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

  I did all the self-tests. I did the graphics, too. It came from an idea called Bug Shooter. I asked her [Bailey] to go ahead and put mushrooms up and use a trackball. That stuff was my idea, and I did about half the code.

  At the time, the mushrooms were not shootable. If I remember right, it was basically a spider-like creature, a centipede, and the shooter, and that was really it. The mushrooms were static—you shot the centipede and nothing was left behind.

  Dan Van Elderen reviewed the game and said, “It would be nice if … ” Dan wanted to shoot the mushrooms and I agreed that something needed to be done.

  I thought about it a while and said, “Well, I need to add something that creates mushrooms and other things to destroy them,” and so on. So that’s where other ideas like the fleas that brought more mushrooms came from.

  —Ed Logg

  In Centipede, players used a trackball to move a cursor shaped like a snake’s head along the bottom of the screen. The goal of the game was to shoot quick-moving centipedes as they appeared at the top of the screen and snaked their way down. The centipedes were composed of eleven sections with legs. Each time a section was hit, it turned into a mushroom, and the rest of the centipede continued its nimble march.

  The playing field in Centipede was covered with mushrooms that could be shot away. Whenever the centipede collided with a mushroom, the centipede changed directions. Some players developed strategies in which they set traps by creating mushroom formations that forced the centipede to drop down the side of the screen.

  Along with the centipedes, players shot bouncing spiders, scorpions, and fleas that dropped from the top and left mushrooms in their wake.

  One of Dona Bailey’s chief contributions to the game was its unusual color scheme. While other game designers used bright colors, she chose pastels. The first stage of the game had a lime-green centipede scurrying through a patch of green mushrooms with orange edges. The next centipede was pink and traveled through a patch of pink mushrooms with white edges. Nobody knows precisely why Centipede appealed to women, but several people believe that Bailey’s pastel colors were part of the attraction.

  On October 28, 1981, Tournament Games held a three-day national video-game championship in the Chicago Exposition Center. Tournament Games, a company that had extensive experience promoting tournaments for such bar games as billiards and darts, heralded the event as a major new sporting contest in which 10,000 to 15,000 of the world’s best video-game players would go head-to-head on a single game—Centipede.

  Tournament Game’s experience with billiards and darts tournaments did not translate to video games. The company invited the winners of local video-game tournaments to compete, but contestants had to pay for their own transportation and lodging. Walk-on contestants had to pay a $60 registration fee. These expenses were too high for the teenage crowd that frequented the arcades, and less than 150 people signed up for the competition.

  Competitors were invited to practice before the event, but the 250 Centipede machines that Tournament Games installed were not set on free play. The contestants not only had to pay to practice, but the machines had internal timers that stopped their games after three minutes.

  The “Open Singles” winner of the tournament was Eric Ginner, who received a check for $12,000. Ok-Soo Han, one of less than a dozen women who entered, won $4,000 as the top female competitor. Both checks bounced. In the end, Atari covered the checks to avoid bad publicity.

  Atari and another company [that] had done tournaments like foosball and billiards and games of that sort organized the tournament. There was supposed to be a $50,000 fund, but it turned out that these guys didn’t have enough funds to pay it off. So I guess everybody turned and sued Atari.

  —Ed Logg

  First-Person Space Invaders

  Despite a growing list of competitors and mounting internal problems, Atari remained one of the strongest companies in the industry. By this time, so many new companies were manufacturing arcade equipment that no one company could hope to control more than half the market as Atari had in the past.

  In 1981, Taito America had its first American-made hit—Qix, a highly innovative game that one reviewer described as a cross between an Etch-a Sketch and Star Wars; Sega distributed Frogger, a game in which players helped a frog cross a busy highway and an alligator-filled stream; Stern attracted crowds with Berzerk; and Midway imported several strong titles from Namco and released domestic hits created by Dave Nutting and other American designers. Smaller companies like Nichibutsu, maker of Crazy Climber, and Konami also made their mark.

  Toward the end of the year, Atari released a new game by Dave Theurer, designer of Missile Command. The game was called Tempest.

  Tempest did not start out as an original idea. Shortly after finishing Missile Command, Theurer went hunting for his next game in the book of game themes that had been compiled at company brainstorming sessions. The idea that caught his eye was called “First-Person Space Invaders.”

  Since his game would be played from the first-person perspective, Theurer needed the efficiency of a vector-graphic generator. As it turned out, a new X-Y generator that created color lines was under development. Tempest, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Gravitar, Black Widow, Space Duel, Quantum, and Major Havoc were the only games Atari ever released that used the color X-Y generator.

  It took Theurer six weeks to create a preliminary version of First Person Space Invaders. The project was almost derailed when he demonstrated it at a coin-op meeting.

  I got First-Person Space Invaders up pretty quickly. Gene Lipkin, the head of coin-op, and Frank Ballouz played it at a meeting and said, “This game is not that fun. It’s basically Space Invaders from a different perspective.”

