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

  Tiger Electronics released its King Kong game on a cartridge for the Atari VCS and also as a handheld electronic game.

  Suffice it to say that when Nintendo won [its] suit from Universal, Coleco went back at Universal and said, “Hey, what about us?” And Universal then bought some Coleco stock and basically as a payback for the moneys that Coleco had paid to Universal on the royalties side.

  —Al Kahn

  Nintendo’s counterclaims did not go to court until May 20, 1985. On July 29, 1985, Judge Sweet ordered Universal to pay Nintendo $1.8 million for legal fees, photocopying expenses, costs incurred creating graphs and charts, and lost revenues.

  By the time the case was concluded, the video-game industry had nearly vanished and Coleco had entered the doll business.

  * As of this writing, Milton Bradley is still manufacturing Simon.

  * ColecoVision generally sold for $195. By this time, Atari had cut the price of the VCS to $135, in preparation for releasing a new game console called the 5200.

  * In 1978, an Atari executive named Joe Robbins made a foresighted agreement that gave Atari exclusive rights to Pac-Man.

  Skip Paul and Ray Kassar told Joe [Robbins], “You go over to Japan and talk to Namco, but don’t sign anything with them.” We [Atari] felt that they owed us money.

  A week later Joe comes back. He’s had his picture in the paper, signing this deal with the Japanese and playing with [Masaya] Nakamura on a golf course. He agreed to give them $1 million, and they got to renew their contract, but we got the rights to their coin-op games. At that point they had no hits at all.

  It was like Jack and the Beanstalk, and Joe came back with these worthless beans.

  Well, one of those beans was a little game called Pac-Man. In retrospect, it was the best buy of the decade, but at the time, I think it pretty much cost him his job.

  —Al Alcorn

  * This action was taken to clear the way for Dino DiLaurentis to remake the movie.

  ** Nintendo’s lawyer, John Kirby, reminded the court of Sheinberg’s angry claim while cross-examining him.

  The Fall

  They reached a pinnacle in interactive game design with Robotron. If I was on a desert island and I had AC, I’d have Robotron. There’s no question.

  —David Thiel, former sound engineer, Gottlieb

  But Atari’s biggest coup this season will probably be extraterrestrial: this week Atari will launch its first E.T. video game in time to hit toy shelves in November.

  —William D. Marbach with Peter McAlevey, “A New Galaxy of Video Games,” Newsweek, October 25, 1982

  Spielberg wanted to make E.T. into a Pac-Man game, but I wanted to do something original. In retrospect … Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.

  —Howard Scott Warshaw, former game designer, Atari Corporation

  In the Arcades

  No one realized that the arcade business had begun to collapse in 1982. Arcade owners, still believing that all it would take to set the business right was a few good games, watched for hits and tried to rebuild their businesses. And some of the best games of all time came out between the end of 1982 and the middle of 1983.

  Robotron 2084

  I was thinking about the novel 1984. There was a lot of excitement about the whole Orwell thing and [the year] 1984 was upon us, and I was noticing that things were not at all like they were in the book.

  I’m kind of a science-fiction guy, and I was thinking about it and … well, decided that probably not too much is going to happen in the next couple of years. It was really going to be 2084 when the ship runs out and it’s not going to be humans subjugating humans, it’s going to be robots doing the subjugating.

  —Eugene Jarvis, creator of Robotron 2084

  Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar left Williams shortly after completing Defender, the first game Jarvis created as an independent consultant. They started a consulting firm called Vid Kidz that designed games for Williams. Then, in 1981, Jarvis crashed his MGB and broke his right hand.

  Jarvis’s arm was still in a cast when he and DeMar began their next project. As they had with Defender, Jarvis and DeMar started by fleshing out a story about the game. They decided the game would be about an Orwellian world. Since 1984 was only three years away, it was obvious that the world was not in sync with Orwell’s timetable, so they set their game in 2084 to give mankind an extra century to create a viable Big Brother.

  Mankind had created a race of robots to use as servants in Jarvis and DeMar’s story, but the robots had evolved to the point when they no longer needed humans, so they took over the world.

  The idea is that right now we have all these machines that are serving us. They’re getting more and more intelligent, and at some point we’ll see computer rights activists because these things will be so smart and you’ll be talking to them and they’ll be your buddy and they’ll be your information agent on the Internet, and then some guy comes along and unplugs your computer and screws up your hard disk or something and it’s like, wait a minute, that was murder! It’s like killing your dog or something.

  So, computers are running around, trying to help our lives and scooping up our shit and everything, and finally they realize, “What do we need these guys for? I mean, they’re nasty people, they build nuclear bombs, they kill each other. We’re having all these problems with them. What’s the equation here?”

  —Eugene Jarvis

  When Robotron 2084 begins, robots have conquered the world. Players cannot hope to restore mankind. The game has no end; it simply repeats until the player runs out of lives.

  Players control a tiny hero with a large head and thick glasses, whom Jarvis thought looked like Elton John. The hero and his family are the last humans, and the robots, according to Jarvis, want to catch them and put them in a zoo.

