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 (27 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
In Theurer’s new game, players shot at creatures as they climbed to the top of geometrically shaped holes. The game was controlled with a heavy knob that players spun like a dial. The knob originally controlled the hole’s rotation. When players began feeling nauseous, Theurer adjusted the controls so that the player’s gun rotated instead of the hole. The game attracted a lot of attention around the coin-op division.
Tempest
took a year and had about 21K [of code].
*
When I started the game, the cylinder actually rotated and your player stayed still. People said it made them sick to their stomach, so I switched it so that the player moved around. That solved the problem.I wanted to do something special when you got a high score, and I love fireworks and explosions, so I made fireworks at the end if you got on the high score table.
People loved it [
Tempest
]. They came into the labs to play it. That’s how you knew you had something hot—if you had trouble developing your game because people played it while you were trying to debug it.—Dave Theurer
Theurer switched from a black and white vector-graphics generator to the color X-Y generator during the project, but the technology proved somewhat unstable. Though it created beautiful colors and had the same high-resolution images created by older vector-graphics hardware, the new color generator tended to overheat.
I was working on the game, trying to figure stuff out, and all of a sudden the monitor stopped working. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. I was just sitting there and all of a sudden it stopped.
I looked up on the bench where the monitor was sitting, and five or six of the resistors and components had melted themselves out of the PC board. They had gotten so hot that they had melted the solder.
Those color X-Y monitors were flaky. They were a big problem throughout the testing period and they continued to be a big problem in the field. They just don’t last very long. It’s not good for sales if things are continually breaking.
—Dave Theurer
More than any game before it,
Tempest
seemed to move at the speed of light. Players used a spinning knob to control a fast-moving C-shaped polygon that moved around the top of geometric cylinders with a spider-like crawl and shot at flippers (large red Xs), fuseballs (multi-colored balls), pulsars (yellow lines that gave deadly shocks) and other enemies as they tried to climb out of the tube.
Tempest
was an immediate hit, but some arcade owners complained about it. It had maintenance problems and broke down frequently. Before long, Theurer heard rumors about kids playing the game for hours on a single quarter. One story was that they had found a code that gave them forty free games.
In a business that depended on the average player lasting less than two minutes per game, machines that dolled out free credits were a big liability.
When Theurer first heard about the problem, he assumed it was caused by the “flaky” hardware. Upon further examination, he discovered that he had created the flaw.
To protect against piracy, a growing problem in the arcade business, Theurer had imbedded a security code in the game. The code checked the placement of different objects on the screen and caused the game to shut down if images were not in the correct space.
Before shipping, Theurer, who had a reputation for repeatedly fussing over details, discovered that an Atari logo was not perfectly centered. He moved it slightly. It seemed like an inconsequential change, but if players hit a certain score, it caused the security code to malfunction and the player received forty credits.
If players got something like 179,480 points, the game would crank a 40 into the coin counter. It would do other weird things, too, like double the vector generator multipliers so everything would be twice as big, but nobody wanted that. They just wanted to get the 40 free credits, so the kids figured out how to do it.
—Dave Theurer
Around the time that Theurer finished
Tempest
, Atari announced a new bonus plan to reward designers for creating hit games. The plan took effect shortly after
Tempest
was released.
Atari pissed me off. After
Missile Command
, they came up with a new bonus plan that paid about ten times as much, but they weren’t quite sure when they were going to put it into effect. I was working on
Tempest
, and they waited to see how well
Tempest
was going to do. Then they said the first game after
Tempest
would be the first game on the new bonus plan.Talk about making me mad. It cost me perhaps a million dollars.
I don’t know who made the decision. I mean, Ray Kassar was president of the company at the time. They were owned by Warner Brothers, so there was plenty of money to go around.
—Dave Theurer
The growth of the industry continued into 1982, and video games appeared in unlikely places. The Hilton Hotel in Rye Town, New York, opened Bagatelle Place. Named after the forerunner of pinball, Bagatelle Place was a formal arcade with thirty-three video games, a cappuccino bar, and a strictly enforced dress code.
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In Nevada, casinos cleared out gambling equipment and set up small arcades. In Hawaii, an enormous arcade took up nearly half of a floor in the Rainbow Bazaar, a large tourist center in Waikiki. In the early 1980s, Hawaii experienced record tourist business and Waikiki real estate was among the most expensive in the world.
The company that earned the most profits was not, however, Atari or Nintendo—it was Midway. Midway was about to release a product that would become the most successful game in the history of the American arcade industry—
Ms. Pac-Man.
Toru Iwatani, the Namco employee who designed
Pac-Man
, was not involved with the creation of
Ms. Pac-Man.
It was created, instead, by nine college students, led by two MIT students, Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran.
As a junior, Macrae created a small coin-op route on the MIT campus with a Gottlieb Pioneer pinball machine that he received from his brother and three
Missile Command
machines that he bought on his own. The route was very lucrative in the beginning, but
Missile Command
soon began losing popularity. One problem faced by small-route operators was the cost of keeping current. People lost interest in older games as new ones arrived, and before long, the only people playing them could milk an hour of play out of a single quarter.
Other small-time operators would have had to abandon their machines or sell them cheaply, but Macrae was studying engineering. He and another student named Kevin Curran decided to update the
Missile Command
machines and give them a new life.
