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 (28 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
In an attempt to salvage their work on
Pac-Man
, Curran and Macrae flew to Chicago and met with David Marofske and other executives at Bally-Midway. Their plan was to bluff Bally into accepting a deal.
They went to the meeting armed with court papers that showed that Atari had dropped its lawsuit with prejudice. “We just beat Atari in court,” Macrae told the Bally executives, “and we’re going to launch this enhancement kit. We just want your blessing.”
We thought we were being very clever, convincing them that we were going to launch this enhancement kit, and I think we probably could have gotten their blessing.
One thing we did not take into account was that Bally had just successfully made
Pac-Man
the biggest-selling video game of all time. Their production lines had just shut off and they had nothing to put into production after that. They did not have the next game.I believe Dave [Marofske] was the one who came up with the idea of saying, “Well, guys, how about we talk sequel rather than you selling it as an enhancement kit?”
—Doug Macrae
The enhancement kit designed by General Computer turned
Pac-Man
into a new game called
Crazy Otto
, in which
Pac-Man
had legs. In the whirlwind negotiations that followed, Curran and Macrae were told that the new game had to be faithful to the
Pac-Man
image and that the legs were not acceptable.
They decided to create a female character.
As we kicked it around and what the sequel should be, we came up with the idea of, well, it should be the female
Pac-Man.
We originally burnt the
ROMs for production under the name
Pac-Woman
, but as we were getting ready to go into production, several females inside of Midway objected, saying, “That’s kind of an inappropriate name” and that we should put a surname in front of it.I never understood why.
We chose
Miss Pac-Man
and got very close to going into production. Then someone pointed out to us that in the third animation (the cartoons between levels of the games)
Pac-Man
and the female
Pac-Man
get together and have a baby. We would have had all kinds of people talking about the fact that they had a baby out of wedlock, which would have been very bad.We scrambled and came up with Mrs., then changed it to a fifth name, Ms., because we were trying to make everyone in life happy and all of this happened in the final 72 hours before the production line was supposed to start up.
—Doug Macrae
Midway never built an actual
Ms. Pac-Man
board. It simply built
Pac-Man
boards, then added General Computer’s enhancement kit.
By this time, maze chasing had become the most popular theme in the arcades. Some manufacturers updated the theme by making the characters move fast or by adding shooting to the game, but most maze chase games still looked a lot like
Pac-Man.
We had thought that the
Ms. Pac-Man
image gave the game its own identity. We changed the artwork and changed the speed and presented it to Mr. Nakamura [president of Namco]. After going back and forth for a while, we introduced it to the marketplace.—David Marofske
Like
Pac-Man
and
Centipede, Ms. Pac-Man
appealed to female players. It had the same basic game play as
Pac-Man.
The game still involved clearing a maze while avoiding four mop-like ghosts named Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Sue—the latter of which Macrae named after his sister. (The fourth ghost in
Pac-Man
had been named Clyde.)
The biggest difference between
Pac-Man
and
Ms. Pac-Man
was that
Ms. Pac-Man
featured four mazes instead of the single maze in the original game.
Ms. Pac-Man
was also faster. The ghosts in
Pac-Man
followed preset paths. By running in certain patterns, players were able to confuse them and play nearly indefinitely. There were no known patterns to fool the ghosts in
Ms. Pac-Man.
General Computer also created several cosmetic changes. The fruits and bonus objects in
Pac-Man
appeared just below the center of the maze. In
Ms. Pac-Man
they marched around the maze. The main character, Ms. Pac-Man, was still a yellow ball with a mouth but had comic touches—a red bow and lipstick. Like
Centipede
, the pinks and blues in
Ms. Pac-Man’
s color scheme added a feminine touch.
Midway sold 100,000
Pac-Man
machines and more than 115,000
Ms. Pac-Man
machines in the United States. Other than
Pac-Man
and
Ms. Pac-Man
, no arcade game has ever sold more than 100,000 units in the United States.
General Computer later built
Junior Pac-Man
for Bally Midway. Later, Bally/Midway contracted with Dave Nutting to build
Baby Pac-Man
, a maze-chase game with a pinball machine attached. At certain points in the game, the action went from the chase on the video monitor to the pinball machine.
Curran and Macrae sued Midway, claiming that they had come up with the concept of a Pac-Man family and that they should receive royalties from all Pac-Children games. They won the suit.
Though
Baby Pac-Man
was never a popular game and its royalties amounted to little, the litigation resulted in huge royalties on merchandise with images of Pac-Man and his family.
In 1980, Ralph Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, birthed an invention to personalize video games—a camera that could shoot pictures of players’ faces, digitize them, and load the images into games. He thought that arcade manufacturers could place the camera in the marquee of their cabinets and paste players’ faces on characters in their games. The camera could also snap a photograph of a high-scoring player and post it next to his score.
The idea was to put a small, inexpensive black and white video camera into the arcade game and point it down toward the face of the player. The player would
see his own face digitized on the screen, smile until he liked the way he looked, and push a button, and the digitized picture would be stored in RAM and available for use, either during the game to become the head of a player or used in the credits to appear next to the scores and the initials of the player.I figured every confirmed video-game player in the city of Chicago and New York would be running around from arcade to arcade to get his mug up. It seemed like a surefire hit to me, so I built the preliminary piece of equipment and took it to Chicago to Marvin Glass and Associates.
