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 (43 page)

On September 13, Jack Tramiel described his plans for resurrecting Atari at a closed-door meeting for venture capitalists in a luxurious San Francisco hotel. During that meeting, Tramiel reportedly told his audience that he planned to build Atari’s sales from $500 million to somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 billion within one year.
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As the meeting progressed, Tramiel was reportedly asked if he seriously believed that he could keep Atari afloat even through Christmas. He responded that he could and that he planned to release a new line of high-quality, low-cost home computers the following year. Amazingly, Tramiel seemed to believe that he could turn Atari around. Even more amazingly, he convinced several venture capitalists attending the meeting that he could as well.

The
Washington Post
gave Tom Zito one of the most enviable jobs in America, just a few days after he graduated third in his class from Georgetown University.

While working at the
Post
, Zito began writing articles for the
New Yorker
and
Rolling Stone
on the side. As video games came into vogue, Zito often found himself writing about the industry.

In 1984, the
New Yorker
assigned Zito to profile Nolan Bushnell and the video game phenomenon. Bushnell was focusing most of his attention on Sente Technologies at the time. Always gracious to reporters, he showed Zito around, and they struck up a friendship. A few months later, Bushnell called Zito and asked him to move to California and work at one of Bushnell’s pet companies—Axlon Inc.

Axlon was a manufacturer of high-tech toys. The company’s products included a line of hand puppets called Party Animals that had sensors in their mouths. When you opened their mouths, the sensors activated a little sound chip that produced howls or barks, depending on the animal.

Zito’s first project was A. G. Bear, a mechanical teddy bear whose sound sensor enabled it to mumble in response to noise. The idea was that if children talked to A. G. Bear, it mumbled back to them. Unfortunately, Axlon’s intelligent teddy bear was no match for Teddy Ruxpin, a more articulate talking bear released by Worlds of Wonder that same year.

Zito, a bachelor whose family and friends lived on the East Coast, developed a close relationship with the Bushnell family. He visited their home often and thought of their children as nieces and nephews. It was a relationship he valued.

In 1985, Zito’s fascination with movies and video games merged into the idea of creating interactive games using video footage instead of animated characters. He believed that controlling real people instead of cartoons would give games impact.

Zito asked Bushnell for permission to explore “interactive television.” Bushnell liked the idea and told him to assemble a small team. Zito’s team included Steven Russell, the man who made
Spacewars
while studying at MIT; Rob Fulop, the Atari programmer who designed the VCS versions of
Missile Command
and
Night Driver;
David Crane, the charter member of Activision who created
Pitfall;
and other industry pioneers.

As they explored ways of interlacing video images and computer graphics, the team discovered that the ColecoVision’s graphics chip had been designed to allow it to place video game images over a clear background. They learned later that Coleco engineer Eric Bromley had hoped to do games with video images in the background, but the company abandoned the idea because of costs.

Zito and his team hoped to take advantage of Bromley’s design. They wanted to stream video images transmitted through a cable signal into a ColecoVision, then add interactive images. The team was able to build a prototype for testing its ideas with a limited budget but needed more money to take the idea any further.

If Zito was going to complete his project, he needed to take on a partner who could fund it. That partner turned out to be a toy company—Hasbro. Hasbro agreed to spend the $7 million to fund the project in exchange for the video game rights to the technology. Zito named the venture Nemo.

Within six months, however, the partnership was strained. Hasbro wanted the Nemo project to move at a faster pace, but delays in engineering prevented it. After some discussion, Hasbro told Zito that he could either continue the project on his own or Hasbro would take it over, but the company would no longer finance Nemo while under the Axlon umbrella. Forced to choose between Bushnell and Nemo, Zito went with his project, costing him an important friendship.

Upon leaving Axlon, Zito formed a company of his own called Isix. Because of the amount of space required to store digitized video footage, Isix’s games could not be stored on computer diskettes or in a game cartridge. Isix’s engineers developed two solutions for the problem—broadcasting the footage as a cable signal or storing it on video cassettes. Either way, the video footage had to be looped from an outside source and through a console that added the interactive programming before it could be played.

By the middle of 1986, Zito’s team had produced three short trial games. They made a four-minute interactive mystery called
Scene of the Crime
, a baseball game called
Bottom of the Ninth Inning
, and an interactive music video using the song “You Might Think I’m Crazy” by the Cars.

Zito’s next step was to make an interactive movie. He hired a director and had members of his team write the script. His original plan was to do an interactive movie based on the
Nightmare on Elm Street
movies—a series of popular
horror films featuring a maniac named Freddie who shredded people to death in their dreams. Negotiations with the studio fell apart, however, so Zito decided to create a script with original characters. He hired Terry McDonell, a future editor of
Esquire
and
Men’s Journal
, to write the script.

The final version, titled
Night Trap
, was about fledgling vampires attacking a group of teenage girls during a slumber party. As apprentice vampires, the villains did not have fangs; in fact, they wore black stockings over their heads. They simply sneaked around the girls’ house, trying to trap them, then sucking their blood with a device that used a power drill. The game was more silly than violent.

Night Trap
was not a typical video game. The point of playing was to protect the girls by catching the vampires with booby traps. One of the girls was the late Dana Plato, the actress who played the older sister on the NBC sitcom
Different Strokes.

Players would scan the rooms of the house, looking for vampires and trying to spring traps at the right moment to catch them. If players’ timing was right, the game would show a video clip of a vampire being trapped. If they missed, the game would show a clip of the vampire leaving the room and possibly even catching a victim.

In 1987, Zito made a second full-sized game called
Sewer Shark.
In this game, players guided a futuristic fighter craft through tunnels. The game showed clips of the fighter streaking toward junctions, at which point players had to direct it toward openings. If they guided it in the right direction, the game showed a video clip of the fighter going through the opening. If the player made the wrong choice, the game showed video clips of spectacular collisions. Zito hired a special-effects wizard who had worked on the movie
2001
to help produce the game.

Hasbro stopped funding the Nemo project shortly after the filming of
Sewer Shark.
Zito toyed with the idea of marketing the games as arcade laser-disc games, but the laser disc fad had ended. With no funding and nowhere to sell his ideas, Zito packed
Night Trap
and
Sewer Shark
in a warehouse. Several years passed before video game technology caught up with Tom Zito’s dream.

In the meantime, a new force was emerging in the electronic entertainment industry.

We Tried to Keep from Laughing

The American video game market may have crashed in 1983, but the international market continued almost unimpeded. Atari marched on in Europe and Japan. Even the Canadian market remained fairly active throughout most of 1984. Atari, Mattel, even Vectrex sales continued in foreign markets.

Nintendo, the arcade giant that created the games
Donkey Kong
and
Popeye
, introduced a new game console to the Japanese market in May 1983.
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Christened the Famicom (for Family Computer), the new console was a testament to innovation and economic engineering.