicular Robot) and created an animation program on a PDP-8 that used a light pen for input. At one point Fenton wheeled the PDP-8 across campus to show off his animation program for his theater class (Fenton also switched majors from film to engineering). Fenton also enjoyed gaming, playing mainframe classics like Lunar Lander and Space War (which he encountered at the Stanford AI lab around 1973). When DNA called Northouse looking for programmers, Northouse suggested McHugh and Fenton. Upon arriving at DNA, Fenton was, much to his chagrin, assigned to pinball, not video games (like many people, he thought that pinball games were controlled by the mob). Fenton's first project was a home version of Bally's classic Fireballpin, which had sold almost 4,000 copies in 1972. Released in October of 1976, the home version did even better with sales of around 10,000. After completing Fireball, Fenton finally got a chance to work on a video game, though it likely did little to counter his associations of the coin-op industry with gambling and organized crime. Over the Christmas break, Fenton and Ave Nutting designed one of the first video blackjack games.

[Jamie Fenton] My first videogame project at DNA was a blackjack machine, which was very similar to the ones that are now all over Las Vegas except that it was black and white and it had better odds. I actually did the odds out of the book which are a little too favorable to the player to actually do coin op. It was a smashing success as a prototype but it never went into production.

Midnite Racer/280 Zzzap

In 1976 Fenton began working on video games full time. His first game to make it into production was Amazing Maze, a more sophisticated version of Atari’s Gotcha (interestingly, Midway had earlier turned down an offer to license the Atari game). The game was the first to make use of a new hardware system designed by Dave Nutting and Jeff Frederiksen.

[Dave Nutting] With the introduction of the 8-bit microprocessor we immediately created the first 8-bit videogame system. My partner Jeff created [Amazing Maze] in order to test out his new hardware design. We took full advantage of the power of our new logic, adding the element of infinity into our game designs, with no predictable pattern, as in the rules of nature of quantum physics. In [Amazing Maze], the mazes were computer-generated and adapted to the player's skill.<Maze Games, Retro Gamer #129, May, 2014>

While they weren’t much fun to work on, such copycat games were common in the industry at the time

[Jamie Fenton] In 76 they moved DNA to Arlington Heights, near Chicago and then they started putting me on doing coin-ops. The first mission I had was more-or-less doing what was called "coin-op cloning". Back then there wasn't really copyright protection on video games. Everybody just ripped off everybody else's ideas. So they had me whip out a clone called Checkmate[note – a version of Gremlin’s Blockade] in a couple of weeks. The next game I did, which was another clone, was called 280 Zzzap and on that one we did get a license for so I got the source code for one guy's implementation of it and at least used the routines that calculated how high the poles were etc. That was another sort of six-week wonder. It was about then that the copyright laws started evolving and I think that was the last one I did that was a knock-off.

The "one guy" whose code Fenton used was probably Ted Michon (who'd designed Micronetics' version of the game, Night Racer).

[Ted Michon] Midway called with a problem. They had licensed the game, but planned simply to program it from scratch on their reprogrammable system from Dave Nutting Associates…It became clear that their system just didn't have the horsepower to perform the Night Racer perspective transformations in the conventional manner (i.e. multiplications and divisions). I explained how I had done it with logs and antilogs and later sent them the optimized tables I had computed.

After Micronetics released their game, company president Bill Prast liked it so much he showed it to Midway co-founder Hank Ross and the two companies reportedly struck a licensing deal whereby both would release their games at the same time. According to Nurburgring designer Reiner Foerst, Iggy Wolverton (Midway's other co-founder) paid him a visit and led him to believe that Midway was interested in licensing the game from his as well, though he had no intention of doing so.

Whatever its origins, Midnite Racer hewed closely to the original. It did, however, include a few novel features, including a flag-waving referee (perhaps borrowed from the Midway California version??). The game also featured Midway's trademark mirrored-in graphics with 3D, fluorescent background images of a night sky and the front end of a 280Z. Another interesting feature was an onscreen instrument panel that displayed a speedometer, the player's score and time and the previous game's score (the game used an odd scoring system that awarded .01 points for each mile driven). The instrument panel was surrounded by a wood-grain bezel located behind the projected image of the car's front end, making it look like it was a separate, dedicated dashboard.

For video game historians one of the game’s most intriguing features may have been one of the most mundane. When a player crashed, interjections like “WAM” and “BANG” appeared on the screen (ala Sea Wolf). One of the phrases that appeared was “ZORK”. One might assume that this was a reference to the popular computer text adventure of the same name, but this is not so. The original MIT PDP-10 version of the game was not created (or even started) until 1977. So was Fenton receiving divine inspiration from the game design gods? Did the Zork designers borrow their title from Fenton’s coin-op speed burner? Or was it all a massive coincidence and they both just happened to pick the same word? None of the above. The term “zork” was already in use among the MIT hacker community (accounts differ as to what it meant – Wikipedia claims it was a term for an unfinished program while co-designers Tim Anderson and Stu Galley claim it was a nonsense word usually used as a verb) and had likely made its way to the University of Wisconsin where Fenton (or somebody at DNA) appropriated it for use in Midnite Racer.

In any event, Midnite Racer was introduced at the 1976 AMOA show in November. Confusion likely reigned on the show floor as two other versions of the same game - Micronetics’ Night Racer and Atari’s Night Driver– appeared at the very same show. The name Midnite Racer, however, didn’t last long. After the show, Bally cooked up a promotion that included a grand prize of a 1977 Datsun 280Z. Realizing that their new video driving game would be a perfect tie-in, they renamed it 280 Zzzap (the onscreen title was actually "Datsun 280 ZZZap") and began featuring the contest on flyers for the game.In early 1978, the prize auto was finally awarded to a Rhode Island operator (by then, it had been “upgraded” to a 1978 model – Bally also gave away a 280Z as grand prize in their National Pinball Tournament a few months later). Midnite Racer/280 Zzzap wasn’t the only Fenton game to undergo a name change. 1977’s Road Runner– a video rifle game with a desert theme, was renamed Desert Gun. This time, however, the change wasn’t for promotional reasons.

[Jamie Fenton] We did a shooting game that we called Desert Gun. It was originally called Road Runner. That was probably when the copyright problems started [in the industry] because we wanted to call it Road Runner and the Warner Brothers people didn’t particularly want us to.

Fenton went on to work a number of other games, the most notable coin-ops being Gorf and The Adventures of Robby Roto, and later went on to form (along with fellow DNA alums Mark Canter and Mark Pierce) MacroMind, one of the pioneering producers of multimedia authoring software with titles like MusicWorks and VideoWorks (later renamed MacroMedia Director). And 280 Zzzap? While it is little remembered today, it was actually a fairly popular game. RePlay listed it as the #10 game of 1977 while Play Meter had it at #9. The game was also ported to the Bally Professional Arcade. One reason that it (not to mention Night Racer and Nurburgring) are all but unknown today, however, is that they were overshadowed by a much more popular version of the game – Atari’ s Night Driver. We will take up the story of that game in our next segment.

A very poor quality picture of Midnite Racer (misspelled) at the 1976 AMOA show

A much better picture of the game (now renamed 280 Zzzap and again misspelled) at the ATE in January, 1977

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

February 16, 2014, 7:57 pm

≫ Next: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 6: Night Driver (???!!??)

≪ Previous: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 5: 280 Zzzap

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 its 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, accounted 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 (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 6: Night Driver (???!!??)

