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

  Around Namco, the reaction to Iwatani’s game was not terribly enthusiastic. Namco produced four games in 1980. While Pac-Man was generally recognized as a promising game, most executives preferred Rally-X, a similar game in which players maneuvered a race car around a maze, collecting flags while avoiding other race cars. The other Namco games that came out in 1980 were King and Balloon and Tank Battalion.

  I did not imagine that Pac-Man would be an international hit of the magnitude that it was and is to date. People know Pac-Man. People who don’t even know about video games know about Pac-Man. So, no, I didn’t realize that it was going to be the hit that it is.

  —Masaya Nakamura

  Before Namco showed Pac-Man to Midway, one change was made to the game. Pac-Man was originally named Puck-Man, a reference to the puck-like shape of the main character. Nakamura worried about American vandals changing the “P” to an “F.” To prevent any such occurrence, he changed the name of the game.

  When Midway president David Marofske saw Namco’s four new games, he thought Rally-X was the hottest prospect.

  There were actually four pieces that Namco was showing at that time. Of the two best games, one being Pac-Man and the other one being Rally-X, I sort of thought that Rally-X was the favorite.

  —David Marofske, former president, Midway

  Buyer and analyst response at the October AMOA show further confirmed that Rally-X was the best game in the group. Of all the video games at that show, Rally-X received the most favorable comments.

  Once they hit the street, however, Pac-Man quickly overshadowed Rally-X. More than 100,000 Pac-Man machines sold in the United States. Several companies published Pac-Man strategy guides. Pac-Man appeared on the cover of Time magazine, inspired a hit song, and translated into a popular Saturday morning cartoon show. Some arcades purchased entire rows of Pac-Man machines.

  The video-game industry changed in the wake of Pac-Man’s success. Before Pac-Man, the most popular theme for games had been shooting aliens. After Pac-Man, most games involved mazes. Arnie Katz, editor and founder of Electronic Games, the first magazine about the industry, called these games “maze chases.” Soon there were maze chases involving mice (Mappy), eyeballs (Eyes), penguins (Pengo), fish (Piranha), even a personified fire hydrant that slurped up water and spat it at bipedal flames. Like Pac-Man, the heroes of some of these games were relatively helpless. Other games, such as Targ and Eyes, were tank battles set in mazes.

  The video-game business quickly became a wildly lucrative enterprise, and arcades grew to be as common as convenience stores. Hotels replaced gift shops with arcades. Grocery stores placed video games near their entrances. Some doctors even placed games in their waiting rooms.

  To reflect the growth in the video-game side of the business, the Music Operators Association changed its name to the Amusement and Music Operators Association.

  Despite the success of his game, Iwatani never received much attention. Rumors emerged that the unknown creator of Pac-Man had left the industry when he received only a $3,500 bonus for creating the highest-grossing video game of all time. They were untrue.

  I don’t recall receiving anything special, although I am told that I received some recognition in my semi-annual bonus.

  —Toru Iwatani

  According to Namco president Masaya Nakamura, Iwatani received a very small bonus—less than $3,500.

  Maybe he received some bonus but nothing really to write home about. He did not leave the company. He now performs a very important function within our R & D group. He’s the general manager.

  —Masaya Nakamura

  In Japanese business, summer and winter bonuses are considered an important part of the overall employment package. Japanese employers seldom award bonuses to employees for performing the work they were hired to do. Iwatani’s next game, Libble Rabble, did not create much of a stir in Japan and was never exported to the United States. Shortly after the release of Libble Rabble, Nakamura promoted Iwatani to manager of research and development as a token of respect.

  A New Competitor

  Pac-Man was not the only overlooked game at the AMOA show that year. Few people noticed when Williams Electronics, the leading pinball manufacturer, unveiled its first video game since Paddle Ball, a rip-off of Pong. The game was called Defender.

  Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender, had broken into the amusement industry designing wide-body pinball machines at Atari. He realized the pinball division would be closed shortly after Bushnell left the company, so he quit and spent a few months vacationing in Costa Rica. When he returned, another Atari pinball veteran named Steve Ritchie asked him to come to Chicago to help produce pinball games for Williams. They teamed up to build three groundbreaking pinball games—Lazerball, Firepower, and Gorgar.*

  In February 1980, Williams executives decided to enter the arena of video games. They asked Jarvis to design their first title. He had to start by designing a hardware platform for running his game.

  The first step was getting a hardware system going. We debated the merits of color versus black and white. We kind of said, “Okay, we’ve got to go with the future, we’ve got to be hip dudes, so we’re going to go color.”

  The next question was deciding how many colors.

  For Defender, we decided we’d go all out and make every pixel on the screen capable of sixteen colors. It was like, “Wow! This was more colors than you’ll ever need.”

  I don’t even know if the game had a name at that point.

  —Eugene Jarvis

  Jarvis, who described himself as a fan of violence and action, wanted to give his game a title that would justify the game’s violence.