  As usual, Jarvis wanted a game in which players were surrounded by enemies. He prided himself on creating games with nearly unwinnable circumstances. In this case, every scene in the game began with the hero and his family completely surrounded by robots. In order to survive, players had to help the hero dodge and shoot the robots and save family members, while avoiding mines and projectiles. The game moved at a frantic pace.

  In almost every game like Space Invaders or Galaxian, everything comes down at you. Our idea was that being in the center of something would cause incredible panic. Things are coming from all sides and you are just like, “Oh, my gosh!”

  —Eugene Jarvis

  Jarvis’s car accident played an important role in the designing of Robotron 2084. With his hand in a cast, Jarvis was laid up in bed for a few days. While trapped in bed, he thought about a popular game from Stern Electronics, in which players helped a man run through a maze while shooting slow-moving robots. Jarvis loved the game but hated its joystick-button configuration because the same joystick was used for moving the character and aiming his shots.

  When Jarvis returned to work, his cast made him unable to handle the standard joystick and button configuration used with most games, so he and DeMar rigged a two-joystick controller by attaching two Atari 2600 controllers to a panel. In this configuration, one joystick controlled the hero and the other aimed his gun.

  It was the first game to introduce the twin joystick, which let you fire in one direction and move in the other. It’s a very challenging control, most people cannot … probably 80 percent of the population cannot pat their head and rub their stomach at the same time. You actually have to be fairly coordinated with both hands, and you have to be able to deal with running away from something and shooting in another direction.

  —Eugene Jarvis

  Williams sold less than 20,000 Robotron 2084 machines and considered it a success. In later years, Robotron 2084 would become one of the most highly esteemed trophies among video-game collectors.

  Q*BERT

  D. Gottlieb & Company, the group that helped found the coin-operated amusement industry with Baffle Ball, entered the video-game industry late. Columbia Pictu
res owned Gottlieb & Company by the time Gottlieb produced Reactor. Coca-Cola owned Columbia Pictures, so some Gottlieb employees joked that Coca-Cola was their boss.

  Gottlieb had only one hit video game—a quirky little title named Q*Bert. The project began when an artist named Jeff Lee drew a stack of cubes on his computer screen in a tribute to M. C. Escher.

  Being a fan of the great Dutch artist M. C. Escher, the master of optical illusions, I constructed a stack of triad-based cubes. Admiring my derivative handiwork, it struck me, there’s a game in here somewhere!1

  Lee created an Escher-like pyramid of blocks and a two-legged character with no arms who hopped along the blocks and shot enemies with projectiles that he fired from his hose-like nose. He called the game “Snots and Boogers.”

  Gottlieb had recently hired a programmer from Bell Laboratories named Warren Davis. Though he was assigned to a game called Protector, Davis sometimes roamed around the office, hoping to try his hand at other projects as well. One night Jeff Lee’s 3D blocks caught his eye.

  Q*Bert was kind of a Skunk Works project. Warren Davis was a good programmer who had no track record whatsoever doing games; he just thought it would be a fun thing to do.

  Warren saw this stuff that Jeff Lee was working on, these shaded cubes that filled his screen, and asked if he could have a copy of the art. He started playing with it and said, “You know, the problem with this is that it shouldn’t cover the screen like this.” So he made a pyramid out of it.

  —David Thiel

  Davis’s biggest contribution to the game was changing its theme from shooting to strategy. Davis eliminated the nose-gun and changed the goal of the game to saving the main character rather than killing enemies.

  One night a Gottlieb employee named Ron Waxman saw the game and told Davis that the blocks should change color whenever the armless character jumped on them. With that suggestion, the game finally had a clear goal: changing all of the blocks to a particular color while avoiding enemies.*

  During a meeting, another Gottlieb employee named Richard Tracy suggested that the game and its main character be named Q*Bert, a name that he derived from the words “Cube” and “Hubert.”2

  The game began taking shape. Q*Bert’s enemies became more ludicrous than menacing. They were comic animals that included a bouncing snake named “Coily,” a mop-headed gremlin named “Ugg,” and a tiny hood in shades named “Wrongway.” Lee suggested creating two rather harmless imps named “Slick” and “Sam,” who made extra work for Q*Bert by changing the blocks he had touched back to their original colors.

  Lee and a sound engineer named Dave Thiel came up with a humorous device for giving Q*Bert a distinctive personality. They set the game up so that when Coily, Ugg, or Wrongway caught him, or when players ran Q*Bert over the edge of the blocks, he gives a trailing-away scream followed by a sickening thud. At other times he muttered angry gibberish words and a word balloon appeared above his head with messages like “@!#@!”

  Now, in parallel with this, completely independently and having nothing to do with what Warren and Jeff were up to, I had been tasked with using this speech chip that was on a pinball sound board. It was a really unpleasant task because the technology was crummy. You had to manually put together these units of speech, these little sounds, and try to make it say things. It’s not the same as joining letters together on paper and ending up with words.

  We wanted the game to say, “You have gotten 10,000 bonus points,” and the closest I came to it after an entire day would be “bogus points.”