July 31, 2014, 9:34 pm

≫ Next: A "Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 1

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

Over the past several weeks, I have examined what I call the “pre-history” of Atari’s 1976 3-D, first-person driving classic Night Driver, tracing its origins from what is believed to be the original (Reiner Foerst’s Nurburgring) to Digital Games/Micronetics’ Night Racer to Bally/Midway’s Midnite Racer/280 Zzzap. While these games may have preceded it, Atari’s version of the game, Night Driver is far and away the best remembered

In 1976, Atari was the undisputed king of coin-op video game hill (at least in the US – in Japan, Sega and Taito were the top domestic manufacturers). Bally/Midway was a distant second and the rest of the American manufacturers were farther back still. Night Driver wasn’t Atari’s first driving game. That honor goes to 1974’s Gran Trak 10. Nor was it Atari’s first “sit-down” driving game (that would be 1975’s Hi-Way). It wasn’t even Atari’s first microprocessor driving game (Indy 4) By the time of Night Driver, in fact, Atari (and its sister company Kee) had already produced 10 arcade driving games - and that number only includes auto driving games, not games where you drove other vehicles.

One thing that was relatively new to Atari in 1976 was the microprocessor. In April, Atari had released its first microprocessor based games: Quiz Show (based on the Signetics 2650) and Tank 8 (base on the Motorola 6800). One thing that microprocessors required was dedicated programmers and in 1975, Atari’s coin-op division began hiring them. The first was Tom Hogg in 1975 (who worked on Tank 8). The second was Dave Shepperd in February, 1976. Shepperd would go on to design Night Driver. It was not, however, his first game for Atari.

Shepperd had been bitten by the programming bug when he got a look at Nutting’s Computer Space. Enthralled by the game, he decided to try programming on his own and bought an Altair 8800. Released in 1975 by an Albuquerque, New Mexico company called MITS, the Altair was one of the first “personal computers” available to the general public. Calling the Altair a personal computer might be a bit of a stretch. It was really more of a hobbyist’s kit than a practical consumer product. The machine had no monitor, no storage device, and no manual. The only input device was a set of 8 toggle switches that could be used to enter data a bit at a time while output consisted of a series of LEDs on the front of the machine. If you wanted anything else, you had to build it yourself - and teach yourself how (and if you turned the thing off, you lost all your work and had to start again). Like many of the other computer enthusiasts of the time, Shepperd was up to the challenge (or maybe he just had no other choice). After creating a video subsystem that allowed him to connect the Altair to a monitor and adding a keyboard he’d found in a dumpster, Shepperd began programming games for the primitive system. Flyball was his first project at Atari.

[Dave Shepperd] The curious thing about [Flyball] was that I was assigned to do it and I knew almost nothing about baseball and neither did anyone else connected with the project…Long after the game had been out of production, I heard from our marketing department that a bar someplace had been torn up during a fight over the game. I never did learn all the facts, but I believe the fight started because one player thought the game had cheated him. As I pondered how the game might cheat, I sheepishly realized that there was indeed at least one rather serious bug in the game. Whenever a batter was walked, I advanced all the base-runners on base, even if there was an open base between them. Walking in the third base runner with nobody on second could be called “cheating”. I wondered if an undeserved run had caused one player to “win” which had an adverse effect on world peace.

Not long after Flyball, Shepperd started working on Night Driver. Shepperd recalls the genesis of the game as follows.

[Dave Shepperd]I was given a piece of paper with a picture of a game cabinet that had a small portion of the screen visible. I don't recall if it was an actual flyer for the game or simply a Xerox of the front page of the flyer. I recall it being German or maybe I was just told it was a German game. I never saw the game play nor did I know what scoring was used on that game, only that there were a few little white squares showing. With that germ of an idea, out popped NightDriver. I have fond memories of spending time watching the white lines in the street and fence posts whiz by my car as I drove to and from work trying to work out in my mind's eye what kind of math I can use to make little squares on a TV kind of do the same thing.<arcade-history.com/?n=night-driver-upright-model&page=detail&id=26054>

If the flyer Shepperd saw was in German, it was almost certainly for Reiner Foerst's Nurburgring. Atari historian Marty Goldberg, however, reports that Shepperd was actually shown a flyer for Night Racer, which Atari had licensed from Micronetics. Wherever he go the idea, Shepperd was unaware of all but the barest bones of the concept (this may have been a deliberate attempt by Atari to protect themselves from patent infringement claims – though given that they had a license for the game, this seems unlikely).

Of course, the barest bones was pretty much all there was to the game. In terms of graphics, Night Driver was far more primitive than games like LeMans and Gran Trak. The only computer-generated imagery consisted of two lines of sparse white rectangles representing posts delineating the sides of an imaginary road (the image of the nose of a car that appeared on the screen was merely a sticker). The conceit was that you were driving at night, and hence no landmarks were visible. But Atari put those rectangles to good use. Night Driver was a classic example of making a lot out of very little. Though the graphics may have been simple, the game’s 3-D, first-person perspective created a “you are there” illusion that added immeasurably to its realism. This was especially true of the sit-down version that Atari released in April, 1977 (though the upright actually sold far more units). At the time, Atari still had a number of sit-down cabinets left over from 1975’s Hi-Wayand decided to use them for a sit-down version of Night Driver. So how does Night Driver compare to its predecessors (Nurburgring, Night Racer, and 280 Zzzap[1])? Not having played all the games in their coin-op format, it’s hard to tell. In terms of basic gameplay and graphics, the games were very similar. It’s the trappings that distinguish them. Nurburgring appears to have had better sound, though that is really a guess. 280 Zzzap appears to have had more impressive bells and whistles – including its pseudo “dashboard”, the flag-waving referee, and the fluorescent, mirrored-in background graphics (Atari’s version used a stick-on decal to represent the player’s car, though it may have had smoother gameplay). Comparing Night Driver to Night Racer is even more difficult since I could find little in the way of a detailed description of the latter and no YouTube video of gameplay (the game is also quite rare). Looking at the flyers for Night Racer, however, it appears to have been a notch below Night Driver in terms of graphics and, while it had a sit-down cabinet, Atari’s looks much sleeker. In terms of popularity, of course, it was no contest. Nurburgring and Night Racer saw no real success in the US market. 280 Zzzap was listed at the #10 game of 1977 by RePlay and #9 by Play Meter. That same year, Night Driver ranked #6 on both charts. But that fact alone doesn’t tell the full story. After its initial popularity 280 Zzzap quickly faded from the scene (though it did earn an “honorable mention” in RePlay’s 1978 year-end summary). Not so Night Driver. Play Meter listed it as the #9 game of 1978 and the #11 game of 1979 and the game appeared RePlay’s monthly charts as late as January, 1981. Why the difference? While Night Driver may have had smoother gameplay (or may not – I haven’t played the other games), the main factor may have been the simple fact that Night Driver was made by Atari. Another likely factor was that Atari also produced a very popular Atari 2600 version of the game (ported by Rob Fulop and probably the version most people remember today). In any event, for those who were gaming in the late 1970s, Night Driver stands out as one of the more seminal driving games of the era (even if it wasn’t the first of its kind).

[1] While the last two were released at the same time as Night Driver, they were apparently in development earlier.

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A "Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 1

August 15, 2014, 10:09 pm

≫ Next: A "Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 2

≪ Previous: The (Pre) History of Night Driver - Part 6: Night Driver (???!!??)

Today I thought I’d start a series on a subject near and dear to my bookworm heart – video game books. Several months back, I did an overview post on this subject. This time I want to go into a bit more detail.

Starting in 1982, a spate of video game books hit the shelves. My own list shows 56 different titles published that years along. While I didn't have all 56, I bought every one I could get my hands on. In the 21^st century, when both video games and video game books are legion, it’s hard to explain just how cool these things were to a teen or pre-teen video game geek in the 1980s. I can still remember clearly one day when a friend of mine from high school walked into band hall (yes, I was a band geek) with the first issue of a magazine called Electronic Games tucked under his arm. When I saw it, my jaw hit the floor. An entire magazine about nothing but video games!!!???? Are you kidding me!!??? The cover story was on “Asteroids Vs. Space Invaders”. I was hooked instantly and, starting with issue 2, I bought every one and read them to tatters. Many gamers pored over these things with the intensity of a prepubescent ogling the latest issue of Playboy. Electronic Games immediately replaced the Sears Christmas Wish Book as my #1 source of consumerist daydreams. I had an Atari 2600 and (later) and Apple II but if I’d had unlimited funds, I would have had an Intellivision, a ColecoVision, an Atari 800, a Commodore, an Arcadia 2001 (how I wanted one of those!)…you get the picture. I remember dreaming about getting all of the Coleco tabletop arcade games and the various handheld arcade ports and starting my own miniature arcade (the idea of having my own actual arcade was more than my teenage brain could handle – such was reserved for the likes of Ricky Schroeder).

