The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (16 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Jobs was so low on the totem pole at Atari that I didn’t care what happened to him. He was completely off the radar scope.
—Al Alcorn
In 1976, two events reminded video-game manufacturers of their roots in the pinball industry. The first was the legalization of pinball in New York and Chicago.
The process began in early 1976 when Irving Holzman, the president of the New York Music and Amusement Association, applied to the New York City Council to have LaGuardia’s 40-year ban on pinball removed. Gottlieb and Williams had been marketing special add-a-ball pinball machines in New York since 1972, and Holzman felt that the time had come to challenge the ban entirely.
The city council agreed to hold a hearing on the matter in April. One key testimony in the hearings came from Roger Sharpe, an editor at
Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
Sharpe was an extremely gifted pinball player who, after completing a feature about pinball, had decided to write a book about the history of the pinball industry.
Sharpe testified about pinball and the skills needed to master it. He talked about the work that went into designing pinball machines and the popularity of pinball throughout the United States and in many countries around the world. After his testimony, Sharpe was asked to demonstrate his skill.
Along with my testimony, I was supposed to give a demonstration to show that the game was based on skill, not chance.
There’s a funny aside to all this. There were two games set up. The second game was really a fall-back in case anything happened to the first. The cameras were all set up on the other game. We got to the end of my testimony
and the head of the city council stood up and said, “I understand that you are now going to demonstrate pinball for us.”I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Not that game. Let’s do that one over there.”
I guess he thought that the first game was fixed.
—Roger Sharpe
Sharpe was directed to play a Gottlieb pinball game called
Bank Shot.
He began by describing the machine to the council, explaining its targets, rules, and objectives. After some explanation, Sharpe played two balls, acquainting himself with the machine and demonstrating the use of the flippers. On his third ball, he decided to prove that proper use of the plunger required skill.
On the start of my third ball, I said, “Using the plunger takes skill as well.”
There were five lanes at the top of the playfield. I pointed to a lane and said, “If I pull this back just right, the ball is going to go right down this lane.” It was kind of like Babe Ruth calling his shot.
I pulled back the plunger. The ball went up, it went bounce, bounce, and right down the lane.
“Alright, we’ve seen enough.”
I was supposed to play an entire game. The city council passed it [the petition to legalize pinball] six-to-nothing.
August first of that year, which was my birthday, the mayor signed a law for pinball machines to be operated in the city.
—Roger Sharpe
That year, 1976, was also the first year in which concerns were raised about violence in video games. Exidy Games, a company founded by former Ramtek executive Pete Kauffman, released a driving game titled
Death Race.
Kauffman, a very quiet man, had originally planned to design games for other companies.
Destruction Derby
, his first project, was a game in which players steered cars around a screen trying to hit other cars. The computer-controlled drone cars were slightly faster than players’ cars, but they traveled in zigzag paths. The only way to hit computer-controlled cars was to anticipate which way the drone would turn.
According to Kauffman, Chicago Coin bought
Destruction Derby
but refused to pay him his royalties. Kauffman responded by revising the game and re-releasing it himself.
The biggest change in the game was in the targets players hit with their cars. Kauffman renamed the game
Death Race
, and players ran over stick figures that were supposed to be skeletons escaping from a graveyard. When players ran over the skeletons, tiny crosses would appear in their places.
Death Race
was a spin-off from a game we did for Chicago Coin called
Destruction Derby
, in which you hit other cars. We licensed that to Chicago Coin, and they forced us into competing with ourselves by not paying royalties. We came out with
Death Race
to compete with our own game.—Pete Kauffman, founder of Exidy Games
Pete came up with a game called
Death Race.
It’s very tame by today’s standards, but in those days it caused a big controversy.The player was asked to drive over running gremlins. They called them gremlins; the rest of the world thought they were stick people, real people, and the idea of the game, of course, was to kill them.
Every time you made a hit, a little cross would appear on the monitor, signifying a grave. Nice game. Fun. Bottom line, the game really took off when TV stations started to get some complaints from irate parents that this was a terrible example to set for children.
The industry got a lot of coast-to-coast coverage during news programs. The end result was that Exidy sales doubled or quadrupled.
—Eddie Adlum
Though the
Death Race
machine did substantial business in arcades, many location owners refused to carry it. According to Kauffman, Exidy sold only 1,000
Death Race
machines, just a fraction of the number of
Sea Wolf
and
Gun Fight
machines Midway placed that same year, but
Death Race
stirred up protests and was even discussed on CBS’s
60 Minutes.
When defending their game in public, Exidy spokespersons claimed that
Death Race
was about running over demons and had nothing to do with killing people.
In private, they agreed that the scandal had boosted their sales. When
Death Race II
arrived in 1977, it had the same basic theme—running over stick figures.
Death Race did very well, but nobody wanted to be associated with it publicly because of the accusations from the press. It seemed like the more controversy … the more our sales increased.
