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 (3 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Tonka acquires the U.S. distribution rights to the Sega Master System.
1989Coleco files for bankruptcy.
NEC brings PC Engine to the United States and releases it as TurboGrafx.
Sega releases Mega Drive in the United States as Genesis.
1990Nintendo releases Game Boy worldwide.
Nintendo and Atari go to court over the rights to
Tetris.
Nintendo releases
Super Mario Bros. 3
—the most successful non-bundled
game cartridge of all time.
1991SNK brings 24-bit NeoGeo game console to the United States.
Nintendo of America releases Super NES.
Sega recreates itself with a new mascot—Sonic The Hedgehog.
Galoob Toys releases the Game Genie.
1992Capcom releases the arcade game
Street Fighter II
giving arcades a needed boost.
With Genesis outselling Super NES, Sega effectively takes control of the U.S. console market.
1993Sega ships Sega CD peripheral for Genesis game console.
Panasonic begins marketing the 32-bit 3DO Multiplayer.
Atari launches the 64-bit Jaguar.
Broderbund publishes
Myst
for Macintosh Computers.
Id Software publishes
Doom
for PCs.
Virgin Interactive Entertainment publishes
The 7th Guest
on PC CD-ROM.
Senators Joseph Lieberman (D. of Connecticut) and Herb Kohl (D. of Wisconsin) launch Senate
1994hearings on video game violence.
The Interactive Digital Software Association is created in response to Senate hearings.
Nintendo releases
Donkey Kong Country
and retakes control of the U.S. console market.
Sega releases 32X, a peripheral that increases the power of the Genesis.
Sega releases Saturn in Japan.
1995Sony releases PlayStation in Japan.
Sega releases Saturn in the United States.
Sony releases PlayStation in the United States.
Nintendo releases Virtual Boy in the United States.
1996Nintendo unveils the 64-bit Nintendo 64 game console in Japan.
Nintendo sells its billionth cartridge worldwide.
Jack Tramiel sells Atari Corporation to disk drive manufacturer JTS.
Nintendo releases Nintendo 64 in the United States.
Nintendo discontinues Virtual Boy.
1997Sony unveils
Crash Bandicoot.
Sega discontinues Saturn.
Bandai releases Tamagotchi.
Tiger releases game.com handheld system.
Gumpei Yokoi, the creator of the Game Boy, dies in car accident.
DreamWorks, Universal, and Sega team up to form a new line of super arcades called GameWorks.
Nintendo releases
Goldeneye 007
for Nintendo 64.
1998Square Soft publishes
Final Fantasy VII
for PlayStation.
Nintendo releases
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
for Nintendo 64.
1999Pokemon
, a line of Game Boy role-playing games that have ignited a craze in Japan, comes to American and starts a similar craze.
JTS files for bankruptcy and sells Atari properties to Hasbro Interactive.
SNK Corporation brings the NeoGeo Pocket Color handheld game system to the United States.
2000Sega releases Dreamcast game console in the United States.
Toshiba and Samsung announce plans to sell Nuon-equipped DVD players.
Sony releases PlayStation 2 in Japan.
Microsoft unveils plans for Xbox video game console at the Game Developers Conference.
Sega launches SegaNet Internet service for Dreamcast.
Sony launches PlayStation 2 in the United States.
2001SNK discontinues NeoGeo Pocket Color sales in the United States.
Sega discontinues Dreamcast.
Sega chairman Isao Okawa dies.
Nintendo releases Game Boy Advance in Japan (March) and the United States (June).
Nintendo releases GameCube in the United States.
Microsoft releases Xbox worldwide.
The World Before PongYou can’t say that video games grew out of pinball, but you can assume that video games wouldn’t have happened without it. It’s like bicycles and automobiles. One industry leads to the other and then they exist side by side. But you had to have bicycles to one day have motor cars.
—Steven Baxter, former producer,
The CNN Computer Connection
New technologies do not simply spring out of thin air. They need to be associated with familiar industries or ideas. People may have jokingly referred to the first automobiles as “horseless carriages,” but the name also helped define them. The name changed them from nebulous, unexplainable machines to an extension of an already accepted mode of transportation.
Although video games are a relatively new phenomena, they benefited from a close relationship with the well-established amusement industry. The amusement industry, in turn, has long suffered from a lack of legitimacy. As it turned out, however, legitimacy would never be much of an issue for video games.
The beginnings of pinball can be traced back to Bagatelle, a form of billiards in which players used a cue to shoot balls up a sloped table. The goal of the game was to get the balls into one of nine cups placed along the face of the table. Abraham Lincoln was said to have played Bagatelle.
