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

  We went a couple of rounds with temporary restraining orders and injunctions and, eventually, the general counsel of Atari, Skip Paul, came to us and said, “What are you guys really after here?”

  —Doug Macrae

  Skip Paul, Atari’s general counsel and later the president of Atari Coin-Operated Games, decided to look for an amicable solution. He asked Curran and Macrae what they hoped to accomplish. When they told him that they simply wanted to make video games, he made a deal with them. Atari would drop the case with prejudice—meaning that Atari would admit it was a wrongful suit—and pay them $50,000 per month for the next two years to develop games if they would stop making enhancement kits.

  Curran and Macrae agreed.

  The one thing that got carved out of the agreement was that we actually had an enhancement kit to Pac-Man in development at the time, and we did not want to throw it in the trash. The agreement that was written up stated that we would never produce an enhancement kit again without permission from the original copyright holder of the game … or the original manufacturer of the game.

  Atari assumed that no one would ever give us permission.

  —Doug Macrae

  In an attempt to salvage their work on Pac-Man, Curran and Macrae flew to Chicago and met with David Marofske and other executives at Bally-Midway. Their plan was to bluff Bally into accepting a deal.

  They went to the meeting armed with court papers that showed that Atari had dropped its lawsuit with prejudice. “We just beat Atari in court,” Macrae told the Bally executives, “and we’re going to launch this enhancement kit. We just want your blessing.”

  We thought we were being very clever, convincing them that we were going to launch this enhancement kit, and I think we probably could have gotten their blessing.

  One thing we did not take into account was that Bally had just successfully made Pac-Man the biggest-selling video game of all time. Their production lines had just shut off and they had nothing to put into production after that. They did not have the next game.

  I believe Dave [Marofske] was the one who came up with the idea of saying, “Well, guys, how about we talk sequel rather than you selling it as an enhancement kit?”

  —Doug Macrae

  The enhancement kit designed by General Computer turned Pac-Man into a new game called Crazy Otto, in which Pac-Man had legs. In the whirlwind negotiations that followed, Curran and Macrae were told that the new game had to be faithful to the Pac-Man image and that the legs were not acceptable.

  They decided to create a female character.

  As we kicked it around and what the sequel should be, we came up with the idea of, well, it should be the female Pac-Man. We originally burnt the ROMs for production under the name Pac-Woman, but as we were getting ready to go into production, several females inside of Midway objected, saying, “That’s kind of an inappropriate name” and that we should put a surname in front of it.

  I never understood why.

  We chose Miss Pac-Man and got very close to going into production. Then someone pointed out to us that in the third animation (the cartoons between levels of the games) Pac-Man and the female Pac-Man get together and have a baby. We would have had all kinds of people talking about the fact that they had a baby out of wedlock, which would have been very bad.

  We scrambled and came up with Mrs., then changed it to a fifth name, Ms., because we were trying to make everyone in life happy and all of this happened in the final 72 hours before the production line was supposed to start up.

  —Doug Macrae

  Midway never built an actual Ms. Pac-Man board. It simply built Pac-Man boards, then added General Computer’s enhancement kit.

  By this time, maze chasing had become the most popular theme in the arcades. Some manufacturers updated the theme by making the characters move fast or by adding shooting to the game, but most maze chase games still looked a lot like Pac-Man.

  We had thought that the Ms. Pac-Man image gave the game its own identity. We changed the artwork and changed the speed and presented it to Mr. Nakamura [president of Namco]. After going back and forth for a while, we introduced it to the marketplace.

  —David Marofske

  Like Pac-Man and Centipede, Ms. Pac-Man appealed to female players. It had the same basic game play as Pac-Man. The game still involved clearing a maze while avoiding four mop-like ghosts named Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Sue—the latter of which Macrae named after his sister. (The fourth ghost in Pac-Man had been named Clyde.)

  The biggest difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man was that Ms. Pac-Man featured four mazes instead of the single maze in the original game. Ms. Pac-Man was also faster. The ghosts in Pac-Man followed preset paths. By running in certain patterns, players were able to confuse them and play nearly indefinitely. There were no known patterns to fool the ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man.

  General Computer also created several cosmetic changes. The fruits and bonus objects in Pac-Man appeared just below the center of the maze. In Ms. Pac-Man they marched around the maze. The main character, Ms. Pac-Man, was still a yellow ball with a mouth but had comic touches—a red bow and lipstick. Like Centipede, the pinks and blues in Ms. Pac-Man’s color scheme added a feminine touch.

  Midway sold 100,000 Pac-Man machines and more than 115,000 Ms. Pac-Man machines in the United States. Other than Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, no arcade game has ever sold more than 100,000 units in the United States.

  General Computer later built Junior Pac-Man for Bally Midway. Later, Bally/Midway contracted with Dave Nutting to build Baby Pac-Man, a maze-chase game with a pinball machine attached. At certain points in the game, the action went from the chase on the video monitor to the pinball machine.

