Replay: The History of Video Games (17 page)

Only by 1982 did it become clear that Atari needed a replacement for the 2600 and fast. Its answer was the Atari 5200, a repackaging of its 1979 home computer the Atari 400. It was too little, too late. An Atari focus group held just before its launch confirmed the worse when the Atari 5200 was put up against the newest console on the market: the Colecovision. “Overall, consumer reactions after game play was that Colecovision performed somewhat better than expected,” reported an internal Atari memo about the focus group. “The 5200 did not come out as definitely superior to Colecovision despite some initial expectations that it would be a better system.” The Colecovision, created by toy company Coleco, arrived in August 1982 in a blaze of publicity. It was more advanced than the Atari 5200 and, most importantly, came with a copy of Nintendo’s hugely popular
Donkey Kong
.

Donkey Kong
was the first game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who would go on to be regarded as one of the world’s very best game designers. Te Japanese designer’s debut game was commissioned to pull Nintendo’s US operation out of a hole. Nintendo of America had bet everything on
Radar Scope
, a
Space Invaders
-style shoot ’em up that had been a hit in Japanese arcades, but sold only 1,000 of the 2,000 machines it built for the US market. Nintendo decided to create a new game to run on the technology used by
Radar Scope
in the hope of shifting the unsold machines.

Miyamoto was originally told to make a game based on
Popeye
, but when Nintendo failed to get the rights to the comic strip, he devised an entirely new game inspired by the 1933 film
King Kong
and the fairy tale
Beauty and the Beast
. It revolved around three characters: Jumpman, a moustached and stumpy carpenter who the player controlled; Donkey Kong, an escaped giant gorilla owned by Jumpman; and Pauline, the object of both Donkey Kong and Jumpman’s affections.
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Players had to help Jumpman climb scaffolding and ladders to reach the top of the screen, where Donkey Kong was holding Pauline hostage, while dodging barrels thrown by the angry ape and other dangers. Miyamoto’s distinctive characters and bizarre love triangle plot – told in short animated sequences reminiscent of a silent movie – were revolutionary. The game’s jumping action and platform-based levels were equally influential, establishing a new genre of game: the platform game.
[3]
Following the game’s success, Nintendo changed Jumpman’s name to Mario in honour of its US landlord Mario Segale, who had agreed to give the company’s struggling US arm more time to pay its rent prior to
Donkey Kong
’s release.

Michael Katz, Coleco’s vice-president of marketing, felt the
Donkey Kong
deal was vital to the Colecovision: “I don’t think the Colecovision would have been launched as successfully as it had if we didn’t have the exclusive console rights to
Donkey Kong
. We made it so it was the only way you could get
Donkey Kong
for the home.” By Easter 1983, more than a million Colecovisions had been sold off the back of
Donkey Kong
. The release of an adaptor that allowed VCS 2600 games to be played on the Colecovision spurred sales on even further. Atari had been offered the rights to
Donkey Kong
by Nintendo but turned it down on the grounds that the Japanese company wanted too much money. The decision left Atari facing a powerful new rival that had wiped out its Atari 5200 system just as the 2600 market began to unravel.

Not all the problems affecting the video game industry were of its own making. The US had been in a deep recession and by December 1982 one in 10 American adults were out of work. Petrol prices were also rising, eroding households’ disposable income even furr. “The gasoline shortage just sapped money away from kids,” said Gerard. “If you’re an average kid and the way you get around America is in your car and suddenly gasoline prices go nuts, which they did, that hurt.”

On top of that, the video game console had lost its position as the most exciting thing in home entertainment to the video cassette recorder, or the VCR for short. The VCR reinvented television, giving people control over what they watched and when for the first time. “It was a major thing,” said Rob Fulop, a programmer at game publisher Imagic. “All of a sudden you could see a movie at home whenever. It was amazing. Kids were watching and taping movies, computer games weren’t what they did anymore.”

As the games business plunged, the VCR went from strength to strength. In the first quarter of 1982, Americans bought 491,000 VCRs. The first quarter of 1983 saw 958,000 sold, an increase of 95 per cent.

