Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Replay: The History of Video Games (6 page)
Kee Games was named after Joe Keenan, the friend of Bushnell’s who agreed to head up the pretend competitor. Bushnell also appointed Bristow as the new company’s vice-president of engineering. To convince the coin-op industry that Kee Games was a real competitor to Atari, Bushnell concocted a cover story about how Bristow and other Atari employees had jumped ship to form their own company. “The original thing we leaked was that some of our best people had left and started a competitor. That seems very logical to a lot of people,” said Bushnell. “Then we floated the rumour that we were suing them for theft of trade secrets. That alsoounded very logical to everybody. A couple of months later we said we had settled the lawsuits and the settlement was we owned a piece of Kee Games.”
To maintain the pretence Kee Games had its own offices, salespeople and a small game development team, but its main activity was re-releasing Atari games under different names such as
Spike
– the Kee Games’ version of
Rebound
. With so many companies copying Atari at the time, few questioned the similarities between the games. “All the Kee Games’ circuit boards were manufactured in the Atari facility. We had our own cabinets and developed our own games, but it was part of the same thing,” said Bristow. The deception worked and soon Kee Games was striking deals with the distributors Atari couldn’t reach. “The distributors swallowed it and Atari was able to bust open the distribution model so that now we were selling to everybody,” said Bristow. Only one person – Joe Robbins of Empire Distributing – saw through the spin, according to Bushnell: “I remember him coming up to me in a trade show and he says: ‘You think you’re so smart, but I know what you did’. He did it in such a way that you knew he had a lot of respect for what we were able to accomplish.”
Having bypassed the restrictions of the distribution system, Kee Games then provided the big hit Atari needed to repair its finances with
Tank
, a two-player game where players steered tanks around a mine-infested maze trying to shoot each other. The idea grew out of Bristow’s desire to update Bushnell and Dabney’s first video game,
Computer Space
. “
Computer Space
was a really good fighting game, but many people found it hard to play. The idea of a free-floating spaceship that you had to counter velocity with rotation and counter thrust wasn’t easy,” said Bristow. “As a youth my uncle had put me to work clearing his orchard using a Caterpillar tractor, which drove like a tank. I thought that could be turned into
Computer Space
done right.”
Bristow got Lyle Rains, one of Kee Games’ engineers, to turn the idea into a working game. Rains enhanced Bristow’s basic idea by adding a maze littered with deadly mines. Released in November 1974, Tank became the most popular video game since
Pong
with more than 15,000 sold. With Kee Games now awash with cash, Bushnell used the opportunity to officially merge it with Atari. As part of the deal Keenan became Atari’s new president.
The profits from
Tank
repaired Atari’s battered balance sheet and the combination of the two company’s distribution networks gave the reinvigorated Atari unparalleled reach within the coin-op market. It also erased the costs involved in pretending that the two were separate businesses. The timing was fortuitous as Atari was about to launch itself into the consumer electronics business with a version of
Pong
for the home.
* * *
The idea to take
Pg
into people’s living rooms was suggested by Atari engineer Harold Lee. Given the game’s original inspiration – the Magnavox Odyssey games console – the idea to make a home version of
Pong
was an obvious one, but Lee believed Atari could improve on the Odyssey by using integrated circuits.
[3]
The Odyssey had been developed in the late 1960s when integrated circuits were far too expensive to use in consumer products. By the start of the 1970s they still remained prohibitively expensive, but had become cheap enough to use in arcade video games such as
Pong
. Lee, however, believed the cost of integrated circuits would soon fall enough to make a
Pong
console that could be plugged into home TVs.
Pong
’s creator Al Alcorn agreed with Lee’s assessment and the pair asked Bushnell to fund the project. Bushnell was sceptical: “The technology was expensive. The integrated circuit boards by themselves cost almost $200, so that was clearly never a consumer product.” Despite Bushnell’s doubts the pair remained convinced the plan would work and set about making a prototype to prove it could be done, with help from Atari engineer Bob Brown. “It was really a skunk works project,” said Bushnell. “We put very little money into it until we were pretty sure we could do it.”