A Bit of Pre-History

Anyway, enough reminiscing. Let’s look at the books. So what was the very first video game book, coin-op or otherwise? Actually, I don’t really know. The first one I have been able to find was something called The Coin-Operated and Home Electronic Games Market by Frost and Sullivan, published in 1976. This was a market report on video games, and some might argue that this wasn’t really a “book” at all. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to come by. A quick search of Worldcat shows that the Library of Congress has a copy. At one point, I was planning on taking a research trip there, but once I largely completed my collection of RePlay and Play Meter (and found out that they didn’t have a complete collection of either), my ardor for a visit somewhat cooled. In 1977 came Len Buckwalter’s Video Games (Grosset & Dunlap) and Video Games: A Complete Guide (Tempo), which some have said are the same book. I can’t say, since I haven’t seen the former. I do, however, have a copy of the latter. Since it is a home video games book, I won’t cover it in too much detail. Here are some photos.

Len Buckwalter (presumably in his days at Electronics Illustrated)

Oh, what the heck. I can’t resist a LITTLE bit of history – at least on the author. Len Buckwalter was actually quite well known for his electronics hobbyist books of the 1960s and 70s (he wrote 22 of them for Howard W. Sams). His love of electronics started as a teen when a friend visited and told him that a kid in the neighborhood had built a radio that he used to actually talk to people from around the world. Buckwalter rushed over and saw the kid talking to someone in Albany. Albany was just 90 miles away but to Buckwalter it was like he was talking to someone from “Alpha Centauri”. It was the start of a lifetime in radio and electronics. Before long, Buckwalter got his HAM license and began reading everything he could get his hands on about radio. In the late 40s, Buckwalter enrolled at New York University to study electronics – with an eye toward a career in radio broadcasting rather than engineering (during his student years, he worked nights at WINS radio station). After graduating in 1951, he was drafted for the Korean War. Because of his aptitude wit Morse code, he want assigned to the Army Signal Corps. After returning home, Buckwalter worked at a number of radio stations in Trenton, Boston, and other areas. As the low man on the totem pole, however, he was invariably assigned to the night shift, which wreaked havoc on his personal life. Miserable, Buckwalter quit. At the time, a friend and mentor was writing for a magazine called Electronics Illustrated and suggested that Buckwalter do the same. Buckwalter was quickly hired as a technical editor and column writer (in 1961 he started a column called CB Corner on Citizen’s Band radio). In his spare time, he wrote manuals for General Electric’s series of electronics projects kits, like the Basic Transistor Lab. Dissatisfied with the quality of construction articles he was seeing, Buckwalter eventually quit and launched a career as a freelance writer, penning a series of well-known, and well-loved build-it-yourself electronics books like Electronic Toys and Games You Can Build. His most famous work (one site called it “legendary”) was Having Fun With Transistors (now THERE’S a title only a geek could love), which included 13 build-it-yourself projects using transistors, including Boris, the Talking Skull and The Electronic Eyeball. In later years, Buckwalter turned to another love – avionics. (For more on Buckwalter, included audio interviews, check out http://semiconductormuseum.com/HistoricProfiles/Buckwalter_Profile_Index.htm)

The Electronic Eyeball

Rounding out the 1970s were a number of books on repairing video games, including How to Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games and How To Repair Video Games (both published by Tab Books in 1978) and McGraw-Hill’s Electronic Games: Design, Programming, and Troubleshooting (1979). Aside from another Frost & Sullivan volume, these are the only video game titles I’ve been able to turn up from the 1970s. From looking at them, it would seem that publishers considered video games a hobbyist fad which, if true, is a bit surprising given the popularity of the Atari 2600 (not to mention arcade games). I would have thought that someone would have produced a book or strategy guide for the 2600 in the late '70s (maybe they did and I don’t know about it).

The Golden Age

The 1970s video game book offerings were sparse. The video game publishing industry didn’t really take off until late 1981 when the first issue of Electronic Games and Tom Hirschfeld’s How to Master the Video Games appeared. Normally, I’d have started with those, but instead I’m taking a different tack. Since strategy guides were the most common titles, I’m saving them for last. Instead, I’m going to start with what was seemingly the least interesting genre – cartoon and humor books. Now I have to say at the outset that the “humor” in these books doesn’t always hold up – at least for me. Maybe it’s the fact that they were written for pre-teens but I don’t think that’s the only reason. Something tells me that today’s pre-teen would find these things far too tame (though perhaps that’s a commentary on kids today rather than the books themselves). Then again, I grew up on Mad, Cracked, and Crazy, which featured much edgier humor that has stood the test of time (though perhaps only through the rose-colored glasses of memory). OTOH, I also read tons of cartoon books like Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, The Wizard of Id, and even (yes, I'm ashamed to admit it), The Family Circus.The Family Circus was about the wussiest series on earth but people read it, so maybe kids enjoyed the video game cartoon books after all. In any event I didn't exactly fall out of my chair laughing at any of these books. Perhaps this is because this was the one genre that I didn’t actually read back in the day and have only done so recently as an adult. If I had read them in my teen years when they were published, I would probably wax much more nostalgic about them (judging something you loved in your youth is well-nigh impossible as the nostalgia factor invariably overwhelms your objectivity). Nonetheless, I did enjoy “reading” most of them. More important, when I did a bit of research, I unearthed a few facts that I, at least, found quite interesting.

Video game cartoon books were a mini genre in the 1980s, with a handful of titles published. Let’s start with Pac-Mania.

Pac-Mania was a book of Pac-Man “cartoons”, one to page, almost all of them similar to the following.

It didn’t really work for me but some of them were kind of cute. OTOH, I actually quite enjoyed some of the cartoonist's later work (check out the Cartoon Gallery at the link below for examples). At least somebody must have enjoyed these, however, because the book was popular enough to merit a sequel.

Pac-Mania was credited to “Haller Schwarz”, which was actually the name of an advertising agency and the pen name for a group of writers including Dick Chodkoswki, Dan Dixon, and Rick Teich. Of these, I was able to find more info on Chodkoswki. Born in Connecticut, Chodkowski became interested in drawing at an early age. He won school honors (and a mention in the local paper) when he drew a picture of Santa Claus using only numbers and mathematical symbols. After moving to California at age 13 and finishing high school, Chodkowski enrolled in the prestigious L.A. Art Center, only to have to drop out when he could no longer afford the tuition. Determined, he took a job at the Post Office to earn money to continue. Before he could do so, he was drafted and, after serving for two years on active duty, returned the Post Office and to the Art Center. He never graduated, but he did go on to a long career as an artist for various ad agencies (including Haller Schwarz). According to his website, Chodkoswki created the Funburger and the Fun Meal for Burger Chef, as well as the characters Burger Chef & Jeff. For those too young to remember. Burger Chef was a major fast food chain in the 1960s and 70s. At its peak, in 1973, it had 1,050 locations. (I personally liked Burger Chef and its burgers far more than McDonald’s).