The spring of our senior year, Kevin and I got interested in designing games rather than just operating them. I had a computer graphics background,
and Kevin had an electrical engineering background, and the two of us kind of said to ourselves, “Well, how do we get into the design of video games?”The process was a little bit daunting, in that we looked at mainly the arcade games and didn’t really know how you’d go about building cabinets or getting involved in the hardware…. so we came up with the idea that we’d do enhancement kits.
—Doug Macrae, cofounder, General Computer
Rather than creating new games, Curran and Macrae decided to build “PAL” boards that would fit onto the circuit boards of existing games and modify game play. Their first project was to revitalize Macrae’s
Missile Command
machines.
Curran and Macrae moved off campus and set up shop in a rental house. The business at this point was a five-man operation. They borrowed money from Macrae’s mother and from their coin-op route and purchased equipment. Then they took apart one of the
Missile Command
machines and studied its design.
We started disassembling the code to
Missile Command
on this emulator, figuring out exactly what all the code did. Then we designed a board that would mount on top of the
Missile Command
game and would cleverly overlay code that we wrote onto the original Atari code. The way we did it actually was we had a board that was watching the addresses and was deciding when to overlay our code on top of the original Atari code.We were very concerned about copyright infringement because if we just modified their code and sold new ROMs, we thought we would be infringing on the Atari copyrights and end up sued within minutes.
—Doug Macrae
The new game, which they called
Super Missile Attack
, was basically an accelerated version of
Missile Command
with a few new enemies. Along with the usual missile-packing jets and UFOs, the new version also featured a laser-shooting UFO and a new color scheme.
The
Super Missile Attack
modifications brought players around MIT back to
Missile Command
, and Curran and Macrae wagered that it would have the same impact
around the country.
Missile Command
was a fairly expensive game, so Curran and Macrae decided to try and sell their “enhancement kit” on the market.
And we started selling these boards or these kits out of the back of
Play Meter Magazine
and
RePlay Magazine
for $295 dollars. We were taking phone calls in the bedrooms, we were producing them in the basement, we were designing in the living room and shipping out of the dining room of this house in Brooklyn.—Doug Macrae
It cost Curran and Macrae approximately $30 to make a board, which they then sold for $295. They called their company General Computer and sold more than 1,000 enhancement boards over the summer.
Somewhat pleased with themselves and their new business, they decided to modify an even more popular game for their next project. They settled upon the most popular game in the world,
Pac-Man.
Modifying
Pac-Man
was more difficult than working with
Missile Command.
Dave Theurer, the designer of
Missile Command
, had created a very logical and minimalistic code for his game. It was easy to understand and to work with. The programmers who worked with Toru Iwatani on the creation of
Pac-Man
had not been as efficient, and their code was twice as long.
By August 1981, while Curran and Macrae had disassembled the code and begun to build an enhancement, a new development threatened to shut them down. Atari charged them with copyright infringement and took them to court.
We disassembled the code, documented it all and how it worked, etc., and then looked at how to make modifications to make it a little more difficult and a little more interesting. And we were developing this enhancement kit as a separate board and kit again. We were ready to take it to market in August of 1981, and, at that point, we ended up sparring in court with Atari in front of Justice Keating, who was the original Boston bussing judge. It lasted almost two months.
—Doug Macrae
Though the case was ostensibly about copyright infringement, Atari was not worried about people altering the code in its games. The bigger issue with Atari was the concept of enhancement boards. Its arcade business would be crippled if operators could simply update old equipment instead of purchasing new machines. From Steve Ross to Ray Kassar, the Atari executive board wanted General Computer stopped at all costs.
We believed we had very moral high ground, in that we had not copied their code. We had the game operator pull the ROMs out of the Atari game and put them into our board, plug our board into the Atari board, and then we overlaid our code on top of it, so, we viewed that we were actually relatively free of copying their code.
As it came out in court, there were some very difficult issues about trademark dilution and misrepresentation of origin that were going to get sorted out in court under Justice Keating, which had never really been decided before. Up to this point, video-game enhancers had just blatantly copied code, did all kinds of things wrong, and they were pretty clear cut cases for Atari and also Bally to go attack and pretty much put out of business. Ours was a much greater case about whether we had the right to enhance a video game.
We went a couple of rounds with temporary restraining orders and injunctions and, eventually, the general counsel of Atari, Skip Paul, came to us and said, “What are you guys really after here?”
—Doug Macrae
Skip Paul, Atari’s general counsel and later the president of Atari Coin-Operated Games, decided to look for an amicable solution. He asked Curran and Macrae what they hoped to accomplish. When they told him that they simply wanted to make video games, he made a deal with them. Atari would drop the case with prejudice—meaning that Atari would admit it was a wrongful suit—and pay them $50,000 per month for the next two years to develop games if they would stop making enhancement kits.
Curran and Macrae agreed.
The one thing that got carved out of the agreement was that we actually had an enhancement kit to
Pac-Man
in development at the time, and we did not want to
throw it in the trash. The agreement that was written up stated that we would never produce an enhancement kit again without permission from the original copyright holder of the game … or the original manufacturer of the game.Atari assumed that no one would ever give us permission.
—Doug Macrae