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 (22 page)

Within one week, Logg had a preliminary version of
Asteroids
running on his workstation. Within six weeks, the game was nearly complete. It featured the same basic control scheme as
Computer Space
and
Space Wars.
Players directed a small spaceship with five buttons—rotate left, rotate right, thruster rockets, fire, and hyperspace. When players jumped into hyperspace, they reappeared in a randomly selected spot on the screen or the ship blew up if they were hit by an asteroid or UFO while coming out of hyperspace.

The game began with a small spaceship in the center of the screen. Asteroids began floating toward the ship from every direction. Players had to rotate and move the ship to avoid getting bombarded, while shooting the advancing rocks into dust.

Asteroids
had two classes of UFOs—large, slow-moving ones that fired a few wild shots while crossing the screen, and small, speedy ones shooting smart
bullets that homed in on the player’s ship. Around Atari, the saucers were known as Mr. Bill and Sluggo (after characters in a series of Clay Nation skits on the NBC comedy show
Saturday Night Live
), but when the nicknames were mentioned in an interview, a lawyer from NBC sent Atari a cease-and-desist order.

Players received 200 points for destroying large UFOs and 1,000 points for shooting small ones. Like
Space Invaders
,
Asteroids
rewarded players with extended lives at regular intervals.

The audience for coin-operated games had matured along with the industry in the seven years since Nolan Bushnell first created
Computer Space.
People were not intimidated by the controls in Cinematronics’ remake of
Space Wars
, and they flocked to
Asteroids.

In the beginning, most players lasted less than one minute per quarter. When players learned to maneuver and shoot, they could make their games last for hours. One teenager set the world’s endurance record for
Asteroids
when he played a game for more than 36 hours. He earned so many free ships while playing that he was able to leave the game running and take breaks for meals.

Atari sold more than 70,000
Asteroids
machines in the United States. The game did not do as well in Europe and Asia, however. Only about 30,000 units were sold overseas.

Logg’s fellow designers later nicknamed him “Golden Boy” because of his long string of hits.

The culture within Atari’s coin-operated games division encouraged individuality. The quiet ones in the group were Ed Logg and Lyle Rains. Logg did not smoke, drink, or take drugs. He earned the respect of other department members by creating the most successful games. His string of hits included
Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Gauntlet
, and
Steel Talons.

Like Logg, Lyle Rains was generally serious in nature but able to adjust to working with the wilder members of the division. According to some coin-op engineers, Rains never lost track of his executive status. Some programmers considered him guarded. One of the departmental jokes involved Rain’s administrative assistant, an Asian woman from Hawaii who pronounced his name “Wyle Wains.”

After Bushnell left Atari, the people in the coin-operated games division began feeling alienated from other Atari personnel. Though they created many major hits—and Atari’s bestselling cartridges were based on their arcade hits—the coin-operated game designers felt unappreciated by Ray Kassar, who focused most of his attention on home sales. Even worse, Kassar offered more praise to designers who adapted arcade games for the VCS than to the coin-op engineers who first created them.

Coin-op’s ironic sense of self often manifested itself in mischievous pranks. Kassar told
Fortune
magazine that Atari’s game designers were a bunch of “high-strung prima donnas.” The day after the interview was published, the entire division came to work wearing T-shirts that said, “I’m just another high-strung prima donna superstar.”

An engineer made fun of Atari’s slogan, “We take fun seriously,” by circulating a memo that looked like an employment ad. “Looking for pilot. Must be able to fly at night without lights. Must have experience flying below radar range. Knowledge of Colombia-U.S. routes a plus. Must be comfortable handling large sums of cash. Atari. We take fun intravenously. Atari Recreation Pharms [short for Pharmaceuticals] Division.”

The engineer was nearly fired.

A few months later, the entire division produced the “Outstanding in Our Field” video, a home movie–style spoof of life at Atari. The video took its name from a skit in which the narrator, Owen Rubin, describes the company’s coin-operated engineers as outstanding in their field. As he speaks, the video shows the entire division standing in an empty field.

In one skit, two engineers heave an empty coin-operated cabinet from the top of their building. The narrator explains that “Not all of Atari’s games are successful, but we know what to do with those,” as the cabinet hits the pavement and shatters.

Two of the skits on the tape lampooned company commercials. One showed a young couple very absorbed in a game of Atari
Football.
The game is clearly a mismatch. The man, hardware engineer Howie Delman, is enjoying himself even though he is losing. As the camera backs away, it reveals that the woman is topless.

In the other parody, Ed Rotberg pretends he is a used-car salesman trying to sell an
Asteroids Deluxe
*
machine. “How much would you expect to pay?” Rotberg asks. “$3,900? $2,900?” He reveals the real price—$4,387. “Hell, no. We fuck you over completely!”