Created in 1974, the Fun Meal was later ripped off by McDonald’s for its Happy Meal (as with other things Burger Chefian, I preferred the Fun Meal to the Happy Meal). Among his other work was the Kool-Aid comics and Cookie Crisp cereal, another concept Chodkoswki claims he came up with, along with its mascot, the Cookie Wizard. In addition to the two Pac-Mania volumes, Chodkoswi wrote 5 other books (including Snakes Alive, It’s a Reptile Clive). He later created Because I Care– a series of greeting cards promoting condom use that merited a mention on The Tonight Show. For more on Dick Chodowski, check out his website:

http://www.dickchodkowski.com/

There were a number of Kool-Aid comic book series, and I'm not sure which one Chodkowski worked on, but from the art, I'm guessing it was this one.

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A "Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 2

August 23, 2014, 6:38 pm

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Next up is another Pac-Mancartoon book, written by Mike Thaler and published by Pocket Books in 1982. (I am still waiting for my copy to come in the mail, so the photos below are from another website)

While this one goes beyond the single-panel drawings of Pac-Man found in Pac-Mania, it does tread a similar path, with many of the cartoons based on puns. In also includes other types of cartoons like the one below on “The Birth of Pac-Man”.

As with Pac-Mania’s Dick Chodksowski, Mike Thaler has an interesting story. Billing himself as “America’s Riddle King”, Thaler has penned over 200 children’s books, for including the Blue Lagoon series of picture and chapter books (published by Scholastic), the Christian-themed Tales From the Back Pew series (“The Preacher Creature Strikes on Sunday”, “Walking the Plank to the Baptism Plank” etc.), and a number of other tiles (“A Hippopotamus Ate the Teacher”, “Cinderella Bigfoot”), including over 45 riddle books. For most of the books other than the riddle books, Thaler wrote the text while Jared Lee provided the illustrations (for the riddle books, Thaler did both, as it seems he did with The Pac-Man Riddle and Joke Book). He also created “The Adventures of Letterman”, a popular series of animated skits spoofing super-heroes that appeared on the PBS educational series Electric Company.

Mike Thaler - from the author's website www.mikethaler.com

Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Thaler originally drew cartoons for adults until 1961, when Ursula Nordstrom, editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row, saw one of his cartoons in a magazine and suggested that he write for children. He sat down and wrote “the Magic Boy” about a boy with various magical powers (like the ability to turn off the moon so he could go to sleep). He solid it the next day and followed up with “Penny Pencil”. For more on Mike, visit his website at www.mikethaler.com.

Next up is Shoot the Robot, Then Shoot Mom by Tim Skelly

I don't actually have a copy of this one as it is a bit rich for my blood (Amazon is currently one for $100). This is a collection of 73 video game cartoons created by Tim Skelly. Yes - THAT Tim Skelly. The one who designed Star Castle, Rip Off, Armor Attack, Warrior, Reactor etc. While I don't have the book, I did manage to find a few of the cartoons in the June, 1983 issue of Electronic Fun and the April, 1983 issue of Video Games

As an interesting note, the back cover of the book featured a photo of Skelly lying atop a row of Reactor machines. According to a poster on KLOV, Skelly got in trouble for the photograph either because it leaked the game or because it leaked the factory layout.
Here's another example of Skelly's cartooning skills, from a tongue-in-cheek article on the history of video games that was printed in 1979 in either RePlay or Play Meter (I forget which)

Finally, we come to what may be the most significant of the video game cartoon books, Blips! The First Book of Video Game Funnies, by Jovial Bob Stine with illustrations by Bryan Hendrix.

This one had cartoons that were a bit more Mad-magazine in style. Note that the last example includes only the second page of a two-page gag. In the first, the kids tell mom that she should let them play video games because they can do so indoors and avoid getting into fights (personally, I like it better without page one - seems more like a random act of violence).

Illustrator Bryan Hendrix owned Bryan Hendrix Funny Pictures, which he opened in 1981. He has illustrated a number of other books, including 100 Monsters in My School.

But that's what's so significant about the book.

So what IS so significant about Blips?

It's the author - Jovial Bob Stine.

Stine penned a number of books for Scholastic, including 101 Silly Monster Jokes, Don't Stand in the Soup, and Pork and Beans Play Date.
But that's not the significant part.

Stine also founded Scholastic's 1970s teen magazine Bananas.

OK. I'll pause for a minute while you recover from the 70s nostalgia OD (who here remembers Cheryl Tiegs? Who hadn't thought of her for years until they read this post?).

....

Once again, for those too young to remember, Bananas was one of two magazines produced by Scholastic Books. Bananas was aimed at high schoolers while Dynamite was aimed at junior high school students. I read them both, but since I was in JHS at the time, I mostly read Dynamite (remember Count Morbida anyone?), though I occasionally cadged my older brother's copy of Bananas. Back in the day, which is to say MY day, you used to be able to order Scholastic Books right from your classroom. IIRC, every year, or maybe twice a year, they would give out lists of the various books that you could order and they would deliver them to you in class. (True confessions time - I was the dork who ordered more books than anyone else).

But anyway, that's STILL not the significant part.
The significant part is that in 1986 Stine wrote a kiddie horror novel called Blind Date, launching a new career as a children's horror author. Yes, that's right "Jovial Bob" Stine is none other than R.L. Stine - the "Stephen King of children's horror" and creator of such series as Goosebumps and Fear Street.

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A Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 3

September 6, 2014, 6:28 pm

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Not all of the video game "humor" books of the 1980s were aimed at kids and teens. And not all were pro-video games. Two were aimed at adult audiences and poked fun at the video game craze. First up is The Official I Hate Video Games Handbook by Emily Prager with art by Frank Morris, published by Pocket Books in 1982.

So who is Emily Prager? It appears that she is the Emily Prager described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Prager

While the book itself contains no author information, the New York Times book review of Prager's short story collection A Visit From the Footbinder notes that Frank Morris did the dust jacket illustration for the book. In addition, A Visit From the Footbinder was published by Simon and Schuster, the parent company of Pocket Books. So, while this may not be the same Emily Prager, it seems likely that it is.

If, she's had a rather interesting career: she was an actress on the soap opera The Edge of Night for four years, a writer and (briefly) a cast member on Saturday Night Live, a writer and performer in the cult film Mr. Mike's Mondo Video and a voice actor in the cartoon Shame of the Jungle, a contributing editor to National Lampoon and Penthouse, a columnist for the Village Voice, and is currently teaching English in Islamabad.

Emily Prager in 1971 from The Edge of Night

I haven't read any of Prager's other work, but I'm guessing I Hate Video Games isn't one of her finer efforts. It starts with a brief history of video games.

Then comes the longest section "Know Your Enemy" - about 30 pages describing various satirical video games.

Next up is a photo essay "The Tragic Lie of a Video Game Addict".

Then we have a look at the physical effects of video game addiction, the real words to "Punk Man Fever", and a section of video game withdrawal camps.

Chapter 9, "If Video Games Are Not Stopped, This Will Be Our Future" consists entirely of the following drawing:

Hmm - looks kind of like a Virtual Boy to me. Life imitating comedic art?

The book ends with a look at the "final video game" - limited nuclear war.

This one was not really one of my favorites.

In a similar vein was I Hate Videots: Today the Arcade, Tomorrow the World by Mark Baker, published by Fireside in 1982. Again, it was aimed at more mature audiences (it has a little T&A).

This one starts with "Electronic Apocalypse Now: An Introduction to the Video Threat". Then, like Prager's book, offers up a tongue-in-cheek view of the origins of video games.

By the way, an official Golden Age Historian No Prize to the first person to identify the video game player in this picture (not Ronnie - the other guy).

Again, we have a "Know Your Enemy" section, but this one is about "how to spot a videot".

Next Baker offers psychological profiles of the videot, based on their favorite game. The Battlezone Video, for instance is "... a sneak, and a ruthless sneak at that - he'll blindside you every time he gets a chance. He seems like any other insignificant, fawning worm in horn-rimmed glasses...until he gets behind you with a brick bat. The POW! A direct hit, the wimp scores". Famous Battlezone Videos include David Stockman, Willard, Stephen King, and Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Next Baker looks at "invalid videots" (home video game players), the love life of the videot and two more sections similar to those found in the Prager book, a section on the effects of video game addiction and one on deprogramming the videot.

