Today's post is bascially a repost of my December post on Death Race with the addition of some info on the early years of Exidy. I hate to repost material, but you can't very well have an ultimate history of Exidy without talkign about Death Race.
 |
Exidy founder Pete Kaufmann |
Pete Kaufmann founded Exidy (an abbreviation for Excellence In Dynamics) in Palo Alto in 1973 (former Ampex employee Samuel Raymond Hawes was involved with the company's founding, though his exact role is unclear). Exidy’s first game was Hockey/Tennis, released in early 1974 (though Larry Hutcherson remembers that it was called Thumper Bumper), a Pong clone that used painted overlays to achieve a color effect. Next came TV Pinball (originally titled The Sting and marketed on the West Coast only under that title), a game similar in play to Ramtek’s Clean Sweep with the addition of nine pockets at which the player could shoot. Exidy also produced a cocktail table version of the game (Table Pinball) as well as a Pong variant called Table Foosballer. It is not known who designed these early games, though John Metzler, who followed Kaufmann from Ramtek, is a likely candidate.
During these early years, one of the company's most pressing needs was staff, Pete Kauffman turned to whatever source he could to recruit new workers. At the time, the company had only a dozen or so employees and all of them had to work whenever and wherever they could in order to get games ready for sale. Before his stint at Ramtek, Howell Ivy (who would join Exidy in 1975) had worked at the Air Force Satellite Test Center, which provided Exidy with a number of technicians. Chicago Coin's Director of European Sales, Paul Jacobs, signed on to head up Exidy’s marketing department in 1976. Jacobs started his coin-op career riding shotgun on his father's American Coin Machine route in the 1960s. In 1967 he went into sales for his United, Inc., a distribution company also owned by his father. After graduating with a degree in political science he became sales manager and then president of United until it was bought by jukebox giant Wurlitzer. Jacobs had also worked for Rowe and after leaving Exidy would go on to work for a more than a dozen coin-op companies in his forty-year career. Artist Michael Cooper-Hart met Kauffman at a Christmas party in 1975. At the time, Cooper-Hart was teaching design and fine arts at De Anza College in Cupertino. When Kauffman asked him if he was interested in working for a new company named Exidy, Cooper-Hart refused. He considered himself and artist and artists simply didn’t do commercial work. Kauffman’s powers of persuasion (and Cooper-Hart’s anemic bank account) eventually overcame his reservations and he signed on as a consultant at Exidy, where he would design many of the company’s classic game cabinets and go on to become Director of Design (though at some point Cooper-Hart also worked at Atari's Cyan Engineering think tank on a video phone). When he first arrived, however, he was taken aback when he got a look at a new game the company was producing – a driving game called Death Race.
Death Race
Released in April, 1976, Death Race was not Exidy’s first driving game – that honor goes to 1975’s Destruction Derby, itself a game unlike the host of other driving games on the market. While it had standard driving controls, the gameplay was anything but. Rather than a simple racing game Destruction Derby was a video version of the demolition derby in which a group of cars competed in an arena and tried to bash each other into pieces of useless wreckage. The last car that remained drivable was dubbed the “winner”.
d![]()
Initially produced by Exidy,the demand for Destruction Derbywas so great that they licensed it to the floundering Chicago Coin who produced the game as Demolition Derby.As part of the deal, Exidy halted production of the game to avoid competing with their new licensee, but in the end, it didn’t matter. At the time, Chicago Coin was already in the midst of the financial woes that would lead to bankruptcy in 1976 and when they were unable to make their royalty payments, Exidy was left holding the bag. While Exidy may not have seen much in the way of profit from the Demolition/Destruction Derby deal, the experience did result in a couple of very profitable decisions. First, seeing the sales success of the Chicago Coin title, Exidy decided that they would no longer license games to other companies. The second decision proved even more profitable.
While Chicago Coin was marketing Destruction Derby, Exidy found themselves in an awkward position. Unable to produce their own version of the game and not receiving any money from licensing it, they decided to come up with a similar concept game instead. The task was given to newcomer Howell Ivy, his first assignment for the company[1]. It appears that the game was initially called Death Race 98 since flyers and photos with that title appeared in early 1976. A month or so later flyers began appearing with the Death Race title instead. The game Ivy came up with would launch the first (though certainly not the last) national controversy in the fledgling video game industry.
 |
This flyer and announcement for "Death Race 98" appeared in the April, 1976 issue of Play Meter. In May of 1975 Replay and Vending Times referred to the game as merely "Death Race". From this evidence, it appears that "Death Race 98" was an early name for the game. |
The goal of the game was fairly simple, if somewhat gruesome –rather than trying to destroy each other’s cars, the players would score points by running over fleeing stick figures called "gremlins". A score of 1-3 points earned the player the rank of Skeleton Chaser; 4-10 points Bone Cracker; 11-20 Gremlin Hunter; and for more than 20 points, a player was dubbed Expert Driver (though real-world pedestrians might not agree with this assessment).
Adding to the game’s morbid theme was its equally gruesome cabinet art, created by Pat “Sleepy” Peak. Among the images was a grim reaper standing before two open graves beckoning toward a pair of drivers. The sound effects also added a chilling touch - when the player hit a gremlin, it emitted a tiny electronic scream and was replaced by a cross. The gameplay bore a suspicious resemblance to the 1975 film DeathRace 2000, and most sources report that the game was directly inspired by the movie, though sources at Exidy (including designer Howell Ivy) insist this wasn’t the case. Released in 1976, Death Race[2]created a firestorm of controversy.