In another skit, the company’s top designers visit “Club Atari,” an Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant that they dressed up to look like a bordello. The programmers are greeted by women dressed in camisoles and clipped-up stockings as they straggle in. (Dona Bailey, probably the woman who had the greatest impact on arcade games as the cocreator of
Centipede
, appears in the video as one of the women of Club Atari.) Though they have two women each, the programmers congregate around an
Asteroids Deluxe
machine and forget about the club’s other pleasures.

Frank Ballouz, the coin-op division’s marketing manager, also appears on the video. In his skit, he determines a game’s future by throwing a dart. On the wall of his office is a dartboard with four cards taped around it. “Kill it.” “Make 1,000.” “Make 10,000.” A fifth card, in the bull’s-eye says, “Make 100,000.”

Ballouz had a reputation for handling coin-op humor with stoicism. A group of engineers once smuggled a large ice sculpture of a swan into Ballouz’s hotel room during a trade show in Chicago. When he returned to the room, he found the heavy sculpture in his bed. Ballouz dragged the sculpture to his bathtub and had to shower beside the unmelted portion of the statue the next morning.

Once Al Alcorn and Gene Lipkin dropped in on Ballouz while he was making an important telephone call. He ignored them. To get his attention, Lipkin leaned over Ballouz’s desk and started a fire in his in-box. Ballouz responded by telling the person on the telephone, “A couple of VPs just lit the papers on my desk on fire. If it’s all right with them, it’s okay with me,” and continued his conversation.

Coin-op even launched a little war with the building facilities department.

Despite their minor rebellions, the engineers of Atari’s coin-op division maintained incredibly tough standards. They seldom duplicated existing games. With only a few notable exceptions such as
Asteroids Deluxe
and
Space Duel
, programmers were not allowed to remake games already published. Other companies made new versions of
Space Invaders;
Atari looked for new ideas.

Another unwritten rule around the coin-operated division was that programmers never had their first game published. The rule was dubbed “Theurer’s Law” after Dave Theurer, whose first game was
Four-Player Soccer
—a game that did not do particularly well.

Before manufacturing games, Atari tested prototype games in selected arcades to gauge player response. If a game had strong earnings, the company sent it to manufacturing. If a game did poorly, its design team could either find ways to improve it or abandon it altogether.

Atari coin-op had two unofficial in-house tests—the Stubben Test and the In-House Approval test. The Stubben Test, named for Atari
Football
designer Dave Stubben, was a measure of game durability. By most accounts, Stubben, who stood about six-feet-five and weighed 275 pounds, liked to break things. Once, while joking around with other Atari engineers at the lodge at Pebble Beach, Stubben kicked a door in. They tried to repair the damage using toothpaste as caulking.

When engineers wanted to test the durability of their designs, they took the games to Stubben. Few games ever survived. One man bragged that he had created an impregnable coin-drop door. Stubben smashed it in with one kick of his cowboy boot. He bent one joystick in half and ripped another controller right out of a cabinet.

While making the game
Paperboy
, Dave Ralston and John Salwitz decided to use handlebars instead of a joystick and had handlebars welded to the machine. When Salwitz told Mark Cerny, a skinny, brainy, 18-year-old who probably weighed less than 150 pounds, that the prototype was ready for the Stubben Test, Cerny pried the handlebars off himself. A dejected Salwitz took the handlebars back to the lab and looked for another way to attach them.

The other in-house test, and the programmers’ first indication about how much players would like their game in the arcades, was the reaction the games got around Atari. While engineers built their prototypes, other coin-op employees often entered their labs and asked to play them. If a game was good, it usually developed a following. With
Asteroids
and
Tempest
, Ed Logg and Dave Theurer had to chase people away from their workstations.

Atari’s biggest competitor was Midway games. Cash-rich Bally, a company renowned for slot machines and casinos, purchased Midway in the 1970s. By purchasing Midway, a major video-game distributor, Bally entered the electronics industry and acquired new technologies.

Since Taito executives decided to market their own games in the United States after their success with
Space Invaders
, Midway either needed to license games from a new partner or needed to begin developing games in-house. Midway found a partner in Namco, Atari’s former distributor in Japan. In the beginning of 1980, Midway imported
Galaxian
, a game that improved upon the
Space Invaders
theme.

In
Galaxian
, players controlled a spaceship that moved laterally across the bottom of the screen and fired shots toward the top. Unlike
Space Invaders
,
Galaxian
had a color screen. The player’s spaceship was white and red with yellow torpedoes, the alien ships had many colors, and the background in the game had a field of colorful twinkling stars.