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

  America was covered with arcades. According to a Play Meter Magazine study, there were approximately 24,000 full arcades and 400,000 street locations. In all, according to the 1982 study, more than 1.5 million arcade machines were in operation in the United States.

  Nameless Stars

  Despite the popularity of their games, Atari’s designers were forbidden to take credit for their work. Whether Atari president Ray Kassar thought competitors would try to buy his designers away or simply felt that they didn’t deserve the publicity, he seldom allowed his designers to meet reporters and never let them put their names on their machines. When Steve Bloom interviewed Atari coin-op engineers in a book called Video Invader, he had to change their names. He referred to Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, creators of Centipede, as Dona Taylor and Ed Lodge.*

  Tension continued to mount between game designers and management at Atari. By this time, such software companies as On-Line Systems** and Broderbund were making consumer versions of popular coin-op games for Apple, Atari, and Commodore home computers. Ken Williams, founder of On-Line, treated his designers like rock stars, lavishing them with publicity and bonus checks.

  At Atari, only managers and executives received public accolades. Some coin-op engineers began referring to Lyle Rains as “Hollywood Lyle” because he appeared before the media so often. A number of publications mistakenly credited him with the creation of Asteroids.

  Military Battlezone

  Shortly after Battlezone was released, a group of retired Army generals contacted Atari. The officers wanted to license a more realistic version of the game to be used for training soldiers. The new version of the game would require several technical features and had to be built within a few months, in time to be demonstrated at an important trade show. Despite his vigorous protests, Ed Rotberg was asked to take the project.

  I didn’t think it was a business that we should be getting into. You’ve got to remember what things were like in the late 1970s, and where those of us who were in the business came from—our cultural background. There were any number of jobs to be had by professional programmers in military industries or in military-related industries. Those of us who found our way to video games … it was sort of a counter-culture thing. We didn’t want anything to do with the military. I was doing games; I didn’t want to train people to kill.

  Since Battlezone was my baby, and it was Battlezone that they wanted to convert, and there was a deadline to get it done, I agreed to do the prototype if they [his bosses] would promise that I would have nothing to do with any future plans to do anything with the military. They gave that assurance to me, and I lost three months of my life working day and night and hardly ever seeing my wife.

  —Ed Rotberg

  Military Battlezone was much more complex than the original game. In the arcade game, players could only shoot straight ahead, and their projectiles flew in a straight trajectory unaffected by gravity. The military version was considerably more realistic.

  The changes were extensive. First of all, we were not modeling some fantasy tank, we were modeling an infantry fighting vehicle that had a turret that could rotate independently of the tank. It had a choice of guns to use. Instead of a gravity-free cannon, you had ballistics to configure.

  You had to have identifiable targets because they wanted to train gunners to recognize the difference between friendly and enemy vehicles. So, there were a whole slew of different types of enemy vehicles and friendly vehicles that had to be drawn and modeled. Then we had to model the physics of the different kinds of weapons.

  —Ed Rotberg

  Rotberg deeply resented being forced to work on the military version of Battlezone. His next project was a game called Dragon Riders that was based on the novels of fantasy writer Ann MaCaffrey. Had it been completed, Dragon Riders would have been the first game based on a novel. Atari never licensed MaCaffrey’s books and the game never made it out of production.

  Rotberg’s final project at Atari was a game called Warp Speed. This was a high-speed outer-space flight simulation in which players attacked a well-armed space fortress. Rotberg left Atari before the project was finished.

  The people who completed Warp Speed decided to use the joystick from Military Battlezone on their game. Around this time, Atari struck a licensing deal with another Bay-area legend—film maker George Lucas. With its ships and activities altered to replicate the battle over the Death Star, and voices from the movie added to the game, the game was released as Star Wars.

  Donkey Kong

  Our coin-op engineers were really tough, arrogant guys. They didn’t believe anybody made a coin-op game as well as they did.

  One day they came in and they wanted to take the rights to manufacture a game called Donkey Kong for coin-op in the United States. What that told me, knowing our coin-op people, was that it must have been a hell of a game.

  —Manny Gerard

  During the golden age of arcades, a few Japanese companies earned huge profits through U.S. operations. Namco prospered through its partnership with Midway. Taito had made so much money from Space Invaders that it opened its own U.S. operation—Taito America.

  A few Japanese companies, nevertheless, seemed unable to crack the American market. One of these was Nintendo, a nearly 100-year-old playing-card manufacturer that had recently expanded into making toys and electronic games.

  By 1980, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Company Limited, decided that his company needed a U.S. office if it was going to break into the American arcade market. He hired his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to establish an American operation.

  Yamauchi did not hire Arakawa out of family loyalty. Arakawa had just spent three years overseeing the building of a Canadian condominium project for a Japanese construction firm. He had a proven track record as a manager. More important, he had experience running the North American office of a Japanese firm.

  In April 1980, Arakawa set up an office in Manhattan and a warehouse in New Jersey. His first distributors were a couple of entrepreneurs named Ron Judy and Al Stone, who owned a Seattle-based trucking company but moonlighted as game resellers. They had been purchasing Nintendo arcade games through a firm in Hawaii and marketing them in the continental United States.