[Paul Jacobs] Death Racedid cause quite a stir, but not until an Associated Press reporter ran a story in Seattle. She had been in a shopping mall and noticed a line of kids extending out the door of the arcade in the mall. She was curious and went to see what was happening and found out they were all waiting in line to play Death Race. She watched them play and then she concluded that this was a horrible game that showed humans being run over by cars and said the sound when hit resembled a "shrieking child". Well, every paper in the country picked up the story and that started the controversy. The funny thing is that Death Race was just a "filler" game until our next attraction, Car Polo, was ready for production. It was a modification of Destruction Derby using cars versus skeletons rather than cars versus cars. It required very little development time. We had only released 200 games, but after the notoriety, we ended up making around 3000 (including PCB sales overseas). Articles about the game were in all major newspapers, plus Newsweek, Playboy, National Enquirer, National Observer. Midnight, the German magazine Stern, and many more. Nationally syndicated columnist Bob Greene devoted a column to the game. I was interviewed and featured on the NBC television news magazine show "Weekend" with Lloyd Dobbins and then excerpts were shown the following week on the Today show and the Tonight show. The interview was then featured in a PBS television documentary called "Decades" as an important news event for the year 1977. I did live interviews for many U.S. radio stations and also both CBC (Canada) and BBC (England). It was a story that just wouldn't die, and Exidy laughed all the way to the bank.
 |
Photo of Death Race from the August 1976 Play Meter.That's Paul Jacobs in front. |
In the AP article (written by Wendy Walker), Jacobs is quoted as saying "If people get a kick out of running down pedestrians, you have to let them do it". Another quote came courtesy of Dr. Byrde Meeks, a psychologist who'd worked at San Quentin:"A game like that appeals to the morbidity in a person. That type of preoccupation with violence was common in the prisoners I dealt with. They would have loved the game"[3].
 |
The article that started it all.This one is from the July 3, 1976 Daily Oregonian. |
If Exidy thought things would blow over after the AP story, they soon found otherwise as more articles began to appear in the following months. In response, Exidy further emphasized the fact that the game was a harmless diversion and that they'd been careful to avoid depicting actual pedestrians[4]."We have one of the best artists in the business." said GM Phil Brooks "If we wanted to have cars running over pedestrians we could have done it to curl your hair." As for the "scream" the game emitted when you ran over a gremlin - that was just a beep. "We could have had screeching of tires, moans, and screams for eight bucks extra. But we wouldn't build a game like that. We're human beings too."[5]
 |
Another AP article on the game.From the 12/24/76 Times Picayune (New Orleans) |
The hysteria exhibited in some of the articles was almost comical. A Tucson Daily Citizen article was titled "If You've Got Time to Kill…Game Goal: Road Carnage". A photograph of a young girl playing the game bore the caption "Death race or death wish?" and asked if the game was a harmless fad or "…will chasing down pedestrians on a TV screen now encourage her to cut pedestrians down on real highways later?" The article quotes one arcade manager, who compares the game to Gun Fight, a game whose violence he feels is harmless: "…but that's the tradition of the Great American West, having a shootout, a duel, in the street. But deliberately running people down - that isn't an American tradition at all" (guess he's never driven in Boston) Another operator explained "When you leave a game room, you don't go out with a gun in your pocket and shoot your neighbor down. But you do go back to your car and start driving again."[6]
 |
Middltown (NY) Times Herald Register, 10/31/76 |
Complaints about the game’s violent, grisly theme eventually reached the pages of the National Enquirer and Midnight and the game was even featured in more serious forums such as NBC’s Weekend television show where a psychiatrist decried the game’s supposed promotion of violence. Even the National Safety Council got in on the act, calling the game “sick” and“morbid”.A Newsweekarticle on the game was titled “Sick, Sick, Sick” (echoing the National Safety Council).
Over the years, a number of rumors about the controversy caused byDeath Race have appeared, among them: that a bomb threat was called into Exidy headquarters by someone upset with the game and that the game was banned outright in some countries resulting in some foreign operators serving jail time.
[Paul Jacobs] I do not know of any country that banned the game (all markets that we sold to around the world accepted it), but I do believe that a Japanese distributor was briefly jailed for selling it. But I'm not so sure it was necessarily for selling the game itself or that he did not follow proper import procedures (pay appropriate import duties, etc.)
 |
Super Death Chase - from Play Meter, November, 1977Below - Play Meter's review of Super Death Chase(January, 1978) |
[1]Though some sources indicate he’d also designed Destruction Derby.
[2] Some report that the game was called Pedestrian in early stages of development, but this seems unlikely given that the “gremlins” were never intended to represent people. Jacobs claims it never went by Pedestrian.
[3]"Death Race" Is New Game in Poolrooms, AP, July 1976
[4]While some sources claim that the idea of calling the enemies "gremlins" was concocted only after the controversy erupted, this does not appear to be the case (though they may have done so to avoid future controversy). The AP article itself quotes a relieved director of the Seattle Center arcade, "those are gremlins that you run down. You're not supposed to think they're people".
[5]New York Times, December, 1976
[6]Tucson Daily Citizen, January 14, 1977