We had John Pasierb, the chief engineer of Bally/Midway, come over and look at it. And he got very interested immediately.
—Ralph Baer
Executives at Midway expressed great interest in Baer’s camera and commissioned him to install the prototype into one of their machines. Baer installed his camera in an arcade machine and rigged it to take pictures of players who got high scores. Midway set up the game in a Chicago test site.
According to Baer, the game did well the first day. The second day ended in disaster, and a Midway executive told Baer that Midway was no longer interested in his invention.
To make a long story short, they put it on display in an arcade in Chicago and it did very well the first day. The second day some guy gets up on a chair, drops his pants in front of the camera, and that’s the end of the product.
—Ralph Baer
During this time, the rock group Journey was one of the most popular musical acts in the United States. Some Midway designers wanted to make a game based on the group.
In
Journey
, the game, players helped drummer Steve Smith jump through space, using drums as trampolines. They helped keyboard player Jonathan Cain run through a minor obstacle course, guitarist Neal Schon float through a low-gravity cave, bass guitarist Ross Vallory jump over several exploding platforms, and lead singer Steve Perry slip through a maze of deadly gates.
Journey
was the first game to incorporate digitized graphics. Black and white photographic images of the musicians’ faces appear throughout the game. The images were captured using Ralph Baer’s camera.
There’s a postmortem. We salvaged all that money we put into that game by digitizing the heads of some rock group that was popular at the time and using the heads as characters in a game. That was the outcome, but the concept of a camera in a machine just went by the board because of that one instance.
—Ralph Baer
The game play in
Journey
was not particularly innovative, but Midway executives believed that the digitized likenesses of the band would attract an audience. In past years they might have been right. By the time
Journey
came out, the arcade business was beginning to fade and pictures of rock stars were not enough of a draw to save a bad game.
Journey
was, between you and me, a disappointment. I thought it was a better game than it got credit for, but the market had started to soften.Like I say, I was a little disappointed. I thought that from a market standpoint, it was a nice piece.
—David Marofske
There’s a joke that on June 21, 1982, at approximately 4:30
P.M.
, the video game business fell over a cliff. People stopped playing them, and operators stopped buying them. And that pall lasted for many, many years and nobody’s been able to figure out why.To this day, even though it happened well over a decade ago, you still hear people talking about the bust. Not the boom, but the bust.
—Eddie Adlum
The video game industry began its decline in mid-1982. The industry didn’t crash; it simply stopped growing.
The first people to feel the effects were entrepreneurs who placed games in restaurants, grocery stores, and fancy hotels. Games in low-traffic locations no longer earned enough money to pay for their operation. Many of these entrepreneurs defaulted on the loans they had made to purchase their games.
At the time, several companies had recently built new super arcades on the belief that the business would continue to expand. Arcades like Castle Park, a multimillion-dollar 17,000-square-foot operation in Riverside, California, needed thousands of customers per week to survive. As interest waned, these large new arcades attracted too few customers to meet expenses. They were the first casualties of the shake up.
So the fallout from the video bust in mid/late 1982 was a sad one for this business. People lost money putting games in places where they shouldn’t have gone. Lobbies of Chinese restaurants, for example. You’re just not going to make money on a machine in the lobby of a Chinese restaurant, you’re just not.
When the bloom came off the rose, those machines came out of those locations.
Unfortunately, a lot of distributors had extended too much credit to newcomer-operators and ended up with a lot of debt. A million dollars in unpaid bills was not unusual from a single distributorship.
The people who devoted much of their money to video games ended up with a lot of unnecessary cabinetry, hardware, monitors, and games that had absolutely no resale value whatsoever. They started visiting the city dump and pushing them over the hill.
—Eddie Adlum
As the big arcades disappeared, smaller ones received enough business to survive. For a short time, the business seemed to correct itself. Many arcade owners purchased new equipment and tried to hang on until business picked up again. It never did. The coin-operated video-game business continued a fairly steady decline for the next fifteen years.
No one knew why the business had slumped. Some of the most memorable games in video-game history arrived after the arcade business began to fade. Gottlieb released
Q*bert
, Nintendo released
Donkey Kong Junior
, Sega released
Pengo
, and Williams released
Joust
and
Robotron 2084
, but the business continued to wane.
We could just say it’s a fickle public. We do know that movies got better. We do know that CD records made their appearances. And we also know that the stuff that we sell is generally called “novelty,” and novelty is not forever, you have to constantly freshen it.
We tried to freshen it, but apparently not to the point where the public would play it with the reckless abandon that they were playing before.
—Eddie Adlum
Toward the end of 1982, Taito America came out with an adventure game called
Jungle King.
In this game, players helped a Tarzan-like hero rescue a woman from savages. The game involved swinging across a jungle on vines, swimming through alligator-infested waters, dodging falling boulders, and jumping over cannibals.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the entity that held the rights to Tarzan, claimed that
Jungle King
infringed on its property and demanded that Taito change the title of the game and its content. Rather than face an expensive legal battle, Taito agreed.