We did a sequel, but it was really just the same game. There wasn’t anything new about it.
—Pete Kauffman
Although no one could argue with Exidy’s success, some competitors felt threatened by the public’s reaction to Exidy’s violent games. New York City had just legalized pinball, and
Death Race
threatened to cause the same kind of scandal that gambling machines brought to pinball.
We were really unhappy with that game [
Death Race
]. We [Atari] had an internal rule that we wouldn’t allow violence against people. You could blow up a tank or you could blow up a flying saucer, but you couldn’t blow up people. We felt that that was not good form, and we adhered to that all during my tenure.—Nolan Bushnell
Strange BedfellowsI got the contracts out, I got the lawyers out, and I removed Nolan from office. Nolan was simply removed and he was put on the beach.
—Manny Gerard, former vice president, Warner Communications
Manny Gerard? Manny was a free spirit in a three-piece suit.
—Steve Bristow, former vice president of engineering, Atari Corporation
Sears executives calculated the success of the products in their catalog by comparing dollars to inches. They measured the amount of page space given to each product and matched it to the number of dollars grossed. In 1975, the reigning champion was an Adidas sneaker. By 1976, a new champion emerged.
The previous record holder was Adidas tennis shoes. We blew that record away in total dollar volume. We also won the Sears Quality Excellence Award—something nobody knows or cares about, but they’re pretty proud of it.
—Al Alcorn
Magnavox sold 100,000 Odysseys. Atari sold 150,000
Home Pong
machines in a single season. The first heyday of the home video-game console had begun.
Coleco was located in Connecticut, outside of Hartford. In their later years, they moved into what was once a high school. Before that they were on Asylum Street. That place was like an asylum.
—Ralph Baer
With the success of
Home Pong
, an army of new competitors entered the home video-game market. Seventy-five companies promised to launch home television tennis games in 1976.
1
Obscure companies like First Dimension, of Nashville, Tennessee,
2
and established giants like RCA proposed game consoles that looked and worked like
Pong.
Atari’s most powerful competitors were Magnavox and National Semiconductor. Magnavox re-entered the market with Odyssey 100, a new console that, unlike its predecessor, only played tennis. Magnavox had more advertising muscle than other companies in the video-game business, but the poor sales of the original Odyssey did not impress retailers.
National Semiconductor, a company that once made chips for Atari’s coin-operated games, posed a more significant threat. Atari and National
Semiconductor had stopped doing business with each other under unfriendly circumstances, back when Atari and Kee Games were separate companies.
Suspecting that Atari would not be able to pay its bills, National Semiconductor demanded that Atari pay cash up front for custom chips. Since Atari’s income was generated by selling finished arcade machines, National Semiconductor’s demand nearly paralyzed the company’s cash flow. In the end, Steve Bristow, then working for Kee, developed discrete “piggyback” boards that were able to serve the same function as National Semiconductor’s chips. Bristow’s solution worked so well that Atari adopted it as well.
In 1976, National Semiconductor decided to compete with Atari in the consumer game business.
They then proceeded to try to steal our consumer business. So they showed up at that same toy show with a bad version of our
Pong
game. It never sold.We then summarily handed them a copy of our patent, which we later found out was null and void. Fortunately, we didn’t push it very far cause it could have backfired on us. You ever try to force a bad patent? You’re in real trouble if you do.
—Al Alcorn
Atari’s most persistent competition came from a small company located across the continent—the Connecticut Leather Company, better known as Coleco.
The company started with Indian crafts. From there, it became an outdoor products company, making above-ground swimming pools out of plastic.
—Mike Katz, former president, Coleco
Coleco was a family business run by two brothers—Arnold and Leonard Greenberg. Arnold made most of the decisions. His associates described him as a short, anxious man with a quick temper and an aggressive desire to build his company into an empire. One person described him as a “buttoned-down lawyer who was very creative, very forceful, and willing to take great chances.”
When Greenberg took over Coleco, the company produced kits for leather crafts. In 1956, Greenberg acquired equipment to manufacture plastics, and
Coleco became the leading manufacturer of above-ground swimming pools. Ten years later, Coleco took over Eagle Toys and entered the toy business, making tabletop hockey and football games.
In 1975, Greenberg decided that Coleco should expand its product line to include a home video game. His engineers designed a video tennis console called the
Telestar
, and Greenberg ordered the necessary chips from General Instrument, the microelectronics company that supplied chips to most video-game manufacturers.
In the beginning, Coleco’s success seemed preordained. Of all the companies that ordered chips for console games from General Instrument, only Coleco received the quantities requested.
As it turned out, Coleco was the first company to place its order. Surprised by the number of orders received, General Instrument was unable to manufacture enough chips to satisfy its customers. As the first customer in line, only Coleco had its order filled and it looked as if the
Telestar
would have little competition if it reached the market by the proposed launch date of June 1976.