Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  Taito’s president was far from impressed by Nishikado’s plan to create a game where you shot people. “I was prevented from using the human form, so I thought of aliens so I could use the similar form, and therefore a smooth movement, while getting around the problem of shooting humans,” said Nishikado. He took inspiration from the 1953 film of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds that he had seen as a child: “The bug-like aliens made a great impression on me, so I created my aliens based on that image.” The invertebrate alien forms Nishikado eventually created also resembled sea creatures such as crabs, octopuses and squid.

  Another big influence was Atari’s Breakout. Nishikado decided that, like the bat from Breakout, the player’s missile launcher would be stuck at the bottom of the screen and only capable of moving left or right. In place of Breakout’s static bricks, he arranged a phalanx of space invaders – 11 aliens wide and five aliens deep – and got them to march ominously from one edge of the screen to the other while raining laser fire on the player below. And when this extraterrestrial army reached the screen’s edge, it would drop down in menacing unity one step closer to the player and its ultimate goal of reaching earth. To help the player, Nishikado added four shields that could provide some cover from the alien barrage, although these would be slowly ripped and torn apart by the onslaught from above. The player’s task was straightforward: defeat the aliens before they reached earth, but it was a hopeless battle for survival, as the aliens would never stop. Even if the player killed the whole alien army another would simply take its place. The only reward for the ultimately doomed player was the chance to take down as many aliens as possible before defeat in order to add their name to the game’s roll of honour – its high score table.

  For players used to the tame, innocent fun of Pong and the ponderous battles of Tank, Space Invaders was a powerful experience. This wasn’t just a bit of fun, this was ferocious human-versus-machine action. Exhilarating, stressful, adrenaline-pumping and intimidating in equal measure. Like the invaders within its virtual world, Space Invaders conquered Japan within weeks of its launch in July 1978. Children, teenagers and adults alike flocked to the arcades to join the battle against the alien threat. Pachinko parlours, bowling alleys and even grocery stores reinvented themselves as dedicated Space Invaders arcades. Cafés swapped their tables for Space Invaders cocktail cabinets. Novelty pop act Funny Stuff took the invasion onto the airwaves with Disco Space Invaders, a hit single backed with dance moves inspired by the jerky movements of Nishikado’s aliens. Within three months of its launch, Space Invaders had gobbled up so many ¥100 coins it brought Japan to a standstill, preventing people from buying subway tickets or using public telephone boxes. A panicked Bank of Japan responded by ordering an investigation of Taito, which would sell more than 100,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan alone. Nishikado, however, paid little attention to the fuss his game was causing: “I don’t remember being particularly happy or pleased at the time. I was more concerned with the low quality of the hardware for this game and was concentrating my efforts on creating better hardware.”

  Space Invaders’ formula would prove no less potent in North America and Europe. Bally Midway, Taito’s US distributor, sold around 60,000 Space Invaders machines and watched its profits soar. Eugene Jarvis, who was a pinball designer for Atari when Space Invaders reached the US in late 1978, responded by abandoning the world of flippers and pins. “I was a real pinball fanatic, but when Space Invaders came out I knew the future was in video games,” he said. “I was instantly addicted by the possibilities of computer intelligence applied to video games. This was a huge advance from the first generation of ‘dumb’ games like Pong, which relied solely on the intelligence of human players.”

  The impact of Space Invaders could alsobe seen in the US sales figures for coin-op games. In 1978 the business generated revenues of $472 million, slightly down on the previous year’s $551 million. In 1979 the figure had more than tripled to $1,333 million – with Space Invaders accounting for a large proportion of that total. And having conquered the world’s arcades, Space Invaders then helped Atari conquer the home.

  By late 1979 competition in the home video game business was hotting up. Fairchild and RCA’s consoles had bitten the dust but new machines had taken their place. Atari’s biggest rival in the arcades, Bally, had released the Professional Arcade. Designed by Dave Nutting Associates, the Bally Professional Arcade was more powerful than Atari’s machine – a fact the company hoped would give it the edge. “We knew we were miles ahead of Atari technically,” said Jay Fenton, an engineer at Dave Nutting Associates who helped create Bally’s console. “Nothing else came close to our console until the Nintendo.”