With next to no funding the trio spent most of 1974 building a prototype home
Pong
console that could be sold at an acceptable price point. By late 1974 it was clear Lee’s idea really would work and, most impressively of all, the whole game could be fitted on a single integrated circuit – a breakthrough that drastically reduced the production costs. Atari wanted to manufacture the
Pong
consoles itself but needed to invest in a bigger and more advanced production line to produce the machines in the quantities needed for the consumer market. Getting the necessary funding for this was proving difficult until Atari sorted out its finances by merging with Kee Games. This in turn helped the company secure $20 million of funding from technology investor Don Valentine, the founder of venture capitalists Sequoia Capital. By early 1975 Atari was ready to start touting its new games machine to retailers.
But retailers didn’t want Atari’s $99.95 mini-
Pong
. “We took the first
Pong
to the toy trade fair and we sold none,” said Bushnell. “The toy stores at the time, their most expensive product was $29 and so the toy channel was closed to us.” Rejected by toy stores, Atari hawked it to the television and hi-fi stores only to find they were also disinterested. Increasingly desperate for retailer support, Atari pitched its home video game to the department store chain Sears Roebuck, the largest retailer in the US at the time. "We called Sears really as a last resort,” said Bushnell. Atari ended up being pointed to the buyer for the company’s sporting goods departments. “The sporting goods department of Sears turns into a ping-pong, pool table type of department around Christmas and it turned out that the year before they had successfully sold out of a home pinball,” said Bushnell. “The buyer said pinbals are in bars,
Pong
is in bars, this will be a good home recreation thing. “
It was the break Atari needed. Sears struck an exclusive deal with Atari for the console. Sears would stock the game in its 900 stores and promote it heavily in the run-up to Christmas 1975. In exchange Atari rebranded the game as the Sears Tele-Games Pong and agreed not to release its own Atari-branded version until the new year.
That Christmas 150,000 Sears Tele-Games Pong consoles flew off the shelves as customers went crazy for the chance to play
Pong
in their own homes. While the Odyssey had already offered consumers the chance to play video games at home, the arrival of Atari’s console was the moment where millions suddenly realised that video games could be played on their own TV sets as well as in bars and arcades. “It’s the first time people have been able to talk back to their television set, and make it do what they want it to do,” Bushnell told the
Wilmington Morning Star
. “It gives you a sense of control, whereas before all you could do was sit and watch channels.”
The console ushered in a second wave of
Pong
-mania that turned Atari, a near bankrupt business just over a year before, into a household name. And just as with the coin-operated version of
Pong
, Atari was quickly joined by a stampede of imitators hoping to cash in on the TV games craze. Atari’s competitors were aided by the arrival of General Instruments’ AY-3-8500 microchip. “The AY-3-8500 chip did much the same thing as in the Atari machine, but General Instruments independently developed it,” said Ralph Baer, the creator of the original Odyssey console. “Two guys did it in Glenrothes, Scotland, against the better judgment of management. This General Instruments guy in Long Island, New York, the general manager there, heard about what was going on and told those guys to come over and bring their demo with them. He moved it.”
The AY-3-8500, and the rival chips that followed, allowed any company to produce a home
Pong
without having to design an integrated circuit from scratch. Provided they could get hold of the chips that is. The home
Pong
boom caught the chip manufacturers by surprise and they simply could not produce enough to satisfy demand. Companies such as toy manufacturers Coleco and Magnavox which ordered their chips early received them on time, while the late comers were left in the lurch unable to get their consoles on the shop shelves in time for Christmas 1976, when the excitement about home
Pong
peaked. Despite the microchip supply problems, millions of people brought home
Pong
games. By Christmas 1977 there were more than 60
Pong
-style consoles on sale around the world and nearly 13 million had been sold in the US alone.