  Curran and Macrae sued Midway, claiming that they had come up with the concept of a Pac-Man family and that they should receive royalties from all Pac-Children games. They won the suit.

  Though Baby Pac-Man was never a popular game and its royalties amounted to little, the litigation resulted in huge royalties on merchandise with images of Pac-Man and his family.

  Digital Me

  In 1980, Ralph Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, birthed an invention to personalize video games—a camera that could shoot pictures of players’ faces, digitize them, and load the images into games. He thought that arcade manufacturers could place the camera in the marquee of their cabinets and paste players’ faces on characters in their games. The camera could also snap a photograph of a high-scoring player and post it next to his score.

  The idea was to put a small, inexpensive black and white video camera into the arcade game and point it down toward the face of the player. The player would see his own face digitized on the screen, smile until he liked the way he looked, and push a button, and the digitized picture would be stored in RAM and available for use, either during the game to become the head of a player or used in the credits to appear next to the scores and the initials of the player.

  I figured every confirmed video-game player in the city of Chicago and New York would be running around from arcade to arcade to get his mug up. It seemed like a surefire hit to me, so I built the preliminary piece of equipment and took it to Chicago to Marvin Glass and Associates.

  We had John Pasierb, the chief engineer of Bally/Midway, come over and look at it. And he got very interested immediately.

  —Ralph Baer

  Executives at Midway expressed great interest in Baer’s camera and commissioned him to install the prototype into one of their machines. Baer installed his camera in an arcade machine and rigged it to take pictures of players who got high scores. Midway set up the game in a Chicago test site.

  According to Baer, the game did well the first day. The second day ended in disaster, and a Midway executive told Baer that Midway was no longer interested in his invention.

  To make a long story short, they put it on display in an arcade in Chicago and it did very well the first day. The second day some guy gets up on a chair, drops his pants in front
of the camera, and that’s the end of the product.

  —Ralph Baer

  During this time, the rock group Journey was one of the most popular musical acts in the United States. Some Midway designers wanted to make a game based on the group.

  In Journey, the game, players helped drummer Steve Smith jump through space, using drums as trampolines. They helped keyboard player Jonathan Cain run through a minor obstacle course, guitarist Neal Schon float through a low-gravity cave, bass guitarist Ross Vallory jump over several exploding platforms, and lead singer Steve Perry slip through a maze of deadly gates.

  Journey was the first game to incorporate digitized graphics. Black and white photographic images of the musicians’ faces appear throughout the game. The images were captured using Ralph Baer’s camera.

  There’s a postmortem. We salvaged all that money we put into that game by digitizing the heads of some rock group that was popular at the time and using the heads as characters in a game. That was the outcome, but the concept of a camera in a machine just went by the board because of that one instance.

  —Ralph Baer

  The game play in Journey was not particularly innovative, but Midway executives believed that the digitized likenesses of the band would attract an audience. In past years they might have been right. By the time Journey came out, the arcade business was beginning to fade and pictures of rock stars were not enough of a draw to save a bad game.

  Journey was, between you and me, a disappointment. I thought it was a better game than it got credit for, but the market had started to soften.

  Like I say, I was a little disappointed. I thought that from a market standpoint, it was a nice piece.

  —David Marofske

  The Changing Tides

  There’s a joke that on June 21, 1982, at approximately 4:30 P.M., the video game business fell over a cliff. People stopped playing them, and operators stopped buying them. And that pall lasted for many, many years and nobody’s been able to figure out why.

  To this day, even though it happened well over a decade ago, you still hear people talking about the bust. Not the boom, but the bust.

  —Eddie Adlum

  The video game industry began its decline in mid-1982. The industry didn’t crash; it simply stopped growing.

  The first people to feel the effects were entrepreneurs who placed games in restaurants, grocery stores, and fancy hotels. Games in low-traffic locations no longer earned enough money to pay for their operation. Many of these entrepreneurs defaulted on the loans they had made to purchase their games.

  At the time, several companies had recently built new super arcades on the belief that the business would continue to expand. Arcades like Castle Park, a multimillion-dollar 17,000-square-foot operation in Riverside, California, needed thousands of customers per week to survive. As interest waned, these large new arcades attracted too few customers to meet expenses. They were the first casualties of the shake up.

  So the fallout from the video bust in mid/late 1982 was a sad one for this business. People lost money putting games in places where they shouldn’t have gone. Lobbies of Chinese restaurants, for example. You’re just not going to make money on a machine in the lobby of a Chinese restaurant, you’re just not.

  When the bloom came off the rose, those machines came out of those locations.

  Unfortunately, a lot of distributors had extended too much credit to newcomer-operators and ended up with a lot of debt. A million dollars in unpaid bills was not unusual from a single distributorship.