  But that technology came at a higher price and, unlike Atari, which sold the 2600 at cost price, Bally was determined to make a profit on every console sold. “What really killed us was being more expensive – like double what the VCS went for,” said Fenton. The citizens of New Jersey also delivered the console an unintentional blow, said Dave Nutting. In 1978 the state’s voters backed a law allowing casino gambling in Atlantic City. The vote turned the east coast city into a new Las Vegas and for Bally, which also made fruit machines, it was a major business opportunity. “Bill O’Donnell was the president of Bally and his dream was for Bally to get into owning and operating casinos,” said Nutting. “He now had the financial resources, from Bally’s incredible success in the commercial video game market, and now had the place. Bally lost interest in pursuing the consumer market and decided to abandon the project.” The Professional Arcade was sold off to a group of small businessmen who relaunched it as the Astrocade only to watch it fade into oblivion.

  Internal politics also crippled the Magnavox Odyssey2, the TV set manufacturer’s answer to the 2600 and Fairchild’s Channel F. To give its console the edge, Magnavox decided to base the system on the 8244 graphics chip that Intel was developing. This chip, one of the first graphics chips to be created, would handle much of the work involved in generating on-screen images and audio, leaving the Odyssey2’s main microprocessor to concentrate on running games. “It was by far the most advanced graphics chip of its day and gave a huge advantage to the Odyssey2,” said Ed Averett, one of the Intel team that created the chip. But the chip’s development was plagued by delays that kept pushing back the launch of the Odyssey2 until 1978. Despite the delays, Averett was upbeat about the console’s chances and quit Intel to make games for the console. “With incredible hardware for that time and distribution in place, the only thing missing was software,” he explained. “So I left Intel to design games for the Odyssey2. Everyone thought I was crazy. Intel, Magnavox, even my family, except my wife and our one-year-old daughter Ashley.”p>

  But by the time the Odyssey2 launched, Magnavox was already trying to extract itself from the video game business. The project had nearly been cancelled before launch, until Ralph Baer intervened and persuaded the company, which was now part of the Dutch electronics giant Philips, to stick with it. And even though it went ahead with the launch, Magnavox was still looking for a way out. “By the time the chip arrived, Magnavox was seriously thinking about getting out of the video game business as soon as its obligation to Intel was fulfilled,” said Averett. “All of their engineers had been told to stop designing games and most were reassigned. The lights were going out for the Odyssey2 before it was even born.” The console’s only internal support at senior level came from Mike Staup, one of Magnavox’s vice-presidents, and he faced an uphill battle trying to keep the rest of the company’s upper management from pulling the plug on the system. Averett, however, did quite well out of Magnavox’s decision to stop making games internally: “When the Odyssey2 finally hit the market it sold out immediately, so Magnavox said ‘ok, design one more game, but this is the last game we want, ever’. This philosophy of just one more game prevailed for three years.”

  Averett ended up the sole game creator for the Odyssey2 – a one-man freelancer working for royal
ties taking on Atari’s dedicated pool of VCS game designers. “It was incredibly frustrating since the Odyssey2 was vastly superior to the VCS,” he said. “Atari deserves huge credit for taking on Magnavox and then Philips with an inferior product and beating them soundly in the marketplace. While frustrated, I did get a lot of satisfaction about being part of one of the best-kept secrets at the time in the industry – being one guy going toe-to-toe against Atari design teams. We went to some lengths to keep that secret for obvious reasons: one of the biggest being I had no time for anything but designing games.” The only support Averett got was technical help from his wife and criticism from the kids in his neighbourhood, who he used as play testers. “It was as brutal as you might imagine – kids don’t mince words,” he said. The Odyssey2 would eventually crawl past the million sales mark and did well in Europe where Philips released it as the Videopac G7000, but the lack of corporate support ensured the console never came close to matching the sales of the VCS.

