Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  “My overall game plan for my grand presentation to Bally’s management was to obtain two in-production Bally pinballs and strip one of all electro-mechanical components and leave the other for comparative play,” said Nutting. The company bought two of Bally’s movie-themed Flicker pinball machines, gutted one and rebuilt it around Intel’s microprocessor. By September 1974 the enhanced Flicker table was ready and Bally’s management were invited in to see the results. “I had thtwo Flickers side-by-side,” said Nutting. “Both played exactly the same. The only visual difference was the back panel had LED read outs versus the mechanical drum scoring of a conventional pinball. The inside of the cabinet was empty except for a transformer.” Bally’s executives couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “I found John Britz, Bally’s executive vice-president, wandering around opening closet doors looking for the main computer running the pinball,” said Nutting.

  But Bally worried that arcade owners would not understand microprocessor pinballs and decided to phase in their introduction slowly. It also decided to get its own engineers to build their own microprocessor-based hardware rather than using the system developed by Dave Nutting Associates. In response, Dave Nutting Associates teamed up with a small pinball company from Phoenix called Micro Games to create Spirit of 76 – the first pinball game designed for a microprocessor. Spirit of 76 made its debut at the 1975 Amusement & Music Operators Association trade show, where its low cost design quickly attracted the industry’s interest. “The units were lighter and easier to service and were 30 per cent cheaper to manufacture,” said Nutting. Arcade owners stopped buying electro-mechanical pinball tables, preferring to wait for microprocessor-based tables to reach the market.

  Soon every significant pinball manufacturer was following Dave Nutting Associates’ lead. By then, however, Nutting was preparing to do what he did for pinball to video games. The video games of the time were made using transistor-transistor logic (TTL) circuits that had to be made from scratch for each game. While this was adequate for simple Pong games, by the mid-1970s the limits of these simple circuits were holding video games back. “Game designers tried to create more sophisticated game play but they found themselves pushing the limits of TTL,” said Nutting. “The dedicated circuits could not be manufactured. The electric noise generated by the circuits would confuse the logic and the game play would go off and do its own thing.”

  The 4004 microprocessor lacked the power to display images on a TV, by 1975 Intel had come up with the 8080, a microprocessor capable of controlling the on-screen action of a video game. All Dave Nutting Associates needed now was a video game it could use to prove its plan would work. As luck would have it Bally Midway had just the machine. As part of its relationship with Japanese video game manufacturers Taito, Bally had obtained the North American rights to Western Gun , the latest game devised by Speed Race creator Tomohiro Nishikado. Western Gun pitted two players as Wild West gunmen trying to shoot the other in a showdown and was popular in Japan.

  But the game was afflicted with many of the problems that plagued TTL video games and Bally couldn’t put the game into production as a result. Bally asked Dave Nutting Associates to redesign the game using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Using a microprocessor turned the video game development process on its head. No longer would engineers armed with soldering irons build games out of hardware. Instead computer programmers would write the game in software that told the flexible hardware of microprocessors how the hardware should work. "TTL logic was a hard-wired system, to make a changed in game play meant redoing the circuit. Once we established the microprocessor hardware system all game logic was done in software,” said Nutting.

  To help with the programming, Nutting enlisted the help of two student volunteers from the University of Wisconsin’s computer science course: Jay Fenton and Tom McHugh. Fenton, a transsexual who became Jamie in early 1990s, was suspicious of getting involved with the amusements business. “I was worried about working for the Mafia. The amusements device industry had a much shoddier reputation back then. It didn’t take long for me to realise how silly that stereotype was.” McHugh became the main programmer of Gun Fight , Dave Nutting Associates’ remake of Western Gun , with Fenton concentrating on programming the company’s pinballs. For Nutting himself, working with programmers was liberating: “I, as the game designer and director, could literally sit with a software programmer like Jay Fenton and mould the game flow. It was like giving me play dough.”