But the implications of the microchip for video games did not end there. As the mid-1970s turned in the late 1970s, the arrival of a new type of microchip – the microprocessor – would reshape not just the video game business but also the very nature of what and how people played.
[4]
[
1
]. Atari did produce several
Pong
variants of its own, including the four-player
Quadrapong
and the volleyball-inspired
Rebound
, where players had to hit the ball over a virtual net.
[
2
]. Bushnell gained full control of Atari shortly after
Pong
became a success when the company’s other founder Ted Dabney quit in 1973 because he disliked running a large business. Dabney sold his share of Atari to Bushnell for $250,000.
[
3
]. Invented in the late 1950s, integrated circuits – also called microchips – allowed the discrete components that used to form electronic circuits to be shrunk and flattened onto a silicon chip. The result was a massive breakthrough in electronics. Integrated circuits were not only much smaller but were easy to mass produce (the chips could essentially be printed en masse), used less electricity and were more reliable.
[
4
]. Microprocessors are a type of integrated circuit that effectively put the functions of a computer on a single silicon chip. Unlike normal integrated circuits, they could be programmed to perform different functions without any need to redesign the circuit design.
Computer on a chip: Manufacturing Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Courtesy of Intel Corporation
4. Chewing Gum, Bailing Wire And Spit
Victor Gruen was angry. The 1950s were changing America and the Austrian-born socialist architect believed it was changing for the worst. He felt the growth of car ownership and suburban living was ripping out the heart of society, isolating people communities. But he had an idea that he believed would challenge these economic forces: the shopping mall.
Drawing inspiration from the covered shopping arcades of European cities, Gruen envisaged a new kind of retail environment – a city centre for the modern world. The shopping mall would, he imagined, bring communities together to shop, socialise and be entertained within an enclosed and climate-controlled building. And in 1954 he gotis chance to put his ideas to the test using the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota, as the guinea pig. His Southdale Center mall, which opened in 1956, proved to be the starting gun for a transformation of American cities and towns. Over the next two decades, malls sprung up across the nation ushering in a social and retail revolution as they went. The spread of malls became an unstoppable juggernaut. By the end of 1964 around 7,600 malls had opened across the US. By 1972 that number had almost doubled to 13,174.
But for Dave Nutting, the proliferation of the mall meant it was time to start over again. After the breakdown of his business partnership with his brother – Bill Nutting of Nutting Associates – he had formed MCI Milwaukee Coin, a manufacturer of electro-mechanical games. But when the company’s investors got wind of how arcade operator Aladdin’s Castle was building an amusements empire on the back of the expansion of shopping malls, they decided MCI should change direction. “MCI was selling direct to Aladdin’s Castle, who were establishing coin-operated arcades in the new shopping malls emerging throughout the country,” said Nutting. “My sales manager said we should do that. We created Red Baron game rooms in 20 locations from Ohio in the east to Phoenix in the west. My investors then decided we should shut down the MCI game manufacturing arm and concentrate on the game rooms.” Nutting, an engineer by trade, decided it was time to go: “Over the years I had become acquainted with the people at Bally Midway and they suggested we work out a consulting relationship. I took my young electronic engineer Jeff Fredriksen and two techs and created Dave Nutting Associates.”
Shortly after parting ways from MCI, a representative from an up-and-coming technology firm called Intel invited Nutting and Fredriksen to attend a talk about its latest product. “The rep representing Intel began to tell us about a revolutionary new technology called a microprocessor,” said Nutting. “Intel engineers were travelling the country giving lectures on this new technology. Jeff and I drove down to Chicago and attended one of these lectures.”