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No surviving records explain why the cue sticks in Bagatelle were replaced with a device called a “plunger,” but for some reason the evolution took place and the game transformed into a new sport called “pinball” before the turn of the century.
If one event paved the way for today’s computer and video game industry, it was David Gottlieb’s
Baffle Ball.
The founder of D. Gottlieb and Company, David Gottlieb was a short, stocky man with a full head of brown hair and an ever-present cigar in his mouth. A showman and an inventor, he once made a living by taking carnival games to oil workers in remote Midwestern oil fields. He understood the balance of chance and skill that made games fun and had a talent for refining ideas to make them more fun. In 1931, Gottlieb created a game called
Baffle Ball.
Baffle Ball
used no electricity and bore little resemblance to modern pinball games. It was built in a countertop cabinet and had only one moving part—the plunger. Players used the plunger to launch balls onto a plane set at a 7-degree slope and studded with pins circling eight holes or “scoring pockets.” Each scoring pocket had a certain point value attached to it. For a penny, players could launch seven balls.
Baffle Ball
did not have flippers, bumpers, or a scoring device. Players kept track of scores in their heads. Once they launched the ball, they could control its course only by nudging the entire
Baffle Ball
cabinet, a technique later known as “tilting.” Sometimes they tilted so forcibly that the entire
Baffle Ball
cabinet could slide several inches during a single game.
At first
Baffle Ball
sales grew gradually, but within months, Gottlieb’s game became a major success. By the time the game reached peak popularity, Gottlieb shipped as many as 400 cabinets a day.
Gottlieb, the first person to successfully mass produce pinball cabinets in a factory, became the “Henry Ford of pinball.” His competitors worked out of their garages and couldn’t compete.
Imitators popped up immediately, more or less. I mean everybody got involved in the business, and, like I said, there were a lot of people building them in their garages.
Gottlieb machines were a little more expensive. I think it was $16.50 for the machine, and that was $1.00 or $1.50 more than the competitors. But my grandfather used a better quality of walnut; I think the pins were a higher quality metal. He wanted it to be the Cadillac of pinball machines.
—Michael Gottlieb, grandson of David Gottlieb
Once Gottlieb proved money was to be made, imitators followed. David Rockola created several successful pin games
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before establishing his company as one of the most famous names in jukeboxes. Ray Moloney’s first pinball machine,
Ballyhoo
, sold so well that he changed the name of his company from Lion Manufacturing to Bally.
Gottlieb’s chief competitor was Stanford-educated Harry Williams. Having studied engineering, Williams brought a deeper understanding of mechanical workings to the industry. He entered the business as a West Coast distributor selling other companies’ amusement machines but discovered he could purchase used pinball games and refurbish them with playfields of his own design for much less than it cost to buy new ones.
In 1932, Williams decided to make pinball more challenging by limiting the amount of “body English” players could use. He designed a table with a device that contained a metal ball on a pedestal in its base. If players nudged the machine enough to knock the ball off the pedestal, the game ended. He originally called his device “Stool Pigeon,” but when a customer complained that the machine had “tilted,” Williams decided to call it a “tilt” mechanism. He tested this innovation in a game called
Advance.
Williams later refined the “tilt” mechanism by replacing the ball and platform design with a pendulum device, which has been present in nearly every pinball game made since.
In 1933, Williams built
Contact—
the first “electric” pinball machine. The name
Contact
referred to its electrically powered scoring pockets (called “contact holes”), which knocked the ball back into the playfield to continue scoring points. Like the “tilt” mechanism, electric scoring pockets became a standard for pinball that is still used today.
Previous to
Contact
, the skill for the player was to send the ball up on the playfield, have it roll around, and hope that his aim was such that the ball would somehow magically weave its way around through the pins that were nailed into the playfield.With the contact hole, you still needed to have some precision to get the ball into the cup, but getting the ball into the cup gave you something back. There was a sound, there was motion. Part of the fascination people have with pinball comes from those opportunities where the game takes over and does things.
—
Roger C. Sharpe, author,
Pinball!
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Though he was well aware of Harry Williams’s innovations, a different development frightened David Gottlieb more. Slot-machine manufacturers
began making pinball-like machines called “pay-outs,” which combined pinball and gambling.
Gottlieb saw these machines as a threat to the entire industry. Pay-out machines first appeared in the crime-conscious 1930s, and Gottlieb suspected that politicians would outlaw the new machines and anything associated with them.
Yes, there was a certain amount of skill involved, but basically the law looked at it as a gambling device. Pay-outs started out legally in many states and eventually ended up being operated mostly illegally in places where the police would look the other way, such as New Orleans. They were nickel games, by the way. They paid off in nickels. So it was a little gamble, but nevertheless it was gambling.
—Eddie Adlum, publisher,
RePlay Magazine