  They said I should kill the game if I couldn’t do something special with it.

  I told them about this nightmare I had about monsters coming out of a hole in the ground and you had to kill them before they got out of the hole or they would kill you. “I can take First-Person Space Invaders, put it on a surface, wrap that surface around a circle to make a cylinder, and rotate the cylinder to make a different game out of it.”

  They said go ahead and try it, so that’s what I did.

  —Dave Theurer

  In Theurer’s new game, players shot at creatures as they climbed to the top of geometrically shaped holes. The game was controlled with a heavy knob that players spun like a dial. The knob originally controlled the hole’s rotation. When players began feeling nauseous, Theurer adjusted the controls so that the player’s gun rotated instead of the hole. The game attracted a lot of attention around the coin-op division.

  Tempest took a year and had about 21K [of code].* When I started the game, the cylinder actually rotated and your player stayed still. People said it made them sick to their stomach, so I switched it so that the player moved around. That solved the problem.

  I wanted to do something special when you got a high score, and I love fireworks and explosions, so I made fireworks at the end if you got on the high score table.

  People loved it [Tempest]. They came into the labs to play it. That’s how you knew you had something hot—if you had trouble developing your game because people played it while you were trying to debug it.

  —Dave Theurer

  Theurer switched from a black and white vector-graphics generator to the color X-Y generator during the project, but the technology proved somewhat unstable. Though it created beautiful colors and had the same high-resolution images created by older vector-graphics hardware, the new color generator tended to overheat.

  I was working on the game, trying to figure stuff out, and all of a sudden the monitor stopped working. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. I was just sitting there and all of a sudden it stopped.

  I looked up on the bench where the monitor was sitting, and five or six of the resistors and components had melted themselves out of the PC board. They had gotten so hot that they had melted
the solder.

  Those color X-Y monitors were flaky. They were a big problem throughout the testing period and they continued to be a big problem in the field. They just don’t last very long. It’s not good for sales if things are continually breaking.

  —Dave Theurer

  More than any game before it, Tempest seemed to move at the speed of light. Players used a spinning knob to control a fast-moving C-shaped polygon that moved around the top of geometric cylinders with a spider-like crawl and shot at flippers (large red Xs), fuseballs (multi-colored balls), pulsars (yellow lines that gave deadly shocks) and other enemies as they tried to climb out of the tube.

  Tempest was an immediate hit, but some arcade owners complained about it. It had maintenance problems and broke down frequently. Before long, Theurer heard rumors about kids playing the game for hours on a single quarter. One story was that they had found a code that gave them forty free games. In a business that depended on the average player lasting less than two minutes per game, machines that dolled out free credits were a big liability.

  When Theurer first heard about the problem, he assumed it was caused by the “flaky” hardware. Upon further examination, he discovered that he had created the flaw.

  To protect against piracy, a growing problem in the arcade business, Theurer had imbedded a security code in the game. The code checked the placement of different objects on the screen and caused the game to shut down if images were not in the correct space.

  Before shipping, Theurer, who had a reputation for repeatedly fussing over details, discovered that an Atari logo was not perfectly centered. He moved it slightly. It seemed like an inconsequential change, but if players hit a certain score, it caused the security code to malfunction and the player received forty credits.

  If players got something like 179,480 points, the game would crank a 40 into the coin counter. It would do other weird things, too, like double the vector generator multipliers so everything would be twice as big, but nobody wanted that. They just wanted to get the 40 free credits, so the kids figured out how to do it.

  —Dave Theurer

  Around the time that Theurer finished Tempest, Atari announced a new bonus plan to reward designers for creating hit games. The plan took effect shortly after Tempest was released.

  Atari pissed me off. After Missile Command, they came up with a new bonus plan that paid about ten times as much, but they weren’t quite sure when they were going to put it into effect. I was working on Tempest, and they waited to see how well Tempest was going to do. Then they said the first game after Tempest would be the first game on the new bonus plan.

  Talk about making me mad. It cost me perhaps a million dollars.

  I don’t know who made the decision. I mean, Ray Kassar was president of the company at the time. They were owned by Warner Brothers, so there was plenty of money to go around.

  —Dave Theurer

  The Peak

  The growth of the industry continued into 1982, and video games appeared in unlikely places. The Hilton Hotel in Rye Town, New York, opened Bagatelle Place. Named after the forerunner of pinball, Bagatelle Place was a formal arcade with thirty-three video games, a cappuccino bar, and a strictly enforced dress code.4

  In Nevada, casinos cleared out gambling equipment and set up small arcades. In Hawaii, an enormous arcade took up nearly half of a floor in the Rainbow Bazaar, a large tourist center in Waikiki. In the early 1980s, Hawaii experienced record tourist business and Waikiki real estate was among the most expensive in the world.

  The company that earned the most profits was not, however, Atari or Nintendo—it was Midway. Midway was about to release a product that would become the most successful game in the history of the American arcade industry—Ms. Pac-Man.

