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

by Steven Kent

  She could say luau and Lanai, but for some reason she couldn’t say Lyle.

  —Lyle Rains

  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.

  The kinds of things that went on were just wild. We were the company renegades. Atari, at that point in the early 1980s, was growing at an enormous clip, and coin-op really didn’t grow too much. It stayed pretty small.

  Even though we were creating a lot of the titles that were the cornerstone for the consumer part of our business, we were kind of anonymous to a certain extent within the company because we were so small. But, by the same token, we didn’t feel like we were going to take any crap from anybody either.

  —Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone

  Ray always came off aloof to us. Outside of official tours, he only made one unannounced visit to the division, and that one day, nobody was in engineering. We all went out to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  I played poker with him once at a distributor meeting down in Pebble Beach. Nobody introduced me as the guy who did Asteroids, but I think he knew who I was.

  —Ed Logg

  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.

  Facilities decided to reserve some parking spots for themselves in front of our building so that no one else would have them. They would come out and paint lines on the spots, and every time they painted the lines, we would go out with a can of black spray paint and paint over their lines.

  Within 15 minutes there was no facilities parking.

  No matter how many times they came out there, we would go out and paint the lines over again.

  —Ed Rotberg

  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.

  Until about 1986, the attitude was that every game had to be completely new, completely different. It was much like saying if anybody ever did a fighting game, we shouldn’t do a fighting game because that would be a derivative product.

  That kept the market very flexible. I think the players in the arcades in the 1980s were a lot more flexible because every time they went to the arcades and tried an Atari game, they were challenged to learn an entirely new control scheme, a new way of life.

  —Mark Cerny, creator of Marble Madness

  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 himse
lf. 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.

  The Rivalry

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, our main competitor was Atari. I always looked at it as we had a hit, they had a hit, etc. It was great because we were creating a constant interest out there. Regardless of who had it, there was always something new, and people put their quarters in the slot and enjoyed what they were playing.

  —David Marofske, former president, Midway Games

  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.

  Galaxian was more difficult than Space Invaders. Rather than marching in straight lines across the screen, the alien ships in Galaxian swooped down in changing formations. Though its profits were only a fraction of the money brought in by Space Invaders, Galaxian was one of the most successful games of its time.

  In those days, the [Space Invader] games became exceedingly popular in Japan, to the point that people were just going crazy over [them]. As their popularity began to wane, we introduced Galaxian. I must say that Galaxian was a far superior game.

  As you will recall, the Invader game was black and white, and it has vertical and horizontal movements only, whereas Galaxian was in color and the enemies attacked from various directions. So it was a significant improvement over the Invader game.

  —Masaya Nakamura, founder, Namco

  Distributing games created by Namco and other foreign partners, Midway challenged Atari’s leadership in the arcade market.

  Atari responded with Missile Command. Dave Theurer had just finished Four-Player Soccer when a team leader named Steve Calfee suggested he make the game.

  Missile Command was based upon an old game called Missile Radar that Nolan had seen before he started Atari. In that game you tried to intercept missiles before they hit your base. We always brought this up at brainstorming sessions.

  —Steve Bristow

  Calfee called me into his office and said, “Dave, we have something we want you to work on next. We want you to explore the idea of the U.S. being invaded by the USSR. We want your game to have this radar screen that shows missiles coming in.”

  I walked out of his office and my spine was tingling because I just had this feeling that this was going to be fun and it was going to be hot. It was so relevant—that was in the middle of the Cold War.

  I just had this really, really good feeling about it.

  —Dave Theurer

  Theurer, a relatively mild-mannered person who had to struggle to stay interested in Soccer, fell in love with the idea. Though he was known throughout the division for constantly editing and re-editing his work, he managed to finish Missile Command in approximately six months. Theurer had to make only minimal alterations to get the final version of the game ready for location tests.

  I just sat down and drew up a basic game idea, which is pretty much the way it turned out, except we got rid of the radar screen because that was too distracting. I hate radar screens because you can’t see what’s going on half of the time.

  —Dave Theurer

  The finished game was fairly simple. Players launched missiles from three silos to protect six cities located at the bottom of the screen. The silos had limited numbers of missiles, so players could not waste them by shooting wildly. Once the missiles ran out, players had to sit and watch their cities explode.