Finally Baker discusses dealing with the "terminal videot" and ends with a manifesto for the "Video Liberation Army".

Once again, not my cup of tea.
Next time, we'll look at some kiddie video game fiction.

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A Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 4

September 8, 2014, 10:58 am

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Today, we look at one of the more interesting of the kiddie video game book publishers - Kid Stuff Records, which produced a number of video game-themed book and record sets (and albums) in the 1980s.

If you are over 30, you probably remember listening to "read-along" book-and-record sets as a kid. These consisted of a short book along with a record (later a cassette tape) that you could play while reading it ("SEE the pictures, HEAR the story, READ the book").
The record contained a reading/dramatization of the text , along with sound effects (including the standard "turn the page now" sound).

A number of companies produced them, including Disneyland Records (the market leader):

Peter Pan Records:

and, my personal favorite, Power Records (a sub-label of Peter Pan)

(Note check out powerrecord.blogspot.com for more info on Power Records).

Kid Stuff, a dba name for I.J.E. Distributing, was formed in Hollywood, Florida in 1977 by former Disneyland Records employees Jerry Weiner and Irv Schwartz, producing titles like The Story of Jack & the Beanstalk and Mostly Ghostly. The idea was to produce cheap records for kids. Kid Stuff also produced records that went a bit beyond the standard sugary-sweet fairy tales and other stories typical of children's records of the time with titles like Songs From Saturday Night Fever and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The company really started to grow (at least according to a 1982 Cleveland Plain Dealer article) when they hired Sheldon Tirk as VP of sales. A graduate of Ohio State, Tirk had been in the record business for 20 years, and had served as national sales manager for Smash Records, where he had four #1 hit records with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Shortly after arriving at Kid Stuff, Tirk contacted American Greetings about the possibility of licensing its Holly Hobby greeting card character. Instead, American Greetings suggested Tirk license a new character they were about to introduce called Strawberry Shortcake. Tirk made the deal and it proved to be a bonanza or Kid Stuff, who followed with licensing deals for Fat Albert, the Pink Panther, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Flash Gordon, and Looney Tunes.
By 1982, Kid Stuff was the second largest manufacturer of children's records and tapes (behind 800-pound gorilla Disney).

Starting in 1982, Kid Stuff began producing a series of video game themed books and records. That isn't unusual, given the popularity of video games at the time. Nor was it unusual that they struck a deal with Atari. What WAS unusual, however, was the four (at least) Atari titles that they picked: Asteroids, Missile Command, Super Breakout, and Yars' Revenge. While three of these were coin-op titles, the cover art on the records was from the Atari 2600 versions.

Let's take a look at the titles:

The Story of Asteroids

I don't have a link to the full record for this one, but this guy made a cool movie based on an abridged version of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcJYBgzsB8

I will also put the full text at the end of the post.

Kid Stuff offered two main types of video game products. The first was the book-and-record sets, that usually included a 7" record (while it had a center hole that was the size of a 45, it was actually 33 1/3 RPM). The second was an LP (with no book) that included stories and music. They often made both for a given title. Such was the case with Asteroids. We'll start with the book and record.

If you were wondering how you could make a narrative story out of Asteroids, join the club. As you will see below, the rather thin plot involves Captain John Strohmeyer of the "Outer Contact Recon Patrol", who is on his way to investigate an emergency transmission from an unmanned robot ore-carrier that was on its way from "United Federated Mining Operation 6" when it disappeared. I'll let you read the book for the rest of the story. I have to admit that it is far from a great story (though it was written for kids). It has one of the hallmarks of bad science fiction - the overuse of pointless technical jargon. You know, like one of those books where everyone brushes their teeth with their "laser toothbrush" and eats "astro pancakes" for breakfast. Examples here abound: "ion rocket engines", "gas decay boosters", "binary hybrid computers", "magnetic bubble memories". As is typical of such stories, they also misuse the jargon on occasion. At one point we're told that the computer Cynthia "…went haywire…90 light days into the mission."

Despite its shortcomings, however, I can't help but love this thing. It stands as one of the strangest now-forgotten relics of the golden age of video games.

Asteroids

Full audio here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPQaSLoznB0

This one has a different story than the book-and-record (though they both involve battling asteroids). The album starts with the "Atari Theme" - a rather dull, stately instrumental that includes annoying laser sounds that seem like something from a bad disco record. Then comes part one of the story. This time the star is Captain Jim Stanton who, along with his new rookie co-pilot Chip Brain, finds himself transported 600 years into the past to the year 1983, where Earth is threatened by a massive asteroid. This one is more of a dramatization than a reading and has multiple characters. Once again, it features the techno jargon (Stanton's sister Zora 237 lives in Pan Asia - "After one week on earth, I'm as nervous as a Protolean android in a jump suit. I hear they cleaned up the place a lot after the industrial techno-freeze…" - shades of Spock being ".. more tight-lipped than an Aldeberan shellmouth" here). And, once again, there are errors ("silicone chips").

The story is interrupted by two songs. First is "Asteroids", featuring the chorus

Asteroids… Asteroids
Photon torpedoes ready
Shields up, hold 'em steady
Asteroids…Asteroids …got one!! …Asteroids

Next is "Time Warp", a vocoder techno tune with robotic vocals. Then comes the conclusion of the story (Does Jim save the day? What do YOU think?) followed by a reprise of the Atari Theme..

The record (like almost all, if not all, the Kid Stuff video game records) was produced by John Braden. The songs are credited to John Braden and "J. Waxman".

So who is John Braden? One possibility is that he was the same John Braden who was a writer, producer, and director on shows like Magnum PI and Knight Rider and who provided the voice of Senator Woden in the Max Payne video game series.

According to a post here, however, the Kid Stuff John Braden was a different person..

http://windfarmisrecords.blogspot.com/2009/02/john-braden-19.html

In a response to the post, someone who claims to be Braden's sister claims that the Kid Stuff John Braden was born in 1946 in North Carolina and died in New York City in 1987 (the Magnum PI John Braden was born in 1949 and died in 2004). He had nine gold records with Kid Stuff and worked on "dozens" of musicals. J. Waxman is apparently arranger Jeff Waxman. Braden (if it is the same Braden as the Kid Stuff one) released an eponymous album in 1968 on A&M records. Ry Cooder played guitar on a few of the tracks, as did Chris Ethridge and Sneaky Pete of Flying Burrito Brothers, Richard Bell (keyboardist for Janis Joplin and The Band), and folk musician Bruce Langhorne.

The Story of Missile Command

Full audio here: http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/storybooks/missilecommand/

You can also download it from the Computer Museum here:
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=39639&type=Memorabilia
But I wasn't able to get it to work.

This one is very similar to its Asteroids counterpart. Like Asteroids, the story here is is a bit boring and involves First Office Ed Matthews attempt to defend the planet Zardon from an attack by the Krytolians. I'll spare you the details this time (you can listen to the audio if you're interested)

Missile Command

Story Audio (no songs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdqmsdrm78

Once again, the record features a more in-depth story with different characters (and much more background on the Krytolians). There are also two songs (in addition to the Atari Theme): Missile Command and Zardon Commanders.

The Story of Atari Super Breakout

Full Audio and Text: http://www.codehappy.net/breakout/

If Asteroids seems an unlikely candidate for drama, Super Breakout is even moreso. Nonetheless, Kid Stuff managed to make a story out of it. This one involves a space shuttle hauling a load of ore from Io to "New California" - a space center orbiting Venus - when a huge, multicolored force field appears. I didn't find an LP counterpart to this one.

