Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  To help it develop more vector games the company hired Tim Skelly, a programmer whose journey into video games began with a night out at The Sub’s Pub in Kansas City. “A guy walked into the bar room with a computer under his arm. Seriously,” he said. “Of course you talk when someone walks into a bar with odd company or artefacts.”

  The man with the computer was Douglas Pratt and he planned to open a video game arcade. Skelly decided to go into business with him: “I had my doubts, but almost anything was better than just making sandwiches.” The venture failed but gave Skelly enough experience to land a job at Cinematronics designing their new vector games. Skelly loved the visuals: “It was different from what other games were using. The best part was that we could do smooth rotations at high speed. Vector games were much more fluid and fine-grained. Raster, chunky. Vector, smooth. I liked smooth.” Skelly’s first vector games started rolling off the production line in early 1979. They ranged from the 3D dogfights in space of Tailgunner to Warrior, an overhead view sword-fighting game where players controlled two smoothly animated warriors carrying long swords.

  By then, however, Atari had caught up. In the wake of Space Wars, Atari’s research and development team in Grass Valley, California, had got to work on vector graphics technology of its own and by early 1978 had a working prototype to show the company’s coin-op team. “It wasn’t much more than a demonstration test bed, but it clearly demonstrated that cool vector images could be displayed,” said Atari engineer Howard Delman, who teamed up with fellow coin-op engineer, Rick Moncrief, to turn the prototype into a useable device. Having refined the prototype, Delman decided Atari’s first venture into vectors should be a remake of the moon landing game Lunar Lander, a 1973 remake of the 1969 text-only computer game Lunar that used the vector graphics abilities of the DEC GT40 terminal. “I had previously seen the game and thought it would be a good choice to demonstrate the look and feel of our new technology,” he said. Released in early 1979, Atari’s Lunar Lander was a delicate real-time battle against gravity that challenged players to land their craft on the moon’s mountainous landscape before their limited supply of fuel ran dry. It was an impressive demonstration of what vectors could do but it would be Asteroids, Atari’s second venture into vector graphics, that really caught the public imagination.

  Asteroids began with a meeting between programmer Ed Logg, who had done some of the work on Lunar Lander, and Lylains, vice-president of the coin-op games division. “I get called into Lyle’s office and he goes: ‘I’ve got an idea for a game’,” said Logg. Rains suggested a game where players controlled a spaceship that had to blow up asteroids, splitting them into smaller and smaller chunks of cosmic debris until they vanished altogether. The challenge would be to avoid colliding into the asteroid fragments. Logg decided it should use vectors: “Vector monitors are high resolution. They are 1064 by 728 pixels whereas standard rasters are 320 by 240 – a big difference in resolution so when you turn your ship you can tell which direction it’s facing, which is really important.”

  Logg developed the rock smashing idea by turning it into a balancing act. Trigger happy players risked being overwhelmed by the volume of asteroids floating around the screen while those who did too little would find themselves under attack from the flying saucers that Logg created to force players to act. The tension between action and inaction was enhanced by the sound effects created by Delman, which echoed the ominous thumping beat that the aliens of Space Invaders marched to. “I tried to create the sound of a heartbeat,” said Delman. “My sense was that the player’s heart rate would be increasing as the game got more frenetic, and I wanted the player, subconsciously, to be hearing his own heart racing.” Asteroids became the most popular game ever made by Atari and the second biggest arcade game of 1979 – outdone only by Space Invaders.

  Atari followed it up with a spate of popular vector games, most notably Ed Rotberg’s 1980 game Battlezone, a futuristic tank battle viewed from within the player’s tank. “Given that we now had the vector generator technology, it seemed like a natural follow on to the successful Tank and Tank-8 arcade games for Atari,” said Rotberg. The game’s 3D visuals inspired a group of retired US Army generals to ask Atari to remake it as a training simulation to help soldiers learn to drive the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.[2] Atari’s management readily agreed to the idea and then told Rotberg. “I was told about it after the prototype had been promised – and on a very aggressive schedule,” he said. “I was not pleased. I felt that Atari should not be doing government/military products. Back at the time, most of us could have gotten jobs in the military-industrial complex if we had wanted to. Many of us were still very much affected by what had happened during the Vietnam War. Most of us had pacifistic leanings at that time, myself included. I simply did not want to work on a product that would help people learn how to kill other people.” As the only person capable to meeting the generals’ deadline, Rotberg agreed to do the prototype but on the condition that he would never work on a similar product. After three months of toil he completed the Bradley Trainer prototype, but it never went beyond the prototype stage.