  By the middle of 1975 Gun Fight was ready to go into production. Bally, however, was getting nervous. “RAM was, at that time, expensive,” said Nutting. “Marcine ‘Iggy’ Wolverton, the president of the Midway, asked Jeff Fredriksen and I out to lunch and he appeared nervous. Iggy looked at us and stated ‘I hope you guys know what you are doing because I am about to commit to purchasing $3 million of RAM in order to get a good price’. Of course we nodded yes.” Bally’s RAM order was a major purchase. Nutting estimated it swallowed up around 60 per cent of the memory chips available in the world at the time. Wolverton needn’t have worried though. Gun Fight became a popular arcade game and soon every video game manufacturer was looking at how they could use microprocessors in their products, Nishikado included: “Quite frankly I thought the play of Gun Fight was not really good and in Japan my version of Western Gun was better received. But I was very impressed with the use of the microprocessor technology and couldn’t wait to learn this skill. I started analysing the game as soon as I could.”

  The days of TTL video games were finished. One by one the world’s video game manufacturers embraced the new world of the microprocessor and 1976 saw the release of the last two significant TTL games: Atari’s Breakout and Death Race , created by Exidy – a small coin-op business in Mountain View, California.

  Exidy came up with the idea for Death Race after licensing its game Destruction Derby to the far bigger Chicago Coin, who released it as Demolition Derby . Chicago Coin’s version destroyed sales of Exidy’s original. “We had to do something,” said Howell Ivy, one of Exidy’s game developers at the time. “Someone jokingly said ‘why don’t we make a people-chase game?’ We had a steering wheel on the game, so let’s drive to chase the people.” The idea was simple enough that Exidy could easily adapt the design of Destruction Derby , saving it the trouble and cost of building a brand new game. The reworked game would, they decided, give players points every time they ran over one of the people and leave a headstone-like cross marking the spot where the person was hit. They named it Death Race . “We had no clue that it would cause any controversy,” said Ivy. “The game was fun and challenging. There was no underlying motivation or thoughts in creating the first controversial video game. It was created out of necessity and defence of our own product licensing.” The media and public, however, didn’t agree and Death Race provoked the first major moral panic over the content of a video game. “The controversy began with a reporter in Seattle,” said Ivy. “The reporter interviewed a mother in an arcade and she said the game was teaching kids to run over and kill people. The story was placed on the Associated Press news wire and then escalated nationwide. The first indications were requests for interviews with us at Exidy.”

  Exidy’s media handling did little to quell the outrage. “If people get a kick out of running down pedestrians, you have to let them do it,” Paul Jacobs, the company’s director of marketing, told one reporter. Psychologists, journalists and politicians lined up to condemn the game. Dr Gerals Driessen, manager of the National Safety Council’s research department, described Death Race as part of an “insidious” shift that was seeing people move from watching violence on TV to participating in violence in video games. It was a charge still being levelled at video games more than 30 years later. As the criticism mounted, Exidy hastily concocted a story that it wasn’t people being run over, but gremlins and ghouls. The lie fooled no one and soon the controversy began making its way onto national US TV news programmes such as 60 Minutes . Exidy received doz
ens of letters about the game. Nearly all condemned Death Race . One neatly handwritten letter threatened to bomb Exidy and its facilities. ”We did not take this threat lightly, we asked ourselves ‘what have we done?’,” said Ivy. “The police were called and for several weeks we did have security guards at our facility both day and night. The letter was not signed and the person was never caught or heard of again.”

  The rest of the video game industry watched the controversy carefully. While several distributors and arcade owners refused to touch Death Race , video game manufacturers kept quiet – preferring to see what could be learned from the controversy. The main lesson was that controversy sells. “The height of the controversy lasted for about two months then slowly died as other news stories became more important,” said Ivy. “During this time the demand for the game actually increased. We did have customers cancel their order while others increased their orders. The controversy increased the public awareness and demand for the game. Negative as it was, we felt the press coverage did increase the demand for the game and established Exidy as a major provider of video game products at that time.”