  I had to have this whole justification for why you were there and what you were doing. A lot of games fall short. They just put you there, and all of a sudden you’re beating people up and you start to wonder, “Why am I beating these people up?”

  There was actually an old TV show called The Defenders about attorneys back in the 1960s, and I kind of liked that show. You know, if you’re defending something, you’re being attacked, and you can do whatever you want.

  —Eugene Jarvis

  According to Jarvis, space battles provided the most popular theme for games at the time. Placing Defender in space appealed to Jarvis because it covered up the inadequacies of his hardware.

  At the time, space was just the happening thing. It was very easy to do space because space is very abstract.

  We had limited graphic ability—just making a person look like a person was very difficult. It was almost as if you wanted to go to more abstract outer-world themes because that way people couldn’t say, “You know, that thing looks like shit.”

  —Eugene Jarvis

  Jarvis’s first inclination was to create a game similar to Space Invaders. After several aborted attempts, he began trying to design something closer to Asteroids. He liked the controls in Asteroids, which let players go anywhere on the screen. When his programmer began creating the game, Jarvis changed his mind because he didn’t like the way the game anchored him into a single screen.

  In his next attempt, Jarvis created a world that was far larger than the screen.

  I came up with scrolling the screen, making the field larger than the actual screen. The Defender world turned out to be three and one-half screens or seven screens or something. Having a universe that was larger than the screen, that was just a huge, huge breakthrough.

  My original idea was to go one direction. I tended to want to go left to right. My friend told me that was bogus, that you needed to be able to go backward. Changing the program to make it go backward was a pain in the ass, but he finally talked me into it.

  —Eugene Jarvis

  By July, Jarvis found himself far behind schedule. He had his spaceship, his scrolling world, and his controls, but he still needed to create allies to defend and enemies to attack. He needed to finish the game before the upcoming trade show, which took place in mid-September.

 
; Jarvis decided to defend astronauts—humans in space. He spent weeks creating tiny men who actually walked on the surface of the planet while players shot enemy aliens out of the sky. The process took too long. Jarvis’s boss began pushing him to finish the game, even if it meant taking the astronauts out.

  Somewhere during that time, I just wanted to put all my stuff in a box and quit. I don’t know why I didn’t actually quit. Everyone was hassling me on spending so much time on these little astronaut guys.

  Around this time, a really talented guy joined the team. His name was Sam Dicker. He was about nineteen years old.

  He did some really incredible effects for the game. All of a sudden, we were blowing up things, we had some sound going, and it was starting to get fun.

  —Eugene Jarvis

  Jarvis did not finish the game on time. He ended up spending several hours completing Defender on the floor of the show.

  Defender was Williams Electronics’ biggest seller. More than 55,000 units were placed worldwide.

  In making Defender, Jarvis had created one of the toughest games in arcade history. Players controlled a fighter craft as it defended the inhabitants of a small planet, ten astronauts in stasis, from alien abduction.

  In the beginning, the alien invaders slowly dropped from the sky in an effort to snare an astronaut and fly back into space. When aliens escaped with an astronaut, they turned into fast-moving mutants. If the aliens managed to capture every astronaut, the planet exploded and the player found himself flying through hyperspace being chased by a seemingly endless supply of aliens.

  Defender had an elaborate control panel with a joystick for controlling altitude and five buttons for firing weapons, dropping smart bombs, accelerating, changing directions, and jumping into hyperspace.

  Beginning players seldom lasted more than a few seconds on Defender, and mastering the game became a badge of honor. Some players let the aliens capture their astronauts, then shot them as they tried to escape. They would catch the astronauts as they fell back toward the planet and carry them on the front of their fighter. Other players preferred to let the aliens take the humans because so many aliens attacked them in hyperspace that they easily built up their scores. Different players came up with their own solutions for conquering Defender’s very intense play.

  I came into an arcade on a Friday night and there was a crowd of people four deep around this game, putting in their quarters and lasting maybe 35, 40 seconds. Defender was a very ferocious game—very difficult controls.

  They were seeing the special effects in the game and they just, they wanted to do it. And one after the other, they were throwing quarters in. Defender made $700 its first week. I have never seen a quarter-a-play video game make money like that—not before or after Defender. It was the most phenomenal collection anyone had ever seen.

  It was a hell of a game….

  —Larry DeMar, video-game and pinball designer, Williams Electronics

  Battlezone

  In November 1980, Atari released a game with an updated version of a familiar Atari theme—tank warfare. The game was titled Battlezone.

  Though Ed Rotberg is credited with creating Battlezone, the game was a group effort from the beginning. Rotberg used Howie Delman’s vector-graphics generator because it offered enough power to create a three-dimensional environment. He also asked other designers for help.

  The idea that we should do a first-person tank game came out of a company brainstorming session. Morgan Hoff was the project leader, Jed Margolin was the electrical engineer, and I did the programming.

  Roger Hector did the models [for the enemy tanks]. I went to Roger and said I needed something that looked like a tank but used as few lines as possible because we had only so much processing power back then.