  The crisp outlines of vector games were an exciting departure from the blocky monochrome of old. But by the end of 1979 the arrival of colour graphics was proving even more exciting. Prior to 1979, almost evy arcade video games was black and white. The closest they got was the use of transparent coloured plastic to create an illusion of colour in particular areas of the screen. Breakout used this approach to make its bricks different colours, while Space Invaders had a strip of green plastic glued to the bottom of the screen to colour in the player’s missile launcher and shields. “Colour was not added for some time because of cost, both for the monitor and the additional hardware needed to support colour,” said Rubin. “At the time, it was not a trivial change. A few games, like an eight-player Tank game were tested in colour – it was the only way to have eight players look different – but for most of the games we were doing, colour did not add a lot.”

  But on the other side of the Pacific from Atari, Namco – the company that bought the wreckage of Atari Japan in 1974 – had come up with one of the first full-colour video games: Galaxian. It was a Space Invaders clone that removed the shields and added aliens that dive-bombed players. Colour proved a powerful selling point and made Galaxian a huge success. Other game developers were inspired to follow suit. Dona Bailey, a car sensors programmer at General Motors, was inspired to leave the car industry for Atari after seeing the colours of Galaxian: “I adored Galaxian, I thought it was intensely beautiful. Its repetition of patterns, its colours and its swooping and swerving motions. I wanted to make something that seemed as beautiful to me.”

  Galaxian’s rougher, tougher remake of Space Invaders also proved influential, marking the start of a rapid evolution in shoot ’em ups that saw them crank up the intensity of their man versus machine challenge. Atari’s Dave Theurer served up energetic shooting games based on nightmares. His 1980 game Missile Command, a trackball-enhanced scramble to protect cities from never-ending barrages of nuclear missiles, came out of Cold War nightmares of nuclear war.[3] Theurer’s next creation, 1981’s Tempest, was a colour vector graphics game based on a nightmare he had about monsters coming out of a hole. It challenged players to zap strange abstract shapes that crawled out of a cylindrical 3D pit. Not to be outdone, Namco continued to hone the aggression of Galaxian with 1981’s Galaga – a sequel that handed the aliens new tricks such as tractor beams used to try and capture the player’s craft.

  But none of these were as angry as Defender, the ferocious shoot ’em up created by Eugene Jarvis that marked leading pinball manufacturer Williams’ return to the video game business. Jarvis joinedlliams as a pinball designer after a stint at Atari’s ill-fated pinball division. Williams had dabbled in video games in the wake of Pong, but quickly reverted back to pinball tables. By the end of the 1970s it was clear the decision to walk away was a mistake. “We all could see a revolu
tion happening in video games. It was a no brainer to bullshit management into blowing a few hundred grand on a video game,” said Jarvis, who had decided he wanted to make video games rather than pinball tables after playing Space Invaders. Jarvis soon found himself charged with developing Williams’ comeback game. The game designer had clear ideas about what he wanted to do. He wanted to make what he called “sperm games” – video games that bristled with testosterone, stimulated adrenal glands, and would terrify and thrill in equal measure. He sought to make Defender the embodiment of his vision. “The inspiration for Defender was to somehow capture the physical rush and freedom of flying in a 2D game and throw in a believable world with cool enemies,” said Jarvis. “And then, most importantly, give the player a real purpose – something to defend. The idea of defence as opposed to offence is so much more emotional. Protecting something precious from attack is much more visceral than randomly raping and pillaging aliens.”