  Arakawa offered to cover their expenses and pay them a large commission if they would become consultant-representatives of Nintendo of America.

  Ron and Al had a small trucking company, Chase Express, and I was their lawyer. They came in one day and said that they had discovered coin-operated video games. This was actually before they had been involved with Nintendo.

  They started importing Nintendo video games through Hawaii. These were games that Nintendo Company Ltd. produced and exported to the United States. Not a lot of games but a few.

  At some point they hooked up at a trade show with Mr. Arakawa, who by now had set up Nintendo of America. Mr. Arakawa engaged Ron and Al Stone on a consulting basis. The term of the deal was that they would be paid on a commission basis.

  Their responsibility was to go around and set up the distribution throughout the United States and Canada for Nintendo of America coin-op games.

  —Howard Lincoln, chairman, Nintendo of America

  Their first game, Radarscope, did not sell well, even though it had done fairly well in Japan. Yamauchi told Arakawa that Radarscope would be a hit. Nintendo shipped 3,000 copies of the game to the United States.

  Around this time, Arakawa discovered that locating his operation on the East Coast added two weeks to the time it took to ship games from Japan. He decided to relocate his headquarters to the West Coast and settled in Redmond, Washington.

  Radarscope did not appeal to American audiences, and Judy and Stone were unable to sell all 3,000 units. Since Nintendo of America covered their expenses, they did not incur debts, but they also received very little income since they were being paid a straight commission.

  The fact that it was one of the most expensive games in the industry and we
were not an established line with the American distributors … we had some difficulty selling the entire amount of the shipment from Japan.

  —Al Stone

  Radarscope and Heavy Fire and mediocre games were available. Radarscope was the number two game after Pac-Man [in Japan], so it was pretty popular … very popular at the September show, in Japan. And we had Ron Judy and Al Stone very excited [about bringing the game to America].

  It’s a shooting game, like Galaxian from Namco but more sophisticated.

  We brought it to the United States … I think too many games, about 3,000 Radarscopes. We saw them pile up. We sold 1,000, and had 2,000 left.

  —Minoru Arakawa, president, Nintendo of America

  As president of Nintendo Co. Ltd., Hiroshi Yamauchi ran his company in a notoriously imperialistic style. Before taking over the family business, Yamauchi had his dying grandfather fire relatives working for Nintendo so that he could consolidate his power base. As Nintendo expanded operations from Hanafuda playing cards to toys, Yamauchi acted as sole judge of new products. If a concept appealed to him, it went to market. Since Yamauchi’s instincts were almost always correct, Nintendo generally thrived.

  Breaking into the American market, however, proved baffling to Yamauchi. Arakawa reported failure after failure. Space Fever did not attract business. Arcade owners did not like Sheriff. Judy and Stone were able to sell a scant 1,000 units of Radarscope, the game Yamauchi hoped would take America by storm. Two thousand Radarscope machines sat stacked in the New Jersey warehouse. If Yamauchi was going to establish Nintendo in the United States, he would need something that Americans had never seen before.

  Fortunately, there was a project that looked very promising. In 1977, Yamauchi had hired a creative young college graduate with a degree in industrial design named Shigeru Miyamoto.

  Miyamoto was somewhat of an anomaly in Kyoto, Japan. He played the banjo, loved bluegrass music, and collected Beatles albums. Above all else, Miyamoto loved designing toys. Years later, after establishing himself as the greatest designer in the video-game industry, Miyamoto told a reporter that he still wanted to design toys, not video games.

  Ironically, one of Miyamoto’s first jobs at Nintendo was to create the art for the outside panels of Radarscope and Sheriff cabinets. In 1979, Yamauchi called Miyamoto to his office and asked him if he could design an arcade game. Miyamoto excitedly said yes.

  What I wanted to do was to make fun toys, interesting toys. They [Yamauchi] knew that I had been doing kids’ toys, but nobody expected me to get involved in the video-game business.

  When I was first hired, I did artwork for game cabinets. I was actually making some game characters before I started Donkey Kong, so when I knew that I was going to be given a chance to make a game, I was very excited.

  —Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Donkey Kong

  Miyamoto did not have to worry about the technical aspects of game creation. The cabinets already existed—Yamauchi planned to build Miyamoto’s game by converting unsold Radarscope machines. To make sure the project proceeded smoothly, Yamauchi assigned Gumpei Yokoi, the dean of Nintendo’s engineering team, to oversee the implementation of Miyamoto’s ideas.

  Like Eugene Jarvis, Miyamoto began by inventing an elaborate story to explain his game. The story involved a gorilla escaping from its master, a carpenter, and kidnapping his girlfriend. First the gorilla climbed to the top of a seven-story construction site. When his master followed, the ape rolled barrels at him. Players helped the carpenter leap over the barrels as he followed the gorilla.

  Once the carpenter reached the top of the foundation, the chase moved to a five-story structure made of steel girders. This time the carpenter had to avoid marching flames while pulling the pins that held the girders together.* Once the structure collapsed, the carpenter and his girlfriend were reunited.