The Story of Yars' Revenge

Yars' Revenge

Full Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHZKPc0z30

I couldn't find a copy or audio for the book and record but did find audio for the LP.
The story on the LP is a recruiting talk to a young Yar warrior as he prepares to defend his insectoid race from invasion and exact "Yars' Revenge". It includes a history of the Yars, instructions on how to defend the Yars, and a tearful goodbye from Father and Mother Yar. The songs this time are Yars' Revenge (another techno track that I actually sort of like - but only sort of) and Fly Yar Warriors (plus the now unbearably annoying Atari Theme for a fifth and sixth time).

According to the comments on the youtube video, the narrator here was none other than Peter Fernandez, voice of Speed Racer, who also did voices for a handful of Power Records titles (he was Peter Parker/Spider Man on Spider Man: Mark of the Man Beast).

Shockingly, given his other work, Yars' Revenge must have been highly regarded by some, since it was read at a 2010 memorial to Fernandez that aired on the program Destinies on WUSB, student radio station at the University of New York:
http://captphilonline.com/Destinies_2010.html

Not all of Kid Stuff's video game records were for Atari games.
Next time, we'll take a look at their other efforts: Donkey Kong and the Pac-Man series (which included at least 9 different titles).

In the meantime, here's the full text of The Story of Asteroids (sorry for the poor scans)

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A Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 5

September 13, 2014, 7:13 am

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Today we finish our look at Kid Stuff records by reviewing their non-Atari video game titles.

Donkey Kong

Full audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umXeQ-Hlt0o&list=PLLDY_jB5qI-2NKQFX1YHPHQ1v_btEXFHf

Unlike the other Kid Stuff records, this one doesn't have a stand-along story. Instead, it incorporates a short story into the intros for the album's five songs. It also has an opening/closing theme.

I have to admit that I didn't actually listen to the songs (which are aimed at kids). I DID listen to the story, however (such as it was).

In it, we learn that Donkey Kong ("the world's biggest gorilla") used to live at the Gamesville zoo, until he was sold to the circus after the zoo was torn down. In this story, Mario is not a carpenter, but a pizza maker and Pauline is his delivery girl (with a little hanky panky on the side???). The zoo is now a construction site and one of the workers calls to order a pizza. At the same time, Donkey Kong has escaped from the circus and is headed for the same construction site. What happens? You'll have to listed to the record (I'm sure the suspense is killing you).

So, is this story filling in details of the Donkey Kong mythos or is it a reboot? Are the Donkey Kong purists up in arms over the changes? Is this stuff part of the Donkey Kong canon?

Pac-Man Titles

The bulk of Kid Stuff's video game books/records featured Pac-Man, with at least 9 different titles featuring the character, beginning in 1982 (while some of them have a 1980 copyright, they weren't created until 1982 - I'm guessing that this was the copyright date for the game, not the records). Speaking of the Pac-Man deal, Sheldon Tirk said "We lucked out with Pac-Man, the Japanese character. We happened to ask to make records of it at the same time the company got a request to do a TV show. The Japanese character was Puck-Man, but we preferred Pac-Man.”

Announcement of Kid Stuff's Pac-Man line from Billboard - July, 1982

Unlike the Atari titles, however, these things are pretty hard to take (at least for me). If the Atari titles are boring, these things are annoying (some are downright unlistenable). They seem to be aimed at much younger kids and the "plots" are often paper thin. They all start with a wavering version of the Pac-Man theme that really grates on my nerves. For the love of God please stop!!!

Even worse, Pac-Man has to be the wussiest sounding character I've ever heard.
Imagine (if you can) a love fest involving Richard Simmons, Mister Rogers, and Snuggles the fabric softener bear. Then take the result of this unholy mating and wussify it even further and it will STILL be more manly than this guy (who at one point proclaims himself "one bad yellow fellow").

If you can get through all of these things, you're a better man than I.

Pac-Man Picnic

Full text and audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuDWihCQhHA

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man go on a picnic at Pacville Central Park where the ghosts (disguised as ducks) steal their precious fruit. That's pretty much it

Pac-Man Goes to Playland

Full audio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01p-l1pAMIA

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man visit Playland - the Pacville amusement park. The ghosts are out of town visiting a friend who got sick after overeating. As it turns out, however, those nefarious ghosts were lying and are have lured Paccy into a trap.

Pac-Man Run For Fun

I don't have any audio for this one and haven't read it, but I'm guessing it involves PAc-Man entering a race where he's chased by ghosts.

Pac-Man and the Ghost Diggers

Full audio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZRU-BDBS0

This one was actually an audio version of an existing book that was available separately from Golden Books (without the record) so I'll discuss it later.

Baby Pac-Man Goes to Market

Full audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw-lSmFrf9c

Pac-baby learns to it his veggies - and also finds the missing lettuce for Earth-Man (a giant, talking carrot - though why a carrot is encouraging someone to eat vegetables is beyond me).

The Pac-Man Christmas Story

Full Audio: http://www.sweetthunder.org/tapes/weekeightyfour.html
Text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goXbMCJ4D5U

Obnoxiously saccharine story in which Pac-Baby was so busy playing with his friends that he forgot to buy Christmas presents for Pac-Mom and Pac-Dad. He goes to buy them one, but gets distracted again by a skating race. So, he decides to make them a gift. The ending of this one will make you puke.

Pac-Man Christmas Album

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBYILgUr8-0

I didn't make it very far into this one. It seems to consist of sappy Christmas songs ("the magic of Christmas is me and you") that have little to do with Pac-Man. The scant narration by various pac-children features the wimpiest voices of the whole series (I could feel the testosterone draining from my body as I listened).

The Pac-Man Album

Full Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPaAWPFywUI

The Amazing Adventures of Pac-Man

Full Audio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xdUGhaAOnE

Both of these are credited to Dana Walden and Patrick McBride and I found both pretty hard to take. The former is basically a collection of songs loosely tied together by some narration (it's not really a story - more of a vague description of the game). This one is set in "the magic land of Pac-Man" (what happened to Pacville?)

Amazing Adventures features a story with songs interspersed. The plot involves the ghosts stealing all the fruit in Pacville and Pac-Man's attempts to retrieve them.

On another note, here are a couple of links I was sent for fundraising projects related to video games (one of them is sort of related to the topic of this post):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idsY5I0zbuo

http://www.extra-life.org/participant/89319

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Programma International - Coin-Op Breeding Ground

September 15, 2014, 10:04 pm

≫ Next: A Literary" History of the Golden Age of Video Games - Golden Age Video Game Books Part 6

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Today, I take a brief break from my “literary history” to talk about one of the more interesting software publishers of the personal computer industry’s early years – Programma International. Those of you who cut their gaming teeth on an Apple II may remember Progamma for their “crude” games (most written in Integer BASIC) sold at bargain-basement prices, but Programma was one of the earliest and largest PC software publishers, producing over 300 titles (and not all of them games) for the Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS 80, and other systems. According to Steven Levy’s Hackers, in fact, Programma was the biggest distributor of Apple II software in the world in 1980. Among its many offerings were utilities, business applications (including the seminal world processor Apple Pie), and a host of games ranging from simple text games to clones of arcade games (Clowns & Balloons and Apple Invaders) to more sophisticated games like Star Voyager. Despite its importance, however, the company has been largely forgotten and little has been written about its history. And while this article is woefully inadequate in that regard (I wasn’t able to find out much info about it myself), it is a start. One that I hope will lead someone else to pick up the mantle and pen the company’s full history.