  Around the same time as Death Race arrived in a blaze of controversy, Atari was enjoying major success with Breakout . Breakout came out of another of Nolan Bushnell’s attempts to instil a creative working culture at Atari: away days where staff would debate new ideas. “We’ll take the engineering team out to resorts on the ocean for a weekend or three days and do what we called brainstorming,” said Noah Anglin, a manager in Atari’s coin-op division. “Everything went up on the board no matter how crazy the idea was and some of them were really far out.” There was only one rule, according to Atari engineer Howard Delman: “Nothing could be criticised, but anyone could elaborate or enhance someone else’s idea.” At one of these away days someone proposed Breakout , a game that took the bat-and-ball format of Pong but challenged players to use the ball to smash bricks. “The idea didn’t meet our first clutch of games we were going to work on but Nolan really liked it,” said Steve Bristow, Atari’s vice-president of engineering. With Bushnell keen to see Breakout put into production, Bristow handed the job of developing the game to Steve Jobs, a young hippy who had taken a technician’s job at Atari so he could earn enough money to go backpacking in India in search of spiritual enlightenment. “Jobs always had a sense of his own self-worth that people found a little put off-ish,” said Bristow. “He was not allowed to go onto the factory floor because he wouldn’t wear shoes. He had these open-toe sandals that workplace inspectors would not allow in an area where there are forklift trucks around and heavy lifting.”

  Atari expected the game to require dozens of microchips, so to keep costs low Jobs was offered a bonus for every integrated circuit he culled from the game. Jobs asked his friend Steve Wozniak for help, offering to give him half of the bonus payment. Wozniak, a technical genius who worked for the business technology firm Hewlett Packard, agreed. “Wozniak spent his evenings working on a prototype for Breakout and he delivered a very compact design,” said Bristow. Wozniak slashed the number of integrated circuits in half and netted Jobs a bonus worth several thousand dollars. Jobs, however, told Wozniak he got $700 and gave his friend $350 for its effort. Wozniak would only learn of his friend’s deceit after the pair formed Apple Computer.

  Atari never used Wozniak’s prototype of Breakout . The design was too complex to manufacture and the company decided to make some changes to the game after he had worked on it as well. On release Breakout became the biggest arcade game of 1976 and the following year was included on the Video Pinball home games console. [1] But the rise of microprocessor-based video games, however, meant Breakout would be Atari’s last TTL game. Bushnell saw the microprocessor as the natural technology for the video game. “I made the games business happen eight years sooner than it would have happened,” said Bushnell. “I think my patents were unique and birre enough that it’s not for sure that someone else would have come up with something like it, but I’m sure that as soon as microprocessors were ubiquitous somebody would have done a video game system.”

  The move to microprocessors also required a different set of skills from video game developers, shifting the focus away from electric engineers towards computer programmers. “Initially many of the programmers, including me, were also hardware engineers,” said Delman. “But after a few years, the two disciplines became distinct.” The need for programming skills prompted Atari to embark on a recruitment drive in 1976 to find the people who could make the new generation of video games.

  One of these recruits was Dave Shepperd, the electrical engineer who had started making video games at home after playing Computer Space in the early 1970s. “By late ’75 and early ’76, it was clear to Atari the future was in microprocessors. They put an ad in the paper and I happened to see it,” said Shepperd. Prior to seeing the advert, Shepperd had begun experimenting with the Altair 8800, one of the very first microprocessor-based home computers. Available in the kit form via mail order, the Altair 8800 was nothing if not basic. Released in 1975 by MITS, it had no video output beyond a number of LED lights and just 256 bytes of memory. [2] It had no keyboard so users had to program it using a bank of switches on the front of the computer.

