Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  The bet spurred Garriott on and he managed to get the game working on the PDP-11 computer that his school’s Teletype was connected to. Even though D&D1 was the first game Garriott had written, the beginnings of Ultima , the video game series that would propel Garriott to fame and fortune, were already evident. “Even though it was printed on paper it still looked a lot like Ultima ,” said Garriott. “It would print out a little asterisk for walls, spaces for corridors, power sign for treasure on a 10x10 character map. You would say if you wanted to move north, south, east or west and you would wait about 10 seconds for it to print out the new 10x10 map and off you would go fighting monsters and finding treasure.”

  Garriott’s dad stayed true to his word and stumped up the cash to help his son buy an Apple II. By the time the computer arrived, Garriott had already produced numerous new versions of his game and was up to D&D28 . On getting his Apple II, Garriott started work on D&D28b , which he soon renamed Alakabeth: World of Doom , with the goal of adding graphics to his previously text-only game. He came up with the idea of giving players a first-person view of the dungeons and the monsters within after playing another Apple II game called Escape : “In Escape you saw a top-down viewpoint screen, watched a maze being generated and then it just dropped you in the middle of this 3D maze and you had to walk out of it.”

  Garriott, however, had no intention of selling his game: “It was really written for myself and for my friends to play. We were playing Dungeons & Dragons the evenings and I’d set up the computer nearby so people could play the game.” In the summer of 1979, having completed Alakabeth , Garriott got a summer job as an assistant at the ComputerLand store in Clearlake City, Texas. One evening after work he decided to play his game and loaded it onto one of the store’s Apple IIs. The store’s manager John Mayer noticed it immediately. “He said: ‘Richard, this game is far better than any game we sell here, you should seriously think about distributing it’,” said Garriott. Mayer agreed to stock the game, so Garriott spent $200 on Ziploc bags, floppy disks and photocopied instructions so he could produce copies for the shop to sell. “I thought it was a huge amount of money,” he said. One of the copies of Alakabeth that Garriott produced for the ComputerLand store ended up in the hands of California Pacific Computer, one of the largest software distributors in the US at the time. “They called me on the phone, sent me tickets to fly to California so I could sign contracts and they agreed to pay me $5 per unit that was sold,” said Garriott. California Pacific also hit on the idea of using Garriott’s Lord British character, which he had included in the credits of Alakabeth alongside his real name, to help market the game. “They said: ‘You know Richard Garriott is a perfectly fine name, but not nearly as memorable as Lord British would be. So why don’t we just drop Richard Garriott from the credits’,” said Garriott, who gave the marketing ploy the go-ahead.

  The appeal of a game based on Dungeons & Dragons , a new concept to home computer owners, was huge. The game sold 30,000 copies in total, earning Garriott $150,000 – considerably more than his space-travelling father did in a year. “I was still in high school, so I didn’t really conceive how much money that was,” said Garriott. “I was just kinda doing my thing. But it was enough money for friends and family to notice and it became obvious that I should do this again with an eye to making a game I intended to be seen by the consumer.” His 1980 follow-up to Alakabeth , Ultima: The First Age of Darkness became an even bigger success, selling around 50,000 copies, but Garriott soon had competition.

  In 1981 a company called Sir Tech released a rival role-playing game called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that offered better graphics and had players leading a party of adventurers rather than the lone hero of Garriott’s games. It outsold Garriott’s game by more than two to one, and soon the competition between role-playing game makers became intense as they tried to outdo each other with new features. In 1982’s Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress , Garriott introduced the idea of letting players talk to, as well as fight, computer-controlled characters. That same year Texas Instruments replaced the black and white line drawings that Wizardry and Ultima used for their dungeons with solid colour tunnels in Tunnels of Doom . Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds , also 1982, gave players the option to import their characters from the first game.

  By the time Ultima III: Exodus arrived in 1983, the home computer game publishing was starting to look like a proper business. The number of computer owners had grown massively and so had the number of games being released. The home computer had freed the games of computer researchers from the networks of academia and allowed them to enrich the range of video games as an entertainment form.

  Yet as the 1980s dawned, no-one was paying much attention to the games packaged in Ziploc bags on computer store shelves as they were too busy looking at the arcades and the new generation of game consoles that were about to send the US video game crazy.

  [ 1 ]. So much so that baseball has its own field of statistics called sabermetrics, which Daglow plundered to create Baseball .

  [ 2 ]. Eliza was actually the name of the software Weizenbaum’s that ran the code that created his virtual psychotherapist, which was actually called Doctor . However most people called it Eliza and the real name became near forgotten.

  [ 3 ]. Daglow was not the first person to think of transferring TSR’s game to a computer. Rusty Rutherford’s Pedit5 , the earliest known computer role-playing game, appeared on the PLATO computer network in 1974, shortly after Dungeons & Dragons was launched. Pedit5 ’s unremarkable name was an attempt to avoid deletion by fooling system administrators into thinking it was a serious program rather than a game. The disguise failed and the pioneering game was erased forever without a second thought. It did, however, survive long enough to inspire other PLATO users to develop more role-playing games.