  But while Bally and Magnavox had been doing their best to help Atari finish off their own consoles, by late 1979 Atari finally found itself facing a serious challenger: Mattel. Flushed with its success in the handheld games business, Mattel decided it wanted a slice of the video game console business too. “Handhelds had established Mattel in the electronic game area, which made it a sensible add-on to go and compete on the console side against Atari,” said Katz. In late 1979 Mattel launched its Intellivision console in Fresno, California, to test the market ahead of the full US-wide launch in 1980. Mattel had no intention of letting Atari have an easy ride. It developed an advertising campaign that highlighted how superior the Intellivision’s graphics were to the VCS. It paid sporting bodies to endorse the sports games that woulbe central to its bid for sales. And it formed an internal development team headed by Don Daglow, the pioneering computer programmer who had written Baseball and Dungeon. “We absolutely felt we could catch up with Atari because the Intellivision was next generation compared to the Atari 2600 – it was that much better,” said Daglow.

  But just as Mattel was gearing up for its assault on Atari, Manny Gerard had a brainwave. “The single best thing I ever did at Atari was go over to the coin-op building one day in 1979,” said Gerard. “They had a coin-op version of Space Invaders and they’re all playing it. I walked back across the street to Kassar’s office and I said ‘I’ll tell you what I want Ray – take the fucking Space Invaders, send it up to consumer engineering, engineer it for the 2600 and licence the name, and if you can’t licence the name steal the game play’. He looked at me and said ‘oh my god, why didn’t I think of that?’. I said ‘Because you’re too busy running the company’.” Atari moved quickly, bought the rights off Taito and, in January 1980, released Space Invaders on the 2600. Any question marks about Atari’s hold on the console market melted away. “It was the Space Invaders cart that blew the 2600 to the Moon,” said Gerard. The fuss over the electronic handheld games that had stolen the thunder of video game consoles in the late 1970s evaporated and every kid in every town in America wanted an Atari 2600. And over the next couple of years millions of them would get their wish.

  [1]. Lawson’s Demolition Derby game didn’t get much further than Campbell as Major Manufacturing closed down shortly after it was installed in the pizzeria.

  [2]. Eight-track tape cartridges were a popular music format in North America during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in car stereos.

  [3]. Customers were just as bewildered a more than a year later when Atari launched its console. “Atari had a very good attract mode to attract you to the game,” said Lawson. “People used to play the attract mode and not realise they weren’t playing the machine.”

  [4]. Speak & Spell also inspired numerous musicians to use its robotic tones in their music. Among them were the Pet Shop Boys, Kraftwerk, Limp Bizkit and Beck. British synthpop act Depeche Mode even named their 1981 debut album after thetoy.

  [5]. Chicago was home to most of the pinball business including the three largest manufacturers: Bally Midway, Gottlieb and Williams.

  Pop idols: Buckner & Garcia meet Pac-Man. Courtesy of Buckner & Garcia

  7. Pac-Man Fever

  It’s the summer of 1982 and North America is in the grip of video game mania. In the four years since Space Invaders made its Japanese debut, video games had exploded in popularity. Back in 1978 the US sales of home and coin-operated games stood at $454 million; 48 months later in 1982 that figure had soared to $5,313 million. To put it another way, the video game business was expanding by a massive 5 per cent a month.

  Excitement about video games pervaded every corner of American life. The public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for electronic play had transformed the retail landscape. Arcades had sprung up in every mall and high street. Coin-op games could be found in launderettes, movie theatres, cocktail lounges, hotels and restaurants. Even supermarkets were installing video games for their customers to play. “Arcade locations were like Starbucks back then – literally everywhere,” said Scott Miller, who wrote columns for the Dallas Morning News about video games at the time. There was no respite at home either as millions upon millions of Atari VCS 2600 consoles had embedded themselves under the nation’s TV sets.