  Despite its user-unfriendliness, thousands of computer hobbyists bought an Altair and set about building hardware and writing software for the system, which was powered by the same microprocessor used in Gun Fight . Among them were Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair and formed Microsoft to sell it. Shepperd, meanwhile, was making games for the system. “I designed and built a new video subsystem integrated into the Altair,” he said. “I got it working and coded up a few very simple games. Many of my neighbours would come over and we’d play games on it until the early hours in the morning. We’d make up new rules as we went along and I’d just patch them into the code and put them into the computer using only the toggle switches on the front panel and, later, from an adapted old electric typewriter keyboard I found in a dumpster.”

  With his experience of writing games on a computer, Shepperd landed the Atari job and on Monday 2nd February 1976 he turned up for his first day of work bursting with excitement at the prospect of using the advanced computer equipment he imagined was lurking within Atari. “Atari’s cabinets looked real cool. The games were loads of fun. It seemed like the neatest, newest, most interesting thing I could be doing,” said Shepperd. “I had been working for a company that made products for IBM and Sperry Univac. The test equipment we had in our labs was pretty high end. The computers I was using were multi-million dollar IBM mainframes housed in very large climate-controlled, raised-floor computer rooms. For reasons I cannot explain, perhaps because the product was so new, I imagined Atari had engineering labs with even more state-of-the-art development tools and test equipment.” The reality brought Shepperd crashing back to earth: “The development labs were just tiny rooms in an old office building. The computer systems we had to use were third-hand PDP-11s. All of the test equipment we had was old and pretty beat up It was tough to find an oscilloscope with working probes. The office building had no air conditioning and with all the people and equipment jammed into the tiny office spaces it made the rooms almost unbearable, especially in the summer months. They were operating under a very limited budget and it seemed they were just keeping things together with chewing gum, bailing wire and spit.” Despite the conditions and ropey equipment Shepperd, like the other programmers who joined Atari at that time, was excited to be making games rather business software.

  His first project was to make Flyball , a simple baseball game that did little to demonstrate the potential of the new era of microprocessor video games. But the second project he was assigned to, Night Driver , would ram home the potential of the new technology. Unlike earlier driving games such as Gran Trak 10 and Speed Race , which were viewed from above, Night Driver would be viewed from the driver’s seat. The idea came from a p
hotocopy of a flyer for another arcade game that Shepperd was briefly shown. “I have no recollection of what words were printed on the paper, so I cannot say what game it was and it could easily have been in a foreign language, German perhaps,” said Shepperd. “The game’s screen was only partially visible in the picture, but I could see little white boxes which were enough for me to imagine them as roadside reflectors.” [3]

  Not that Shepperd ever got to play the game that inspired Night Driver : “The flyer had nothing in the way of describing a game play. At no time did anybody suggest, either inside or outside Atari, how I was to make an actual game out of moving little white boxes around the screen. That I had to dream up on my own.” To work out how the game should look, Shepperd opted for learning from first-hand experience.

  “I remember driving around at various times and various speeds – research, you know – watching what the things on the side of the road appeared to be doing as they passed my peripheral vision,” said Shepperd. His solution was to have the white boxes emerging from a flat virtual horizon and growing bigger and further apart as the player’s car moved towards them. Once the boxes reached the edges of the screen they disappeared. The first time Shepperd got the movement effect working, he and his boss were stunned. “The little white boxes spilled out from a point I had chosen for a horizon at ever increasing speed. We both sat there mesmerized by the sight,” he said. It was quite cool even though there was no steering or accelerator then. The project leader probably thought we had a winner right then and there but I wasn’t sure because at the time I still had no idea of how to score the game. All I knew was it looked really cool.”

  Once Shepperd got the steering and acceleration working, Night Driver seemed destined to be a successful game. “One thing that nearly always was true at Atari, especially in the early days, was if the game was popular amongst the people in the labs, it was probably going to do quite well,” he said. “I often had to kick visitors off the prototype in order that I could continue with development. The visitors were not only other engineering folks, but word had spread and I had visitors from marketing and sales and all over all the time.”