  Defender was a high-speed race to destroy waves of alien attackers who were determined to capture the humans, spread across the game’s horizontally scrolling game world. Captured humans would be lifted into the skies and used to turn weak aliens into fast, angry, laser-spitting mutants that would seek out the player. As a result, it was in players’ self-interest to stop the aliens from capturing humans. Jarvis completed Defender just hours before its debut at the October 1980 Amusement and Music Operators Association trade show in Chicago – the highlight of the US arcade industry’s calendar.

  Williams’ return to the video game business was a big deal and the industry was keen to see what the company had come up with. Jarvis and the team were nervous: “None of us really had a clue whether the game was any good or not. Everything was so new at that time.” Defender’s macho swagger proved too much for the trade show delegates. The sight of the game’s controls – a joystick and five buttons at a time when one or two buttons were standard – scared off numerous delegates. Those who dared to step up to the daunting control panel found themselves beaten to a pulp within seconds of pressing the start button. “The show goers were old shiny-suit guys and blonde spokes-models,” said Jarvis. “They didn’t know a video game from a TV set. They played for 10 seconds and died.” The delegates dismissed Defender as a failure. It was too hard and too complex to be a hit, they agreed. So they consigned it to their lists of no-hope games, the titles the industry expected to flop. Another game on that year’s list was Namco’s Pac-Man, the feminine yin to Defender’s masculine yang.[4]

  Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man’s designer, had set out to challenge the status quo of the arcades with his maze game. “Most arcade video games of the time were violent and focused on the male player, so the game centres became places frequented mainly by men,” he said. “We decided to change that demographic by designing games that could appeal to women and thus to couples, therefore making game centres desirable places to go on a date.” After giving it some thought, Iwatani decided his game should be about eating. “When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword,” he said. “When I was doing research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had that eureka moment. So I based the Pac-Man character design on that shape.”

  For the look of the characters in his maze game Iwatani drew on the Japanese kawaii[5] art style he had already used in his previous game, the Pong-influenced Cutie Q. The cute, kitsch characters of kawaii originated in the art of early manga comics and anime films, but really took off in 1974 when the fashion accessories company Sanrio launched its Hello Kitty range of merchandise aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at teenage girls.

  Kawaii characters resonated culturally with the Japanese so much that, by the dawn of the 1980s, the interest was growing rather than fading. Kawaii became so integrated into Japanese culture that kawaii characters can be found on everything from government posters and bank literature to computers and cooking pans. For Iwatani kawaii visuals had two advantages: “The hardware specifications at the time, compared to the present time, were very limited, so we could only have artwork in a very simplistic style and it was very difficult to create a sense of empathy for the player with this limited artistic style. But we wanted as many people as possible to enjoy the game, so by creating kawaii characters we thought we could appeal to women as well.”

  Iwatani’s ideas resulted in a maze chase game where the player, as Pac-Man, has to eat all the dots in the maze while dodging four cute ghosts. Pac-Man’s only defence was four power pills located in the far corners of the maze. If eaten, these pills allowed Pac-Man to eat the ghosts for a limited period of time, turning the player from pursued to pursuer. It was a simple but elegant game lifted by its charming kawaii looks. But few thought it would be popular. Namco doubted its potential. Namco’s US distributor Bally Midway believed no one wanted to play maze games. The delegates at the Chicago trade show agreed. Instead they reckoned the hit in waiting was Namco’s other offering Rally-X, a colour game where players had to drive a car around a maze spread over several screens to collect flags while being chased by other cars.

  “Unlike the other exciting games that were around at the time, Pac-Man was designed for people to play with ease and when relaxed without ‘excitement’,” said Iwatani. “So when it was launched we didn’t get the kind of review that other games got. I guess Pac-Man didn’t have the ‘sational’ image. I myself could not imagine that it would be loved by so many people and be such an international hit.”

  The industry veterans at the trade show were, however, wrong. Very wrong. Defender became a huge success as players sought to master the game in the hope of gaining kudos from conquering the most vicious game in the arcade. “Kids used to steal rare silver collectible quarters from their parents’ coin collections, which were worth 10 to 100 times a regular quarter, to stick into Defender,” said Jarvis. “The average Defender cabinet in the US would take in about 2,500 quarters a week. Since there were 60,000 Defender games out there, you would have up to 150 million quarters in the games every week. That is a lot of quarters.”