  We needed a missile and we needed this and that, so Roger did all the artwork. He did the background as a line drawing that we had converted into a series of vectors, and there was a volcano in it.

  We worked in labs and I was in a lab with Owen Rubin, who would always come in and say, “When are you going to make the volcano active?”

  I was trying to make a game, and every day Rubin came in with, “When are you going to make the volcano active? When are you going to make the volcano active?”

  Finally, I said, “Look, I’m trying to make this game here. If you want the volcano active, write the damn code yourself.”

  I came into work the next day and there, sitting on my desk, was a bunch of code. That’s how we got the active volcano in Battlezone. It was really the only code in the game that was not written by me.

  —Ed Rotberg

  Like Sea Wolf, Battlezone had a distinctive periscope-like viewer. Players pressed their faces against it to see the screen. The viewer in Sea Wolf, however, pivoted and was used to aim torpedoes. The one in Battlezone was a stationary plastic structure that enhanced the feeling of being inside a tank. It could not be used for aiming, however, since the player’s tank only fired straight ahead.

  To this day I don’t like it [the viewer]. I was concerned with coin drop. It isolated players and gave them a feeling of immersion, but it blocked other people’s view of the game.

  —Ed Rotberg

  In Battlezone, players used two large joysticks to maneuver their tanks as they hunted enemy vehicles. A radar scope in the top of the screen showed the position of enemy vehicles. The key to the game was using the scope to evade enemy attacks.

  Battlezone featured several kinds of enemies—slow-moving standard tanks, super tanks, and anti-tank missiles. Sometimes flying saucers appeared as well.

  Rotberg created a three-dimensional plain for his battlefields. In this silent world, Roger Hector’s volcano could be seen spewing boulders along the horizon. Blocks and pyramids scattered throughout the plain added depth and provided players with cover from enemy attacks. Though all of the objects were shown as line art, Battlezone’s realistic depiction of tank warfare attracted attention that Rotberg later came to resent.

  * There are two kinds of monitors—vector and raster scan. Raster-scan technology, used in televisions, is based on an electronic beam painting images of the screen by constantly drawing and redrawing every row. Rather than going row by row, vector screens draw images by tracing lines from point to point, making them unsuitable for drawing pictures but excellent for displaying high-resolution outlines. Vector, or X-Y graphics, are displayed as lines. Rather than drawing an entire screen, a vector-graphics generator creates independent objects. The games Asteroids, Battlezone, and Star Castle were vector graphics games, as was Space Wars.

  * Though Night Driver, a driving simulation published by Atari in 1977, featured 3D pylons along the side of the road, Tail Gunner is generally acknowledged as the first true 3D game.

  * A number of industry people, including coin-op game executives, acknowledged that Asteroids Deluxe was not one of Atari’s better games.

  * Gee Bee was the only game manufactured by Namco in 1978, and Bomb Bee was one of the only games manufactured by the company the following year.

  * Gorgar was the first electronic game to feature synthesized speech.

  The Golden Age

  (Part 2: 1981n–1983)

  We only mentioned Space Invaders and Pac-Man, but there were a few others that made it into that boom period, which lasted until June of 1982. It was only a short-lived thing, but it got everybody’s attention, including the national media.

  —Eddie Adlum

  Ron’s accountant called me up and said, “We’ve got to incorporate Ron.” I started laughing and said, “Ron is nearly bankrupt. Why would we incorporate him?”

  He said, “Don’t you know? Nintendo is just going wild selling this Donkey Kong coin-op game.”

  —Howard Lincoln, chairman, Nintendo of America

  Arcade’s Biggest Year

  In 1981, 15-year-old Steve Juraszek of Arlington Heights, Illinois, scored 15,963,100 points in a 16-hour game of Defender. He set a new world’s record
, became an instant celebrity, and got his picture in Time magazine. Local school officials were not impressed. The game began during school hours. Juraszek was banned from leaving school grounds for playing hooky.1

  Arlington Heights was not the only town that saw a connection between video games and truancy. The Pittsburgh City Council enacted an ordinance that prohibited minors from playing video games during school hours and threatened to revoke the license of any arcade that ignored that ordinance.

  Several small towns, including Babylon, New York, pushed for laws to monitor the operation of video-game arcades. In Oakland, California, the city council voted to ban minors from visiting arcades during school hours, after 10 P.M. on weeknights, and after midnight on weekends. A dispute over zoning laws between Aladdin’s Castle, a large chain of arcades, and the city of Mesquite, Texas, ended up before the Supreme Court (City of Mesquite v. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc., 455 U.S. 283 [1982]).

  Other countries also struggled with the growth of video games. In November 1981, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos banned video games and gave arcade owners two weeks to destroy them.2

  A Time magazine cover story reported that Americans dropped 20 billion quarters into video games in 1981 and that “video game addicts” spent 75,000 man-years playing the machines. The article went on to explain that the video-game industry earned twice as much money as all Nevada casinos combined, nearly twice as much money as the movie industry, and three times as much money as major league baseball, basketball, and football.3