Intel’s product, the 4004, was the first functioning microprocessor and although it could do little more than add and subtract, the potential fired Nutting’s imagination: “I immediately became convinced it was the future of all coin amusement devices. Design one microprocessor hardware system and all games would be created in software.” Nutting quickly set about building a relationship with Intel: “I convinced the Intel marketing person that the microprocessor would revolutionise the coin amusement industry from pinballs to slot machines to video games and that my group was an advanced R&D group for Bally. Our local Intel rep then convinced Intel to send us one of the first 50 development units.” The development unit arrived at Dave Nutting Associates in early 1974. The company used it to build a microprocessor-based pinball machine to persuade Bally to invest further in his company’s exploration of the technology.
“My overall game plan for my grand presentation to Bally’s management was to obtain two in-production Bally pinballs and strip one of all electro-mechanical components and leave the other for comparative play,” said Nutting. The company bought two of Bally’s movie-themed
Flicker
pinball machines, gutted one and rebuilt it around Intel’s microprocessor. By September 1974 the enhanced
Flicker
table was ready and Bally’s management were invited in to see the results. “I had thtwo
Flickers
side-by-side,” said Nutting. “Both played exactly the same. The only visual difference was the back panel had LED read outs versus the mechanical drum scoring of a conventional pinball. The inside of the cabinet was empty except for a transformer.” Bally’s executives couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “I found John Britz, Bally’s executive vice-president, wandering around opening closet doors looking for the main computer running the pinball,” said Nutting.
But Bally worried that arcade owners would not understand microprocessor pinballs and decided to phase in their introduction slowly. It also decided to get its own engineers to build their own microprocessor-based hardware rather than using the system developed by Dave Nutting Associates. In response, Dave Nutting Associates teamed up with a small pinball company from Phoenix called Micro Games to create
Spirit of 76
– the first pinball game designed for a microprocessor.
Spirit of 76
made its debut at the 1975 Amusement & Music Operators Association trade show, where its low cost design quickly attracted the industry’s interest. “The units were lighter and easier to service and were 30 per cent cheaper to manufacture,” said Nutting. Arcade owners stopped buying electro-mechanical pinball tables, preferring to wait for microprocessor-based tables to reach the market.
Soon every significant pinball manufacturer was following Dave Nutting Associates’ lead. By then, however, Nutting was preparing to do what he did for pinball to video games. The video games of the time were made using transistor-transistor logic (TTL) circuits that had to be made from scratch for each game. While this was adequate for simple
Pong
games, by the mid-1970s the limits of these simple circuits were holding video games back. “Game designers tried to create more sophisticated game play but they found themselves pushing the limits of TTL,” said Nutting. “The dedicated circuits could not be manufactured. The electric noise generated by the circuits would confuse the logic and the game play would go off and do its own thing.”
The 4004 microprocessor lacked the power to display images on a TV, by 1975 Intel had come up with the 8080, a microprocessor capable of controlling the on-screen action of a video game. All Dave Nutting Associates needed now was a video game it could use to prove its plan would work. As luck would have it Bally Midway had just the machine. As part of its relationship with Japanese video game manufacturers Taito, Bally had obtained the North American rights to
Western Gun
, the latest game devised by
Speed Race
creator Tomohiro Nishikado.
Western Gun
pitted two players as Wild West gunmen trying to shoot the other in a showdown and was popular in Japan.
But the game was afflicted with many of the problems that plagued TTL video games and Bally couldn’t put the game into production as a result. Bally asked Dave Nutting Associates to redesign the game using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Using a microprocessor turned the video game development process on its head. No longer would engineers armed with soldering irons build games out of hardware. Instead computer programmers would write the game in software that told the flexible hardware of microprocessors how the hardware should work. "TTL logic was a hard-wired system, to make a changed in game play meant redoing the circuit. Once we established the microprocessor hardware system all game logic was done in software,” said Nutting.