  Journalists marvelled at the dazzling success of the video game. They pored over analyst reports suggesting that video games would soon be bigger than film and music combined. They interviewed fresh-faced game designers who boasted about how they had spent royalty cheques and bonus payments worth tens of thousands of dollars on a celebrity lifestyle of fast cars and flash pads. And they wrote about the new ‘pinball wizards’ – the hot-shot players who were the masters of the arcades. “The public and the media were fascinated by the video game,” said Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies, which started life as a small arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, before turning itself into the official keeper of video game high score records. “The media, in particular, was amazed by players who could actually beat the games. It was this perception of ‘man versus machine’ that made many news stories so intriguing to the public.”

  Everyone wanted a piece of video games, from the movers and shakers of Washington D.C. to the studio bosses of Hollywood. Star Wars director George Lucas set about forming a games division at his company Lucasfilm. Walt Disney Pictures sought to cash in with Tron, a film about a man trapped inside a video game that was touted as a summer blockbuster. Guides explaining how to beat arcade machines clogged up the bestseller lists. Quaker Oats, Parker Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Thorn EMI formed video game divisions. McDonald’s started serving Atari-themed burger meals where “thanks to McDonald’s and Atari, the old-fashioned TV dinner is being replaced by an exciting video-dinner that could make you a winner”. And if a burger, fries and shake were too much, you could snack on a packet of Universal Foods’ Pretzel Invaders. In Washington D.C., a group of young Democrats – including future presidential candidate Al Gore – became known as the Atari Democrats for their support for giving tax breaks to high-tech industries rather than older manufacturing industries such as steel and cars. As Time magazine’s cover declared in late 1981: “Gronk! Flash! Zap! Video Games Are Blitzing The World’.

  The blitz began with Space Invaders. Its success reignited interest in video games just as a trinity of technological and cost breakthroughs allowed for a major leap forward in the quality and vision of games being released in the arcades. The first development was the microprocessor and the design freedom it granted game developers, the second and third were improvements in video game visuals: high-resolution vector graphics and colour games. Both came to fruition in 1979.

  Vector graphics had existed for years, but had always been too expensive for use in the arcades.[1] Standard TVs, also known as raster scan monitors, build images out of a series of horizontal lines that are drawn in turn left to right starting from the top. Using this method a TV can create a full-screen image once every 50th or 60th of a second. Vector monitors take a different approach.<
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  Instead of building complete pictures, they draw pencil-thin white lines between two co-ordinates on the screen. While poor at drawing complete images, vector graphics were perfect for drawing crisp, smooth outlines that were also brighter than the images created by standard TVs. “The resolution of raster games was not so great in those days,” said Owen Rubin, an Atari engineer who started out making vector graphics games on his university’s computers. “The graphics of a vector monitor were extremely sharp and, for the time, very high resolution. They just looked very good.”

  Vector graphics first came to the arcade, thanks to Larry Rosenthal, an engineer who, like Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, wanted to bring Spacewar!, to the arcades. He built the Vectorbeam system that made vector graphics cheap enough to use in arcade games and used it to make Space Wars, an arcade version of the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game. Rosenthal hoped arcade manufacturers would buy the rights to the game and most were interested. But when Rosenthal insisted on getting half of the profits, potential buyers such as Atari walked away. Having alienated the big players, Rosenthal found himself pitching the system to small-fry video game companies. One of these was Cinematronics of El Cajon, California. Cinematronics was in bad shape when Rosenthal got in touch. The company had released two unsuccessful games and was on its last legs, so figuring it had nothing to lose, it accepted Rosenthal’s high price. In October 1977 Space Wars went on sale, introducing vector graphics to the arcades for the first timee game’s distinctive ghostly outline visuals helped Cinematronics shift 10,000 machines, saving it from the brink of closure. Cinematronics’ relationship with Rosenthal would be short lived. Rosenthal felt he wasn’t earning enough from the game and walked out taking his Vectorbeam system with him. After a legal tussle, Cinematronics paid Rosenthal for the rights to use the Vectorbeam technology and set about trying to become the premier creator of vector graphics arcade games.