  But even Defender’s success paled before the commercial juggernaut that was Pac-Man. For Twin Galaxies’ Day, Pac-Man was the moment when the already rapid growth of arcades went into overdrive: “When Pac-Man came on the scene, it brought the female audience into the arcade and made the amount of income so great that businessmen started opening up arcades and, thereby, making games available in more places.”

  Pac-Man’s cute kawaii characters were also ideal for merchandising and soon the pizza-inspired hero and the ghosts of Iwatani’s mega-hit game started appearing everywhere. ABC-TV started showing a Pac-Man cartoon series that attracted 20 million viewers on its first broadcast. Pac-Man turned up on lunchboxes, Frisbees, stickers, yo-yos, sleeping bags and ‘I brake for Pac-Man’ bumper stickers. Pac-Man even scaled the heights of the pop charts thanks to Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, a song-writing duo from Arkon, Ohio, who worked under the name Buckner & Garcia. The pair discovered Pac-Man at their local bar. “We were drawn to the video game craze like everyone at that time and played most of the games,” recalled Buckner. “There was a bar near a recording studio we worked at with a Pac-Man machine that we played every chance we got. At some point the idea for the song sprang up.” Big record labels initially rejected their Pac-Man Fever song, but after Buckner & Garcia released it locally and sold 12,000 copies in a week, CBS quickly offered them a deal. CBS re-released Pac-Man Fever in December 1981, the following March it hit number 9 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart selling more than a million copies in the process. CBS pushed Buckner & Garcia to make a whole album of songs about video games as quickly as possible to capitalise the success of their novelty single. “With only three weeks to complete the album we would go to a game room and look for a game that was hot and have the good players explain how to play it,” said Garcia. “We would then go home and write the music for it and by the next
de laying the basic tracks for the song.” The result of those rushed sessions was the Pac-Man Fever album: a saccharine pop snapshot of arcade life in early 1982.

  Its eight tracks of sugary melodies name-checked some of the biggest games of the time from Sega’s traffic dodging Frogger (Froggy’s Lament) to Centipede, a shoot ’em up set amid the mushroom-strewn detritus of a forest that was created by former General Motors employee Bailey and Asteroids designer Logg (Ode to Centipede). Buckner & Garcia’s lyrics captured a world of pockets brimming with quarters, intergalactic battles and calloused fingers. Sound effects taken from the games punctuated the tracks with blasts of white noise, eldritch beeps and the robotic monotone of synthesized speech. The album sold nearly a million copies and made Buckner & Garcia stars of the video game boom. They appeared on TV shows such as the Dick Clark-presented chart show American Bandstand and a special Pac-Man Fever day on MTV, an exciting new TV channel dedicated to music videos that had started broadcasting in August 1981.

  Buckner & Garcia weren’t the only people sharing in the success of Pac-Man. Atari, more by fluke than design, had found itself the holder of the exclusive rights to make Pac-Man on home consoles and computers thanks to a $1 million deal signed in 1978 when Namco had no hit games to its name. Atari couldn’t believe its luck. For a relative pittance the company had gained control of the biggest game of the past decade. In April 1982, Pac-Man arrived on the VCS 2600 sending sales of the console through the roof. More than 12 million Pac-Man cartridges were sold worldwide. “Pac-Man was our all-time best seller. It was a phenomenon,” said Ray Kassar, Atari’s president. And with Namco owed no more than 50 cents from each of the $25 cartridges, most of the profit ended up in Atari’s coffers. The Pac-Man cartridge confirmed the 2600’s utter dominance of the home games market. The 2600’s lead over its nearest rival, the Mattel Intellivision, was now approaching 20 million units. Atari had pretty much stopped worrying about rival consoles, it was now more concerned about the video game companies that had started releasing 2600 games to cash in on the captive audience Atari had build up with its console.