  [4]. Fog of war is a military term that refers to the level of uncertainty in a battle. For example not knowing the location of your enemy or the amount of supplies their capabilities. Tabletop war games tended not to simulate fog of war due to the difficulty of keeping the other players’ moves secret.

  [5]. Having turned down the Apple II, Atari entered the home computer business in 1979 with the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers.

  Invasion of the coin snatchers: A Space Invaders contest. Courtesy of Funspot

  6. High-Strung Prima Donnas

  Stella was a bicycle. The bicycle owned by Atari engineer Joe Decuir to be precise. It was also the codename of what was Atari’s most important project at the start of 1976: a new form of home game console. Unlike the home Pong console that took the world by storm in Christmas 1975, this new console would harness the flexibility of the microprocessor to allow it to play a whole range of games. And instead of these games being built into the machine, they would be sold separately on memory chips housed in plastic cartridges that could be plugged in whenever people wanted to play a different game.

  Atari figured that such a system would be a great money spinner even if they sold it for little or no profit, because once people bought the console, they would be more likely to buy game cartridges rather than a new machine when they tired of the games they owned. And since these cartridges cost a few dollars to make but could be sold for $30, Atari stood to make enormous profits if it could get enough of its consoles, which it later named the VCS 2600, into people’s homes. But progress on Stella was slow, hampered by Atari’s tight finances. Home Pong may have made Atari millions, but these profits were rapidly eaten up by expansion and the development of new products. “One of Atari’s weaknesses was it was primarily self-financed,” said Steve Bristow, the company’s vice-president of engineering. “Most of the money it made came from selling products, which it then spent making the next product. There wasn’t a pool of capital. There were times when it was practically cheque-to-cheque and there would be a race out of the parking lot to make sure your pay cheque would get cashed.”

  Atari founder Nolan Bushnel
l was well aware of the problem: “We were getting ready to do the 2600, which required a lot of cash and we just didn’t have a lot of cash.” The company toyed with the idea of floating on the stock market, but backtracked after deciding that the depressed market wouldn’t bring in the kind of money needed. Then as it started examining alternatives, Atari received the news it feared most: another company had come up with exactly the same idea and was close to launching its system.

  That company was Fairchild Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley electronics component manufacturer had intended to use its new F8 microprocessor as the basis of its console: the Fairchild Channel F. Fairchild had given the task of creating the Channel F to Jerry Lawson, an African-American field applications engineer for the firm who had already made a microprocessor-based coin-op video game. “Fairchild wanted to start a new concept – field application engineers, people who were able to help its customers with design in the field. I was hired as the first field application engineer,” said Lawson. “At that time the microprocessor came and reared its ugly head. I said the microprocessor is a great tool to be used for displays, but everyone said: ‘Oh no, it’s too slow’. To prove my case I came up with a design concept to build a video game.”

  Using Fairchild’s F8 microprocessor, which launched in 1975, Lawson created Demolition Derby, an overview driving game that foreshadowed the action of the non-microprocessor coin-op Death Race. “You drove cars around the track and the cars crashed into each other. It was later changed to be called Death Race. Instead of hitting cars you hit people and a tombstone popped up. That’s how grotesque people get to be when they want to.”

  Lawson sold his game to a company called Major Manufacturing who tested it out on the customers of a pizza parlour in Campbell, California.[1] “Fairchild heard I was doing it and said ‘look we have a concept: we’d like to go into games ourselves’,” said Lawson.

  Like many other microchip manufacturers in the 1970s, Fairchild had decided to move into the consumer electronics market. “The semiconductor industry would put more and more into an integrated circuit and, when you do that, you get to a point where the only thing that’s left to do is put power into it,” said Lawson. “They finally went ‘to heck with this’. Why should they do all this engineering, all this development, so someone else can turn around and put it in a case?”

  Lawson became the director of Fairchild’s new video game division and set about designing a console based on the F8 microprocessor. The idea of a home games console that could play different games wasn’t new. The Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game machine, let people play different games by inserting different circuit boards. But the technology in Odyssey was nearly five years old when it was released in 1972 and required players to attach overlays to their TV screens to enhance the limited graphics. Lawson’s colour video game console needed no such add-ons.

  Fairchild launched the $169.95 Channel F in August 1976 with two Pong-type games built in and a selection of $19.95 game cartridges to buy separately, including a Tank clone called Desert Fox and the self-explanatory Video Blackjack. The idea of interchangeable game cartridges, or videocarts as Fairchild called them, took some explaining to a public still getting used to the concept of home video games. “There’s an event that takes place the day after Christmas that the retailers call ‘Hell Day’,” said Lawson. “That’s when people bring back all these wonderful gifts that they can’t do what they want to do with or don’t understand. I made the mistake of coming in the day after Christmas 1976 and our marketing department were on vacation. The phones started ringing. The security guard, he’s getting calls left and right.”