  Missile Command was controlled with a Magic 8-ball–sized trackball similar to the one used in Football. It was the perfect controller because it enabled players to move the aiming device quickly and accurately.

  The game began with missiles appearing like streaks in the sky above the player’s silos and cities. Players launched defensive strikes by firing their missiles in the path of the oncoming threat. As the game progressed, enemy jets and UFOs flew across the top of the screen and dropped clusters of warheads and an occasional bomb. If players were unable to hit enemy aircraft before they launched clusters, they’d have to waste shots mopping up.

  We added railroad tracks between the cities and missile bases. The cities were manufacturing the missiles and shipping them on the railroad tracks to the bases. If the incoming bombs blew up the railroad tracks, the missiles were stranded.

  It was all too complicated and we figured that it was going to confuse people, so we threw all the railroad track stuff away.

  We had submarines for a while, but we decided that it was confusing, so the submarines went.

  We were going to have a localities-option for the operator to set the machines to for the east coast or west coast or middle America. Then we’d label the cities according to where they were. But that got to be too complicated.

  —Dave Theurer

  One day Theurer came up with an idea for creating an enormous explosion. When players lost their last city, he would make it look as if the entire screen had been destroyed by an atomic blast. When Calfee saw the explosion, he suggested putting the words The End in the middle of it.

  One lunchtime I had this urge to try something cool—I could make this huge explosion on the screen. So I just whipped it up one lunch hour. Steve Calfee walked through on his way back from lunch and said, “Why don’t you put ‘The End’ in there?”

  So I stuck it in.

  Everybody liked it. The explosion made it into the movie Terminator II.

  —Dave Theurer

  A Game About Eating

  Space Invaders was an outrageous hit, but it was nothing compared to the one that was to eventually become the icon of the video game business; and that was Pac-Man.

  —Eddie Adlum

  Pac-Man was the invention of Toru Iwatani, a young pinball enthusiast who joined Namco shortly after graduating from college in 1977. Iwatani wanted to create pinball machines, but Namco was only manufacturing video games. As a compromise, he created Gee Bee, Bomb Bee, and Cutie Q, video pinball games that reached the United States in limited quantities.* Namco released Bomb Bee and Cutie Q in 1979, the same year Galaxian was released in Japan.

  In April 1979, Iwatani decided to try something other than pinball. He wanted to make a nonviolent game, something female players might enjoy. He decided to build his game around the Japanese word taberu, which means “to eat.”

  At that time, as you will recall, there were many games associated with killing creatures from outer space.

  I was interested in developing a game for the female game enthusiast. Rather than developing the character first, I started out with the concept of eating and focused on the Japanese word “taberu,” which means “to eat.”

  —Toru Iwatani

  Iwatani was assigned a nine-man team to convert his concept into a game. The first thing he produced was th
e character Pac-Man, which was a simple yellow circle with a wedge cut away for a mouth.

  The actual figure of Pac-Man came about as I was having pizza for lunch. I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man.

  —Toru Iwatani

  The next step was to create Pac-Man’s enemies. Since the game was supposed to appeal to the female audience, Iwatani felt that the monsters had to be cute. He settled on colorful “ghosts” that looked like mop heads with big eyes. The maze, dots, and power pills came next. It took just over a year to produce a working prototype of the game.

  The idea came up in April 1979, and the project team was put together in May. Location testing was a year later, in May of 1980. A private showing was done in June of 1980, and in July the game went on sale.

  —Toru Iwatani

  The final game was exceptionally simple. Players used a joystick to guide Pac-Man as he swallowed a line of 240 dots in the maze. Four ghosts swept through the maze as well, trying to catch Pac-Man. The player lost if the ghosts caught Pac-Man before he cleared all of the dots.

  There were two ways to earn bonus points in Pac-Man. The first was to eat fruit and objects. Cherries, strawberries, bells, keys, and other objects appeared near the center of the maze at different intervals. Each time players cleared the maze, the value of the fruit increased.

  The other way of earning bonus points was to eat the ghosts. There were four large dots, or “power pills,” located near the corners of the maze. When Pac-Man ate the power pills, the ghosts turned blue and Pac-Man could eat them for a brief time.