  Being very frustrated with this, I said, “Well, screw it. What if I just stick random numbers in the chip instead of all of this highly authored stuff, what happens?” It sounded alien. It sounded like somebody should be able to understand it, but, of course, you couldn’t understand it because it was gibberish.

  By that time, Warren had Q*Bert bouncing around on the cubes, and I said, “Have I got something for you.”

  —David Thiel

  Q*Bert was released in 1983. The game’s popularity resulted in licensing deals for lunchboxes, board games, and a Saturday morning cartoon. Gottlieb sold approximately 25,000 Q*Bert arcade machines.

  Dragon’s Lair

  In 1983, Cinematronics, the pioneering arcade company that led the move toward vector-graphics games in the late 1970s, released Dragon’s Lair.

  The game, which combined computer engineering and a Pioneer laser disc machine, had animated cartoon graphics that looked like something out of a Walt Disney cartoon. Understandably, it resembled a Disney cartoon, because it was created by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who had worked on films such as Robin Hood, The Rescuers, and Pete’s Dragon.

  Don Bluth had been in Disney’s inner circle, one of the chosen heirs of the company, and he decided to leave Disney and go off on his own. No one had ever left Disney’s inner circle before, and Disney did everything it could to have him blacklisted.

  —Rick Dyer, founder, RDI Technologies

  In Dragon’s Lair, players helped a knight named Dirk as he rescued Princess Daphne from an evil castle. The game play was like a cross between an old-fashioned Saturday morning serial and a series of multiple-choice questions. The screen would show an animated sequence in which Dirk faced some new danger and players had to respond by moving Dirk with a joystick or pressing a button to make him draw his sword.

  In one sequence, for instance, Dirk walked into a room in which a boiling beaker of liquid sat on a table under a sign reading “Drink me.” Left to his own devices, Dirk would drink the liquid and die, but players could save him by pulling the joystick to the right, causing him to leave the room.

  If he drank the potion, players saw an animation of Dirk gasping. After three mistakes, the screen showed a picture of a partially skeletal Dirk scowling at the player.

  Cinematronics had been in Chapter 11 for a year when it released Dragon’s Lair. To complete the project, Cinematronics established a partnership with RDI Technologies, a company that later tried to market a home laser-disc game system.*

  Due largely to public fascination with the new technology, Dragon’s Lair was an immediate and profitable hit. Cinematronics sold more than 16,000 Dragon’s Lair machines in 1983, for an average price of $4,300.3 Coleco purchased the home rights to the game, giving Cinematronics an additional $2 million. Dragon’s Lair was so successful that Cinematronics released a follow-up game called Space Ace within a few months.

  Steven Spielberg loved Dragon’s Lair. After seeing the game, he contacted Bluth and they worked together on some films.

  —Rick Dyer

  A battle formed between Cinematronics, Don Bluth, and RDI Technologies. Though Bluth began work on Dragon’s Lair II shortly after finishing Space Ace, the game did not come out until 1991. By the time it did, both Cinematronics and RDI Technologies had gone out of business. Leland, a Texas-based company, released Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp into the arcades.

  Mylstar (formerly Gottlieb), Atari, and Williams all joined Cinematronics in releasing laser-disc games, but Dragon’s Lair was the only game of its kind to become a hit.

  Society Gone Games

  By the middle of 1982, even as the arcade industry began its lengthy fall, video games crept into other areas of American popular culture. Video jockeys talked about video games on MTV. Walt Disney Pictures made a movie, Tron, in which actor Jeff Bridges saved the world by entering a super computer and defeating an evil program in a series of video game–like battles. The first movie to feature computer-drawn special effects, it inspired two arcade games from Bally/Midway—Tron and Discs of Tron—as well as several home game cartridges from Mattel. Arcade games were also used in the backgrounds of dozens of movies.

  Consumers no longer had to go to the store to buy games; they could purchase them from home. Columbia House, the parent company of the Columbia Record Club, opened the Columbia Cartridge Club. Other companies, such as Tele Soft, Inc., and VideoLivery, set up toll-free lines to let shop
pers call in orders for the latest games. Some companies even began experimenting with delivering games over modems and cable television.

  Software manufacturers also experimented with new topics for games. In October 1982, Caballero Control Corporation released three X-rated games for the Atari VCS. The games—Custer’s Revenge, Bachelor Party, and Beat ’Em & Eat ’Em—were more crude than sexual. They retailed for $49.95.

  Of the three games, Custer’s Revenge received the most attention. The game involved helping Custer escape from battle by dodging arrows. Once safely away from the battlefield, he would find and rape an Indian woman tied to a stake.

  Actually, there were several attempts to do adult games in 1982 and 1983. Caballero, a company that did Swedish erotica, put out three cartridges for the VCS under the name Mystique. One was Custer’s Revenge, a game in which you ran along, left to right, dodging Indian arrows. If you did that successfully, you got to rape an Indian girl who was tied to a pole.

  As you might imagine, Native American groups loved this game. There were protests all over the country. Women Against Pornography did a lot of picketing against it.

  I remember talking to a representative of that organization and telling her that in my opinion, the best way to keep the game from selling was to ignore it. These were games that most people wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.