  The people who devoted much of their money to video games ended up with a lot of unnecessary cabinetry, hardware, monitors, and games that had absolutely no resale value whatsoever. They started visiting the city dump and pushing them over the hill.

  —Eddie Adlum

  As the big arcades disappeared, smaller ones received enough business to survive. For a short time, the business seemed to correct itself. Many arcade owners purchased new equipment and tried to hang on until business picked up again. It never did. The coin-operated video-game business continued a fairly steady decline for the next fifteen years.

  No one knew why the business had slumped. Some of the most memorable games in video-game history arrived after the arcade business began to fade. Gottlieb released Q*bert, Nintendo released Donkey Kong Junior, Sega released Pengo, and Williams released Joust and Robotron 2084, but the business continued to wane.

  We could just say it’s a fickle public. We do know that movies got better. We do know that CD records made their appearances. And we also know that the stuff that we sell is generally called “novelty,” and novelty is not forever, you have to constantly freshen it.

  We tried to freshen it, but apparently not to the point where the public would play it with the reckless abandon that they were playing before.

  —Eddie Adlum

  Jungle Who? Jungle What?

  Toward the end of 1982, Taito America came out with an adventure game called Jungle King. In this game, players helped a Tarzan-like hero rescue a woman from savages. The game involved swinging across a jungle on vines, swimming through alligator-infested waters, dodging falling boulders, and jumping over cannibals.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the entity that held the rights to Tarzan, claimed that Jungle King infringed on its property and demanded that Taito change the title of the game and its content. Rather than face an expensive legal battle, Taito agreed.

  Jungle King became Jungle Hunt. Although Taito did not change the game itself, the Tarzan character was replaced with an explorer in a Patagonian jungle suit. The original hero had made a Tarzan yell as he swung from vine-to-vine, but the new hero made no sound at all.

  In the beginning, most lawsuits over video games involved two game manufacturers suing each other over patents. After the golden age of arcades, much of the litigation involved ideas, titles, and names. The most bizarre suit involved Universal Studios. The judge handling the trial called it “a tale of two gorillas.”

  * Craig Kubey released The Winner’s Book of Video Games the same year. Kubey’s book was published by Warner Books, part of the Warner Communications empire that owned Atari. It listed Logg, Bailey, and several other Atari designers by their correct names.

  ** Later renamed Sierra On-Line.

  * The original version of the game also included a level where the carpenter chased the gorilla through a cement factory. The level involved jumping vats of cement on a conveyor belt. This level was not included in the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game.

  * K refers to 1,024 units of memory.

  The Battle for the Home

  Oh, I mean … there are lots of anecdotes from those days. One of them was about this day I’ll never forget, when I walked across the street to the engineering building on Borregas, and went into coin-op engineering, downstairs—consumer engineering was upstairs. This is probably in 1979….

  Anyway, they had this Space Invaders machine in coin-op engineering. I looked at it and went back to Kassar’s office and said, “Ray, take this goddamned Space Invaders and move it up to consumer. Make a consumer cartridge and license the goddamned name.”

  He just looked at me, and the only thing he said was, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  I said, “ ’Cause you’re very busy running the whole company.”

  —Manny Gerard

  Those of us who stayed at Atari called ourselves the Dumb Shits Club. They made $50 million and we made $20,000.

  —Warren Robinett, former programmer, Atari

  Atari Consumer Division

  A core group of four programmers was hired in early 1977 to design games for the Video Computer System (VCS), Atari’s programmable video game console. Within a year, Atari hired four more programmers, and after a few more months the team grew to twelve. Larry Wagner managed the division.

  Nolan Bushnell was already having problems with Warner Communications as he prepared to launch the VCS, but he remained at the
head of Atari through the October 1977 launch of the system and into 1978. With Bushnell in control, programmers frequently came to work late, stayed late, and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere. Bushnell encouraged their laid-back attitude and had no problem with them partying after, and sometimes during, work hours. The programmers in the fledgling VCS project genuinely liked Bushnell, but there were occasional inconveniences.

  Nolan would come through the game developers area every couple of weeks and make comments on the games that made a lot of sense. Then he would come two or three weeks later and tell you to reverse what he had told you the last time.

  We started taking Nolan’s comments with a grain of salt and asking, “Do his comments really make sense?” A lot of times we ignored him because he would frequently spin you around in circles every two to three weeks.

  —Alan Miller, former programmer, Atari

  The VCS Team

  Atari recruited talent for its VCS team in a haphazard way. Instead of visiting engineering schools and placing employment advertisements around the country, it simply placed ads in local newspapers. Amazingly, many of the people Atari selected proved to be masters at pulling a lot of power out of the Stella chip’s overtaxed hardware. During the VCS’s six-year life span, they found ways to expand its native capabilities and make it perform tasks that went far beyond anything that Al Alcorn and Jay Miner had ever envisioned. Alcorn may have called the VCS an “empty box,” but the people who made games for it turned it into a full-fledged computer.