  Soon Lawson’s phone jammed with people struggling to operate their Channel F. “People thought it was an eight-track tape player but an eight-track tape wouldn’t fit, so they tried to jam it in there,” said Lawson.[2] “One woman called up about grandpa’s teeth being stuck in the cartridge chute. Another said: ‘Urine hurt the game’. Rover had lifted his leg and peed on it. One guy called me and said: ‘I can’t find the batteries’. I went: ‘It plugs into the wall. What do you mean batteries?’ He’d taken it apart because he couldn’t find the batteries. By the end of the day, I was so frustrated that a woman called up and said ‘My game hums. Do you know why?’ and I said: ‘Because it don’t know the words, lady’.”[3]

  Fairchild did not have the market to itself for long, however. Shortly after the Channel F reached the shops, TV set manufacturer RCA announced it was going to release its own cartridge-based console in early 1977: the RCA Studio II. Atari knew it was only a matter of time before other rivals appeared. Suddenly the company that had always led the way on video games faced being left behind. With the clock ticking, Bushnell and Atari president Joe Keenan put Atari up for sale, hoping to find a large parent company that could bankroll the 2600.

  The news that Atari was up for sale soon reached the New York City headquarters of Warner Communications, a large entertainment conglomerate that had a strong presence in the music, film and comics business. “I got a phone call from one of our large institutional investors,” said Manny Gerard, the Warner executive in charge of new acquisitions at the time. “He said something like ‘would you be interested in a technology-based entertainment company?’. The words sounded right so I said yes. I didn’t know what I was saying yes to, but the description fitted us. Next thing I know I’m going to Los Gatos, California, and I’m taken to this company called Atari.” During his visit to Atari, Gerard got a glimpse of Stella, the 2600 prototype. “I wrote an internal memo saying ‘I have seen the future and it was called Stella’,” he said. “When I saw it – a programmable video game – I said ‘oh yeah, this is a big deal’.”

  Warner decided to buy Atari and in October 1976 paid $28 million for the company, turning Bushnell into a multi-millionaire in the process. Bushnell was excited by the deal. Warner were prepared to spend the millions needed to get the 2600 into people’s homes and the daily cash flow battles that he had been fighting ever since forming Atari were finally over. On top of that his initial worries about the competition were easing. “When I first heard Fairchild was doing this thing it scared me. Then when I saw what they had done I thought these guys are clueless,” said Bushnell. Trip Hawkins, a young Harvard graduate hired by Fairchild to carry out market research on the Channel F, had come to the same conclusion. “Fairchild was a semiconductor company,” he said. “In the ’70s those companies, including Hewlett-Packard and National Semiconductor, all got into manufacturing consumer products that would use their chips – calculators, watches, Pong games, etc. Fairchild didn’t really understand consumer product development or marketing and they certainly did not understand games. They had no concrete commitment to being in the games business, whereas Atari was founded to be a games company.”

  Lawson agreed: “The problem was Fairchild still had a component brain, not a systems brain. They always thought themselves more important because they developed the circuit, but to a systems guy like I was, it doesn’t make a difference to me who develops that little chip. I couldn’t care less. But they didn’t understand that because they were coming from a different end of the spectrum. As a result, they didn’t understand marketing when it came to dealing with end customers. Their customers were manufacturers – the Honeywells, the IBMs – they’d never had to deal with an end customer.”

  And when RCA revealed its console would only do black and white visuals, but would cost only $20 less than the Channel F, Atari’s confidence grew even more. Atari had Warner’s money and a collection of hit arcade games that its rivals could only dream of. By the time Atari launched the $199 VCS 2600 in October 1977 with Combat, an in-built version of its arcade hit Tank, its competitors were floundering. RCA’s black and white console had bombed and Fairchild’s Channel F had failed to win over a large audience. But even though the opposition crumbled, sales of the 2600 in Christmas 1977 were a disappointment. Manufacturing delays meant few of the consoles reached
the shelves in time for Christmas and only a few hundred thousand 2600s had been sold by early 1978 despite the millions Warner lavished on the system. “We missed the Christmas season,” said Bushnell. “We were late in producing units and then there were some huge snowstorms that stopped us getting past the Sierra mountains. As a result we ended up not having enough at Christmas and too many in January and February.”

  Matters were not helped by the excitement surrounding a new type of video game: the handheld electronic game. In 1977 it was these, not the new generation of video game consoles, that were topping Christmas lists across the US. Toy company Mattel kickstarted the handheld games craze in 1976 when one of its marketing directors – Michael Katz – came up with the idea for a portable electronic game. “It was the mid-’70s – a time when pocket calculators were a new product and were getting smaller and smaller and less expensive,” said Katz. "Everyone had to have a little handheld calculator. I said to Richard Channing, Mattel’s director of preliminary design: ‘Can you design a new type of game that uses LED technology similar to that in a calculator but that could be portable, battery powered and the size of a handheld calculator?’ He went away and came back with the prototype of what was the first handheld game – an obstacle avoidance game where LEDs were coming down at you. You were at the bottom of the screen and had to try and avoid them and make your way to the top.”