To help with the programming, Nutting enlisted the help of two student volunteers from the University of Wisconsin’s computer science course: Jay Fenton and Tom McHugh. Fenton, a transsexual who became Jamie in early 1990s, was suspicious of getting involved with the amusements business. “I was worried about working for the Mafia. The amusements device industry had a much shoddier reputation back then. It didn’t take long for me to realise how silly that stereotype was.” McHugh became the main programmer of
Gun Fight
, Dave Nutting Associates’ remake of
Western Gun
, with Fenton concentrating on programming the company’s pinballs. For Nutting himself, working with programmers was liberating: “I, as the game designer and director, could literally sit with a software programmer like Jay Fenton and mould the game flow. It was like giving me play dough.”
By the middle of 1975
Gun Fight
was ready to go into production. Bally, however, was getting nervous. “RAM was, at that time, expensive,” said Nutting. “Marcine ‘Iggy’ Wolverton, the president of the Midway, asked Jeff Fredriksen and I out to lunch and he appeared nervous. Iggy looked at us and stated ‘I hope you guys know what you are doing because I am about to commit to purchasing $3 million of RAM in order to get a good price’. Of course we nodded yes.” Bally’s RAM order was a major purchase. Nutting estimated it swallowed up around 60 per cent of the memory chips available in the world at the time. Wolverton needn’t have worried though.
Gun Fight
became a popular arcade game and soon every video game manufacturer was looking at how they could use microprocessors in their products, Nishikado included: “Quite frankly I thought the play of
Gun Fight
was not really good and in Japan my version of
Western Gun
was better received. But I was very impressed with the use of the microprocessor technology and couldn’t wait to learn this skill. I started analysing the game as soon as I could.”
The days of TTL video games were finished. One by one the world’s video game manufacturers embraced the new world of the microprocessor and 1976 saw the release of the last two significant TTL games: Atari’s
Breakout
and
Death Race
, created by Exidy – a small coin-op business in Mountain View, California.
Exidy came up with the idea for
Death Race
after licensing its game
Destruction Derby
to the far bigger Chicago Coin, who released it as
Demolition Derby
. Chicago Coin’s version destroyed sales of Exidy’s original. “We had to do something,” said Howell Ivy, one of Exidy’s game developers at the time. “Someone jokingly said ‘why don’t we make a people-chase game?’ We had a steering wheel on the game, so let’s drive to chase the people.” The idea was simple enough that Exidy could easily adapt the design of
Destruction Derby
, saving it the trouble and cost of building a brand new game. The reworked game would, they decided, give players points every time they ran over one of the people and leave a headstone-like cross marking the spot where the person was hit. They named it
Death Race
. “We had no clue that it would cause any controversy,” said Ivy. “The game was fun and challenging. There was no underlying motivation or thoughts in creating the first controversial video game. It was created out of necessity and defence of our own product licensing.” The media and public, however, didn’t agree and
Death Race
provoked the first major moral panic over the content of a video game. “The controversy began with a reporter in Seattle,” said Ivy. “The reporter interviewed a mother in an arcade and she said the game was teaching kids to run over and kill people. The story was placed on the Associated Press news wire and then escalated nationwide. The first indications were requests for interviews with us at Exidy.”
Exidy’s media handling did little to quell the outrage. “If people get a kick out of running down pedestrians, you have to let them do it,” Paul Jacobs, the company’s director of marketing, told one reporter. Psychologists, journalists and politicians lined up to condemn the game. Dr Gerals Driessen, manager of the National Safety Council’s research department, described
Death Race
as part of an “insidious” shift that was seeing people move from watching violence on TV to participating in violence in video games. It was a charge still being levelled at video games more than 30 years later. As the criticism mounted, Exidy hastily concocted a story that it wasn’t people being run over, but gremlins and ghouls. The lie fooled no one and soon the controversy began making its way onto national US TV news programmes such as
60 Minutes
. Exidy received dozens of letters about the game. Nearly all condemned
Death Race
. One neatly handwritten letter threatened to bomb Exidy and its facilities. ”We did not take this threat lightly, we asked ourselves ‘what have we done?’,” said Ivy. “The police were called and for several weeks we did have security guards at our facility both day and night. The letter was not signed and the person was never caught or heard of again.”