Programma International cofounder Dave Gordon (from Softalk, July, 1983)

Programma International was primarily the brainchild of two men: Mel Norell and Dave Gordon. A native of Brooklyn, Gordon attended high school in New York City. When he was 18, his family moved to Los Angeles where Gordon earned a master’s degree in accounting from Cal State Los Angeles in 1964. He then spent thirteen years as an accountant and computer controller in the entertainment industry, working for firms like Warner Communications, Gulf & Western, and Paramount. In 1977, Gordon was working for ASI Market Research, which operated a theatre in Hollywood that screened movie and television previews, when he made a discovery that changed the course of his career – microcomputers. 1977 was the year of the microcomputer “trinity” – the Apple II, PET, and TRS-80. Fascinated by the new devices, Gordon put a down payment on both a TRS-80 and a PET. When he got his first look at an Apple II, however, he immediately cancelled his orders and got an Apple II (serial number 126) instead. He quickly began making the rounds of users groups, computer stores, and other owners, using his wheeling-and-dealing skills to amass (or at least attempt to amass) a library of every piece of public domain software made for the Apple II (he apparently copied a few non-public-domain programs as well, as he was known as one of the industry’s biggest software pirates). He even traded software with Apple Computer itself, where he also made friends with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, and several others. According to Softalk, he “…brought out the first Woz Pack from Apple…”, a collection of programs written by Steve Wozniak (though it was also offered by A.P.P.L.E. – the Apple Puget sound Program Library Exchange[1]).

With the personal computer industry exploding, Gordon began to think about forming a company of his own. That’s where Mel Norell comes in. At the time, Norell ran Programma Associates, a small company that produced software for the Sphere computer. Introduced in 1975 by the Sphere Corporation of Bountiful, Utah, the 6800-based Sphere I was one of the more interesting of the early personal computers in that it came with a keyboard, monitor, and numeric keypad – something of a rarity at a time when most PCs were kit computers like the Altair 8800 (though the Sphere was also offered in kit form). It also included 4k of RAM (expandable to 64k), a cassette interface, and multiple I/O ports. In 1978, Gordon and Norell formed Programma International, which quickly became perhaps the most prolific producer of Apple II software (if not microcomputer software) on the planet. Of course, in one way that may not have been as great as an accomplishment as it seems, given that there were only a handful of software publishers in existence at the time. On the other hand, the fact that there WERE so few in some ways made Programma’s accomplishments all the more important. Programma produced software in a number of genres, but it’s the games for which they are probably best remembered. Sadly, they are also remembered (when they are remembered at all) for producing “cheap” games – in both price and quality. This reputation, however, is a bit unfair. While Programma’s games were primitive compared to games released just a few years later, in the late 1970s no one minded. Microcomputers were new, games often sold for $10 or less, and there wasn’t much to choose from. Still, while many of Programma’s offerings were excellent, others were crude even by the meager standards of the 1970s. In addition, a number of them were riddled with bugs (a result of Gordon’s policy of buying anything and everything). Before long, Programma was experiencing cash flow problems due to the large number of returns they were getting. In addition, Gordon and Norell frequently clashed over the direction of the company. In addition, Gordon and Norell were increasingly at odds over the company’s direction. In part, this may have been due to Gordon’s larger-than-life personality, which could be in turn charming and enthusiastic and overbearing and unyielding. By late 1980, despite its status as the world’s largest Apple II software producer, Programma was on its last legs. In October, Gordon and Norell sold the company to Hayden Book Company who turned it into Hayden Software with Gordon initially staying on as Vice President and General Manager. Gordon’s personality, however, soon clashed with those of the Hayden executives and he was fired in the spring of 1981. A few months later, Hayden shut down its software division entirely.

Crestfallen at first, Gordon went on to form another company called Datamost, in the fall of 1981, borrowing money from friends and setting up shop in his own living room. One of the company’s first successes was Randy Hyde’s book Using 6502 Assembly Language, which sold over 30,000 copies – enough to keep the fledgling company afloat. It was games, however, for which Datamost was best known and they produced some of the industry’s biggest hits, including Thief, Snack Attack, Pandora’s Box, Tubeway, Pig Pen, Cavern Creatures, Spectre, Aztec, The Bilestoad, Money Munchers, Tharolian Tunnels, Flip Out, and Swashbuckler (among many others).

Datamost's booth at the 1983 West Coast Computer Fair, from Softalk

So, what does Programma International (or Datamost) have to do with coin-op video games? Programma actually bought its games from a number of programmers, many (probably most, given the timeframe) of them young, unproven, and previously unpublished. Among them were at least four (and probably more) who went on to design and program arcade games.

Chris Oberth

Christian H. Oberth’s interest in computer programming started when he read Ted Nelson’s seminal Computer Lib/Dream Machines around 1974-75. His first experience with computers came when he encountered the Plato system while attending Wright Junior College in Chicago and (later) DeVry University (in Downers Grove, IL). Instantly hooked, Oberth decided he had to have a personal computer of his own and purchased an Apple II (serial #201). At the time, however, there were no classes that taught microcomputer programming. Oberth signed up for one programming class but dropped it after he found that it utilized punched cards and other ancient technology. Instead, Oberth learned his craft the way many of the third-generation programmers did – through typing in games that appeared in magazines like Creative Computing. Meanwhile, Oberth got a job in the shipping department for a musical instrument repair company. In his spare time, he turned out Apple II games in his living room, packaging them on audio cassettes in Ziploc bags and peddling them to local computer stores. Eventually, Oberth’s skills came to the attention of Dave Gordon, who called him and invited him to L.A. for a meeting. After the meeting, Programmapublished Oberth’s first game – Phasor Zap, following it up with 3-D Docking Mission (both 1978). Before long, Oberth found a second publisher – a computer and musical instrument store in Chicago called The Elektrik Keyboard.

screenshot from Phasor Zap

[Chris Oberth] The Elektrik Keyboard was one of the musical instrument dealers that our repair shop serviced. I just happened to run into the owner walking out of CES with an Apple II under his arm. Apparently he wanted to add computers (midi music) to his store. When I told him I owned one and knew how to program it, he hired me on the spot.[Interview with Chris Oberth – Retrogaming Times #24, May, 2006]

Oberth published over a dozen games with The Elektrik Keyboardbetween 1978 and 1980, while also serving as head of their computer department (it was there that Oberth met future Gottlieb sound guru Dave Thiel). Then, in 1980, Oberth got another job offer.

[Chris Oberth] One day while working at The Elektrik Keyboard, a guy came in and ordered several Apple II's. He was using them to prototype hand held games and toys at Marvin Glass. Turns out, he was the programmer for Milton Bradley's Simon game.[Interview with Chris Oberth – Retrogaming Times #24, May, 2006]

The meeting led to a job at Marvin Glass (Oberth was hired by none other than Ralph Baer), where he worked on prototype handheld games like Finger Bowl (for Tiger), Light Fight (Milton Bradley), and Alfie (Playskool). After a brief stint at Marvin Glass, Oberth (along with fellow Marvin Glass employee Gunars Licitis) went to work for Stern, where his work included Armored Car, Rescue, Tazzmania, Minefield, Anteater (which was licensed to Tago Electronics – Oberth also produced an Apple II version of the game called Ardy the Aardvark for Datamost) and the unreleasedCrypt. But that story will have to wait or another post. He also worked for a number of other computer and coin-op game publishers including Microlab (Boulder Dash), Epyx (Winter Games), Mindscape (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), Gametek (American Gladiators), Incredible Technologies (World Class Bowling), and Electronic Arts (NBA Live 2001). Chris Oberth died in July, 2012 at age 59.

Gary Shannon

In 1963, Gary Shannon was fresh out of high school when a neighbor who worked for IBM taught him the rudiments of computer programming for a job he wanted Gary to work on. To further hone his skills, Shannon went to a commercial programming school in Los Angeles and also did contract work installing IBM 370s as well as business programming for Hughes Aircraft and Capitol Records. In the 1970s, he took a job with Cal State University, Northridge, where he soon discovered another passion.

[Gary Shannon] They had a policy where you could take classes during the work day as long as you got your 8 hours in so I started to work on a Masters in Computer Science. I didn't finish it, though. What they were teaching didn't have much to do with the real world of programming, so I dropped out of the program. Also, that was about the time that the Apple II first hit the market and I got totally addicted to game programming.