The final blow came from the home computer manufacturers who became embroiled in a bitter price war just as the console market hit the skids. The price war began in April 1980 when Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, paid a visit to London, England. Together with Apple and Tandy, Commodore had started the home computer business but while its PET computer did well in Europe it was lagging behind its two key rivals in the US. To add to its American woes, two other big players had entered the home computer business.

One was Atari. The other was Texas Instruments. For Tramiel, who was fond of saying ‘business is war’, Texas Instruments’ entry into the computer business offered an opportunity for revenge. In the mid-1970s the two companies had fought for dominance of the pocket calculator market and the resulting price war almost destroyed Commodore. Tramiel was determined to make sure that this time round it would be Texas Instruments that would be left in ruins.

During his business trip to the UK, Tramiel saw the idea that would form the basis of his assault on his corporate nemesis: the Sinclair ZX80. The British-made computer had outdated technology and was sold as a kit so buyers had to assemble it themselves at home yet it was hugely successful for one reason: its unbelievably low £99.95 price tag. Excited by the idea of a computer anyone could afford, Tramiel tore up Commodore’s plans for a new business machine and ordered his engineers to make the computing equivalent of the Ford Model T, the 1908 car that introduced the idea of mass car ownership.

Commodore was in a good position to deliver on such a vision. It owned micro
processor manufacturer MOS Technologies and so could get prices that Tandy, Atari and Apple could only dream of. Only Texas Instruments had such an advantage, but its $1,150 TI-99/4 computer was far from mass market. Commodore’s engineers built the VIC-20, a colour computer that cost just $299.95, and launched it in 1980. The VIC-20 was an attack on two fronts. It undercut Commodore’s computer rivals by hundreds of dollars, forcing them to slash their prices.
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It was also cheap enough to compete with video game consoles on price, a fact Commodore emphasised with adverts asking: “Why buy just a video game?”

Texas Instruments responded in 1981 by replacing the overpriced TI-99/4 with the $525 TI-99/4a, a home computer designed for the mass market. The war was on. The fight, however, was not jusontest between rival manufacturers, but a struggle between two different and incompatible visions of home computing. Commodore embraced a philosophy of openness, allowing anyone to create software for its computer. Texas Instruments, meanwhile, believed in control. It wanted computing to follow the video game console model, where it and it alone would make and profit from TI-99/4a software. To enforce its beliefs, the Texan giant publicly threatened to sue any company that released TI-99/4a software without its approval.

Video games would prove crucial in Commodore’s battle with Texas Instruments. While Texas Instruments pushed the educational benefits of its computer, Commodore embraced fun as a way of attracting buyers. “In 1982 no one was buying computers for the software, other than for games or something like that,” said Bob Yannes, who would help design the Commodore 64, the computer Tramiel used to finish off Texas Instruments.

Launched in August 1982, the Commodore 64 was a $595 powerhouse for its era. Armed with a large amount of memory, strong graphics capabilities and an advanced sound chip, it seemed as if it was designed for games. Its release prompted Texas Instruments to offer a $100 rebate on sales of its TI-99/4a, sparking a frenzy of cost cutting as rival computer firms repeatedly tried to undercut each other in a deadly game of corporate Russian roulette.

By early 1983 the benefits of Commodore’s openness were starting to shine throu
gh. While Commodore owners enjoyed a wide choice of software and games, TI-99/4a owners were being starved of choice. Texas Instruments, which outsold Commodore in Christmas 1982, started to fall behind. By the summer the Commodore 64 was on sale for just $200 and Texas Instruments had been pushed into selling its computer for just $99. In November 1983, having lost $100 million in the second quarter of the year alone trying to keep the TI-99/4a alive, Texas Instruments threw in the towel and shut its home computer operation.
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Tramiel had won and Commodore now had a 38 per cent share of the fast-growing market for home computers costing less than $1,000.

The computer wars delivered another nail in the coffin of home consoles. “Home computers replaced home video games,” said Chris Crawford, a member of Atari’s corporate research team at the time. “The price of a home computer system was only about twice that of a home video game system and the software was cheaper and much more plentiful. Combine that with the loss of confidence in the Atari VCS engendered by disasters such as
E.T.
and you can see why sales of the VCS simply collapsed.”