  Because of his desire to penetrate the American market, Yamauchi wanted the game to have an English name. Since Miyamoto spoke only a little English, he used a Japanese-English dictionary to find the correct words for the title. He wanted to name the game after the ape—“Stubborn Gorilla.” Looking through the dictionary, Miyamoto selected the word donkey as a synonym for “stubborn” and the word Kong for “gorilla.”

  Masaya Nakamura may not have foreseen the success of Pac-Man and Michael Kogan may not have predicted the impact of Space Invaders, but Hiroshi Yamauchi immediately recognized the potential of Donkey Kong. He called his son-in-law and told him that a new game was coming that would make Nintendo one of the hottest game companies in American arcades.

  The news could not have come at a better time. Ron Judy and Al Stone had nearly bankrupted themselves, and Arakawa was having trouble covering the costs of his floundering operation. Around this time, Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo’s warehouse, visited Arakawa to complain that the rent was late. After threats and angry words, Segale accepted Arakawa’s promise that the money would arrive shortly. Arakawa later immortalized Segale by renaming Jumpman, the carpenter in Donkey Kong, Mario.

  Arakawa wanted to file a trademark patent on the new game, so he asked Ron Judy to recommend a good lawyer. Judy and Stone took Arakawa to meet their lawyer, Howard Lincoln, the day they learned that Nintendo’s new super game would be called Donkey Kong.

  By this time they were deeply in debt and anxious to abandon Nintendo. The only reason they had stayed was Arakawa’s solemn promise that the next game out of Japan would be a major hit. The name Donkey Kong did not inspire their confidence.

  I remember that day. The fellow who was setting up the distribution for Nintendo Coin-Op was a client of mine named Ron Judy. Ron was compensated with a commission based on game sales. The games that had come in that year had not been strong, so Ron was really strung out.

  Poor Ron. I can still see him sitting there when Mr. Arakawa said, “We have this new game and we need to get it trademarked. The name of the game is Donkey Kong.”

  And I said, “Pardon me. What was that? Donkey Kong? How do you spell that?”

  I remember Ron saying, “Yeah. Can you believe that? Donkey Kong!” It was at a point in time when Ron was thinking, “What have I gotten myself into? None of these games have been great. I didn’t earn any money, and now the final blow is a game called Donkey Kong, which even my lawyer can’t understand.”

  —Howard Lincoln

  Just as Al Alcorn had learned about Pong’s appeal by placing it in Andy Capp’s Tavern, Arakawa discovered he had a hit by placing Donkey Kong in two Seattle bars—the Spot Tavern in South Seattle and Goldies, a bar near the University of Washington. Stone and Judy persuaded the managers of the bars to let them use their locations as test sites. When both test locations cleared more than $30 per day for an entire week, the managers asked for more machines.

  It didn’t take long for Donkey Kong to develop a following. Because of a lack of funds, Arakawa, Judy, and Stone converted the 2,000 Radarscope machines stockpiled in the warehouse into Donkey Kong machines themselves. Soon the entire inventory had been sold, and orders kept rolling in. Arakawa decided to manufacture more machines in the Nintendo of America warehouse in Redmond because it took too long to ship them from Japan.

  At any rate, the game went out to a few distributors who managed to get some operator to put it out before the playing public, and the thing broke out of the box. Smash hit!

  I caught the buzz early on, just from talking to distributors, and I flagged it in RePlay and said this was something to keep your eye on. It went crazy. I think they ended up selling 67,000 Donkey Kongs.

  —Eddie Adlum

  The straight-commission pay schedule that had nearly bankrupted Ron Judy and Al Stone suddenly turned them into millionaires. Toward the end of 1981, Lincoln received a telephone call from their accountant. He had been expecting the accountant to call about filing their bankruptcy notice. Instead, the accountant asked Lincoln to incorporate them to protect their immense earnings.

  Bug Shooter

  A
fter Asteroids, Ed Logg teamed up with Dona Bailey and created one of the few games that appealed to female players as well as male—Centipede.

  Before going to Atari, Bailey spent three years at General Motors, where she helped design the microprocessor-based cruise control in the Cadillac Seville. In 1980, she applied for a job at Atari because she enjoyed playing video games. Once she got the job, she found herself in an odd position—the only female programmer in the coin-op division.

  I was doing this New Yorker profile on Nolan [Bushnell] and Dona was working for him at Sente Games. What I really remember about her is that she was charming. Dona was one of my heroes because Centipede had always been one of my favorite, favorite, favorite games.

  I remember going out to dinner with Dona. She was just so anxious to talk to me because her dream in life was to be able to write for the New Yorker, and here I’m just this guy writing this profile on Nolan and talking about it.

  I said, “So it must be really cool making video games.” And she said, “What I’d really like to do is be a writer.”

  She gave me a story that she had written. It was tremendous. She was a terrific writer.

  —Tom Zito

  Ed Logg got the idea for Centipede from a book of game ideas, in which it was listed as “Bug Shooter.” Bailey asked if she could work on the project, so Logg fleshed out the game and turned it over to her.