As his interest in the Apple II grew, Gary took a job at Rainbow Computing in Los Angeles. Founded in 1976 by Gene Sprouse and Glen Dollar, Rainbow Computing was one of the earliest Apple II retailers (they also sold computer books and magazines, software, and other computers like the Jupiter III). Among the customers who frequented the store were Ken Williams (who founded Sierra On-Line in 1979), Sherwin Steffin (who founded Edu-Ware in 1979) and Dave Gordon (a friend of Shannon’s). Shannon soon began producing games for Programma, including Dragon Maze, Jupiter Express (an outer space shooter), Nightmare Number Nine, and Othello. Shannon also produced games for Softape,another cut-rate software publisher formed by three other of Shannon’s friends: William Smith, Bill Depew, and Gary Koffler (who later worked at Datamost).

Gary wasn’t the only game programmer in the Shannon family. His sister Kathe Spracklen and her husband Dan had programmed a chess game for Z-80 computers called Sargon. After they introduced the game at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire (where it won the first computer chess tournament) they placed an ad in Byte magazine and began selling photocopies of the code for $15. Eventually, they sold the game to Hayden Software, who released it for a number of personal computers. Gary Shannon programmed the Apple II port of Sargon II. In late 1979, Shannon took a short-term contract for San Diego coin-op manufacturer Gremlin Industries do sound-effects boards. Shannon went on to design and program (with Barbara Michaelec) the outstanding vertical shooter Astro Blaster, but that story will have to wait for another post.

Bob Flanagan

Perhaps the most prolific of the Apple II programmers discussed in this post was Bob Flanagan. Flanagan’s programming career started in middle school when his school got a pair of 33 ASR teletype terminals. Made by Teletype Corporation and originally developed for the U.S. Navy, the Teletype Model 33 was released to the public in 1963. It went on to become one of the most popular terminals in the industry with over 600,000 Model 33s and 32s (the companion model) being produced by 1976. Three models were available: the 33 ASR (Automatic Send and Receive, which used punched tape for input and output), the 33 KSR (Keyboard Send and Receive, which used a keyboard), and 33 RO (Receive Only, which had no input device).

[Bob Flanagan] [the 33 ASR’s]…were hooked up to a remote computer via acoustic phone modem. I started by typing in games from 101 BASIC Games by DEC. There were several awesome games in there that I typed in as is, played and saved/loaded from the paper tape…[including] BLKJAC, GOLF, GUNNER, GUNER1, HANG, HORSES, LIFE, MNOPLY, MUGWMP, POETRY, POKER, ROCKET, ROCKT1, ROCKT2, YAHTZE, I had a lock box with 15 or more tapes rolled up of various games. Then I started to get bored and started modifying them to do other stuff to improve them or experiment with an idea. Then I went in halfsies with my mom and purchased an Apple II computer when they came out in 1977. I think it was about $1,200. I then spent all my time learning assembly language to support my first game, Speedway, which was published by Programma International on cassette tape

Gordon initially hired Flanagan on the recommendation of a high school friend named Harry Tarnoff to do cassette duplication, demos, and other programs. When he started designing games, he offered them to Gordon as well. Flanagan was a huge fan of arcade games and video games in particular, as his work for Programma (and later Datamost) shows. Speedway was a version of the Chicago Coin electromechanical classic of the same name, though with a strictly vertical layout (Flanagan’s programming skills were not yet advanced enough to do curves and turns). Flanagan’s second game, Sea Wolf, was a version of Midway’s 1976 arcade video game hit. Other arcade-inspired games included Datamost’s Thief (a takeoff on Berzerk) and Spectre (which one review described as a Tron/Pac-Man combination). Other Flanagan games include Pandora’s Box, Space Ark (Datamost), and Guardian (initially for Continental Software under the alias Tom & Jerry, so as not to hurt Dave Gordon’s feelings or affect Flanagan’s relationship with Datamost). While Flanagan did the bulk of the design and programming, friends occasionally helped out (like many of Programma/Datamost’s programmers, Flanagan worked from home) and Flanagan insisted they get full credit for their work (unlike the coin-op and console industry, many in the computer game industry readily gave credit to their designers in advertising and packaging). Scott Miller helped out on Spectre and Guardian, Bob Miller on Pandora’s Box, and Bob Andrews on Sea Wolf. Flanagan later went to work for Atari on the coin-op games Marble Madness, Paperboy, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, Xybots, Space Lords, Skull & Crossbones, Marble Madness II, and Vapor TRX as even later developed a number of titles for the PS1, Wii, and PC. But that story will have to…well, you know.

Mark Turmell (sort of)

Another coin-op programmer who got his start at Programma was Mark Turmell, whose coin-op work included Smash TV and NBA Jams. Turmell’s game for Programma, however, was never actually published. Turmell had begun studying computers at 15, taking evening classes at Delta College (a community college in Michigan) while attending high school during the day. By the time he graduated, he had almost earned enough credits for an Associate’s degree in Data Processing[2]. At 16, he bought an Apple II computer, intent on earning his living as a game programmer. His first effort was a game called Head On, which he sent to Programma International. Programma gave him a contract and planned to publish the game until another computer game with the same title was released. While attending college at Ferris State in Big Rapids, Michigan, he created a vertical shooter called Sneakers that featured multiple screens of zany enemies (inspiration came from Gorf and Astro Blaster). Turmell finished the game in about three months then fedexed it to Sirius Software. When Sirius got the game (which went on to become an Apple II classic) they offered him a job on the spot. Turmell followed up with Beer Run and Free Fall before moving on to design Atari 2600 games like Fast Eddie and Turmoil for 20^th Century Fox software then landing a job with Williams.

[1] It may be that both Apple and A.P.P.L.E. produced it or that Softalk was referring to A.P.P.L.E. instead of Apple.

[2]Electronic Games (October, 1982) claims he actually did earn the degree.

NOTE - a major source for this story (and almost the only decent source of info I found on Programma) was the article Exec: Datamost that appeared in the July, 1983 issue of Softalk. Thanks also to Bob Flanagan, Gary Shannon, and the late Chris Oberth for agreeing to talk with me.

As I mentioned above, Programma International deserves a much better article than this. I hope that someone will take it upon themselves to tell the full story, perhaps the Digital Antiquarian (http://www.filfre.net/) - IMO the finest computer game history blog on the web.

BONUS SECTION

This section doesn't really relate to coin-op and only tangentially relates to Programma and Datamost (though it does relate to two of the programmers above), but I thought I'd post it anyway, since I've never seen reference to it anywhere else. On December 3, 1982 in conjunction with Comdex show in Las Vegas (or at least at the same time), a group called Software Distributors held its first "Wizard versus the Wizards game championship. The game pitted a dozen computer game programmers against one another in a contest involving 12 different games (one programmed by each of the programmers). After playing each game for five minutes, points were awarded based on their ranking in each game. The top four moved on to four semifinal games on an Apple with the top two switching back to Atari games for the finals.

The programmers were (with the company they represented and the game they entered):

Jim Nitchals (Cavalier? - Microwave), Dan Thompaon (Sirius - Repton), Mark Turmell (Sirius/Fox? - Turmoil), Bob Flanagan (Datamost - Spectre), Jay Zipnick (Datamost - Pig Pen), Peter Filberti (Datamost - Night Raiders), Steve Bjork (Datasoft - Canyon Climber), Gerry Humphrey (Datasoft - Clowns and Balloons), Russ Wetmore (Adventure International - Preppie), Chuck "Chuckles" Bueche (Sierra-Online, Jawbreaker II), Ken Williams (Sierra Online, Threshold), and Joe Hellesen (Roklan - Wizard of Wor).

Broderbund didn't sent any representatives because they were too busy working on the Atari ports of Choplifter and Serpentine.

Jim Natchals beat Dan Thompson in the finals to take the crown.

The results of the competition and some photos appear below (taken from the January, 1983 issue of Softline)

Mark Turmell watches Dan Thompson play

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