  MIT Strikes Again

  Toru Iwatani, the Namco employee who designed Pac-Man, was not involved with the creation of Ms. Pac-Man. It was created, instead, by nine college students, led by two MIT students, Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran.

  As a junior, Macrae created a small coin-op route on the MIT campus with a Gottlieb Pioneer pinball machine that he received from his brother and three Missile Command machines that he bought on his own. The route was very lucrative in the beginning, but Missile Command soon began losing popularity. One problem faced by small-route operators was the cost of keeping current. People lost interest in older games as new ones arrived, and before long, the only people playing them could milk an hour of play out of a single quarter.

  Other small-time operators would have had to abandon their machines or sell them cheaply, but Macrae was studying engineering. He and another student named Kevin Curran decided to update the Missile Command machines and give them a new life.

  The spring of our senior year, Kevin and I got interested in designing games rather than just operating them. I had a computer graphics background, and Kevin had an electrical engineering background, and the two of us kind of said to ourselves, “Well, how do we get into the design of video games?”

  The process was a little bit daunting, in that we looked at mainly the arcade games and didn’t really know how you’d go about building cabinets or getting involved in the hardware…. so we came up with the idea that we’d do enhancement kits.

  —Doug Macrae, cofounder, General Computer

  Rather than creating new games, Curran and Macrae decided to build “PAL” boards that would fit onto the circuit boards of existing games and modify game play. Their first project was to revitalize Macrae’s Missile Command machines.

  Curran and Macrae moved off campus and set up shop in a rental house. The business at this point was a five-man operation. They borrowed money from Macrae’s mother and from their coin-op route and purchased equipment. Then they took apart one of the Missile Command machines and studied its design.

  We started disassembling the code to Missile Command on this emulator, figuring out exactly what all the code did. Then we designed a board that would mount on top of the Missile Command game and would cleverly overlay code that we wrote onto the original Atari code. The way we did it actually was we had a board that was watching the addresses and was deciding when to overlay our code on top of the original Atari code.

  We were very concerned about copyright infringement because if we just modified their code and sold new ROMs, we thought we would be infringing on the Atari copyrights and end up sued within minutes.

  —Doug Macrae

  The new game, which they called Super Missile Attack, was basically an accelerated version of Missile Command with a few new enemies. Along with the usual missile-packing jets and UFOs, the new version also featured a laser-shooting UFO and a new color scheme.

  The Super Missile Attack modifications brought players around MIT back to Missile Command, and Curran and Macrae wagered that it would have the same impact around the country. Missile Command was a fairly expensive game, so Curran and Macrae decided to try and sell their “enhancement kit” on the market.

  And we started selling these boards or these kits out of the back of Play Meter Magazine and RePlay Magazine for $295 dollars. We were taking phone calls in the bedrooms, we were producing them in the basement, we were designing in the living room and shipping out of the dining room of this house in Brooklyn.

  —Doug Macrae

  It cost Curran and Macrae approximately $30 to make a board, which they then sold for $295. They called their company General Computer and sold more than 1,000 enhancement boards over the summer.

  Somewhat pleased with themselves and their new business, they decided to modify an even more popular game for their next project. They settled upon the most popular game in the world, Pac-Man.

  Modifying Pac-Man was more difficult than working with Missile Command. Dave Theurer, the designer of Missile Command, had created a very logical and minimalistic code for his game. It was easy to understand and to work with. The programmers who worked with Toru Iwatani on the creation of Pac-Man had not been as efficient, and their code was twi
ce as long.

  By August 1981, while Curran and Macrae had disassembled the code and begun to build an enhancement, a new development threatened to shut them down. Atari charged them with copyright infringement and took them to court.

  We disassembled the code, documented it all and how it worked, etc., and then looked at how to make modifications to make it a little more difficult and a little more interesting. And we were developing this enhancement kit as a separate board and kit again. We were ready to take it to market in August of 1981, and, at that point, we ended up sparring in court with Atari in front of Justice Keating, who was the original Boston bussing judge. It lasted almost two months.

  —Doug Macrae

  Though the case was ostensibly about copyright infringement, Atari was not worried about people altering the code in its games. The bigger issue with Atari was the concept of enhancement boards. Its arcade business would be crippled if operators could simply update old equipment instead of purchasing new machines. From Steve Ross to Ray Kassar, the Atari executive board wanted General Computer stopped at all costs.

  We believed we had very moral high ground, in that we had not copied their code. We had the game operator pull the ROMs out of the Atari game and put them into our board, plug our board into the Atari board, and then we overlaid our code on top of it, so, we viewed that we were actually relatively free of copying their code.

  As it came out in court, there were some very difficult issues about trademark dilution and misrepresentation of origin that were going to get sorted out in court under Justice Keating, which had never really been decided before. Up to this point, video-game enhancers had just blatantly copied code, did all kinds of things wrong, and they were pretty clear cut cases for Atari and also Bally to go attack and pretty much put out of business. Ours was a much greater case about whether we had the right to enhance a video game.