Home computers did not, however, offer the big profits game makers were used to. While computer games were cheaper to produce, the market was smaller, the sale price lower and games stored on floppy disks were easier to copy illegally than cartridges. The move to home computers may have offered refuge from the chaos elsewhere, but it came at the cost of massively reduced profits, which in turn forced massive lay offs of developers. Sierra Online was one of the companies forced into such a situation. At the height of the boom it joined the console game bandwagon, only to lose huge sums when the bottom fell out of the market. It retreated to its computer game origins. “We were essentially bankrupt,” said Ken Williams, Sierra’s co-founder. “Luckily we had never had a bank line and weren’t really in a hole, we just had no money. By hunkering dwn and laying off almost everyone, we were able to start over.” Al Lowe was one of the game designers laid off by Sierra in the spring of 1984. “One Friday that spring they went from 120 employees to 40 in an afternoon. It was a black Friday,” said Lowe.

The crash also spelled the end for the vector graphics game. Arcade operators were already fed up with the unreliability of these machines by the time the bubble burst. “A vector monitor has to control and dissipate much more energy than a raster monitor of the same size. More energy means more heat and more expensive parts. Bad for reliability,” said Atari coin-op game engineer Michael Albaugh. The difficulty of repairing vector games added to arcade operators’ frustration, said Logg: “Vector monitors are hard to replace. If your regular colour monitor goes down fine, no problem, every TV in the world is a monitor. Just fix the appropriate controls to make it work. But a vector monitor, that’s a different matter.”

As revenue from video games fell, arcades stopped ordering vector games, which were also under pressure from rapid improvements in the visuals of games that used standard raster TVs. “Raster graphics were getting much better: more colours, better graphics resolution,” said Tim Skelly, a designer of vector coin-ops for Cinematronics. “Vector graphics had nowhere to go except colour and that didn’t add much. The screen was still black or, at best, a static background like
Warrior
.”

By 1982 games such as Sega’s shoot ’em up
Zaxxon
and Gottlieb’s
Q*bert
were ramming home the advantages of standard TVs. Both games pioneered the use of axonometric projection; a drawing technique that let game designers create 3D worlds using 2D images.
[6]
Until then, the technique had mainly been used for technical drawings where there was a need to show depth as well as height and width. Or, most famously, in the perspective trickery of Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s work, which inspired Jeff Lee, the artist on
Q*bert
, to use the approach: “Being a fan of the great Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the master of optical illusions, I constructed a stack of triad-based cubes. Admiring my derivative handiwork, it struck me there’s a game in here somewhere. The pseudo-3D look was quite compelling.” The game challenged players to help a fuzzy orange creature with two spindly legs and an elephant-like trunk hop around a pyramid built from Lee’s Escher-inspired cubes until all had been stepped on, while dodging other strange but deadly beasts.
Q*bert
’s cute and cuddly looks made the game popular enough to spawn a spate of merchandise adorned by its bizarre hero.

Another important innovator in standard TV visuals was Namco’s
Xevious
. The shoot ’em up was a labour of love for its Japanese creator Masanobu Endo – he even wrote an entire novel just to flesh out the back story to his game of aerial combat on alien planets.
Xevious
was a visual feast. Its action took place above green grasslands cut up by alien highways and dusty deserts where huge geoglyphs similar to the Nazca Lines of Peru had been etched into the dirt. The metallic alien craft and defensive bases the player fought with were equally impressive, particularly the spinning, shimmering flying saucers that marked the player’s first encounter with the extra-terrestrial forces. The game was, however, not just about looks.
Xevious
set the template for post-crash shoot ’em ups. The player’s craft was set on an unstoppable, pre-defined journey – travelling up the screen at a steady pace. With the decision about where to go removed, the player could concentrate on weaving around the screen to avoid enemy fire and picking off enemies who attacked in predictable patterns. The only time the movement stopped was when the player came face-to-face with a boss – a big, super-powered opponent – that took large amounts of firepower and agility to defeat. Together with Konami’s
Scramble
, Endo’s game became the dominant blueprint for shoot ’em ups, especially those made in Japan, for the best part of a decade.
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The fixed-screen action of
Space Invaders
and its clones, and the player-directed travel and openness of
Defender
became the hallmarks of an earlier era.