Replay: The History of Video Games (12 page)

Despite its dislike of the new regime, the coin-op division continued to produce hit after hit during the late 1970s and one of the biggest was 1978’s
Atari Football
. Atari’s American football game began life in 1974 as
Xs and Os
, but the project had stalled. “I started
Xs and Os
using discrete circuits like in the early games such as
Pong
, but as we got further with the prototype we wanted more objects on the screen,” said Bristow, who led the work on that early version. The arrival of microprocessors gave Atari the chance to dig out Bristow’s abandoned game and try again. The task of completing the game was given to Michael Albaugh, an engineer who had joined Atari from the telecoms industry. While putting together the game, Albaugh came up with the idea of using a trackball as the controller instead of a joystick. Unlike joysticks, trackballs could measure the speed at which players spun the ball as well as the direction they wanted to move. Albaugh thought it was perfect for
Atari Football
: “It allowed a more direct control of the player objects and added physicality to the game.”

Atari’s senior managers were less convinced that adding this relatively expensive control mechanism was worth it. “Nolan Bushnell was opposed to it, thinking a joystick would be adequate. I won by threatening to quit,” said Albaugh. Atari engineer Jerry Lichac got the job of designing a custom trackball for Atari that would be robust and cheap enough for the company to include in Atari Football. “In those days the only ones available were the military things and our engineers actually designed a very low-cost trackball using a cue ball from pool,” said Anglin. Almost as soon as the prototype was tested on the public, Atari knew it had aher game destined for success. “We got this thing out on test and me, Bristow and coin-op executive Lyle Rains watched this game, as we only wanted products people loved going out,” said Anglin. “There were these guys playing
Atari Football
. One guy was slamming the trackball so much his watch flew off of his arm and across the room. There were crowds of people watching people play. We kinda thought this might be a hit.”

And it was. As 1978 drew to a close
Atari Football
looked set to be the biggest arcade game of the year by a long margin. But then
Space Invaders
arrived.

* * *

After seeing
Gun Fight
, Dave Nutting Associates’ microprocessor reworking of his game
Western Gun
, Tomohiro Nishikado knew he wanted to use the same technology in his next creation. He diligently researched the capabilities of microprocessors and built a computer that would allow him to program games for this new technology. After getting to grips with the technology, he turned his thoughts to what kind of game he wanted to make and homed in on the advantages microprocessors offered in terms of animation. “With microprocessors, the animation is smoother and there are so many more complex physical movements that can be reproduced, so the category of games that we could now create was so much more,” he said. Nishikado decided to make a shooting game: “The targets that came to mind were military tanks, ships and airplanes. I decided on airplanes but I just couldn’t get the movement of the airplane in flight to look smooth, so I tried many different targets and found that the human form was the smoothest movement.”

Taito’s president was far from impressed by Nishikado’s plan to create a game where you shot people. “I was prevented from using the human form, so I thought of aliens so I could use the similar form, and therefore a smooth movement, while getting around the problem of shooting humans,” said Nishikado. He took inspiration from the 1953 film of H.G. Wells’ novel
The War of the Worlds
that he had seen as a child: “The bug-like aliens made a great impression on me, so I created my aliens based on that image.” The invertebrate alien forms Nishikado eventually created also resembled sea creatures such as crabs, octopuses and squid.

Another big influence was Atari’s
Breakout
. Nishikado decided that, like the bat from
Breakout
, the player’s missile launcher would be stuck at the bottom of the screen and only capable of moving left or right. In place of
Breakout
’s static bricks, he arranged a phalanx of space invaders – 11 aliens wide and five aliens deep – and got them to march ominously from one edge of the screen to the other while raining laser fire on the player below. And when this extraterrestrial army reached the screen’s edge, it would drop down in menacing unity one step closer to the player and its ultimate goal of reaching earth. To help the player, Nishikado added four shields that could provide some cover from the alien barrage, although these would be slowly ripped and torn apart by the onslaught from above. The player’s task was straightforward: defeat the aliens before they reached earth, but it was a hopeless battle for survival, as the aliens would never stop. Even if the player killed the whole alien army another would simply take its place. The only reward for the ultimately doomed player was the chance to take down as many aliens as possible before defeat in order to add their name to the game’s roll of honour – its high score table.

For players used to the tame, innocent fun of
Pong
and the ponderous battles of
Tank
,
Space Invaders
was a powerful experience. This wasn’t just a bit of fun, this was ferocious human-versus-machine action. Exhilarating, stressful, adrenaline-pumping and intimidating in equal measure. Like the invaders within its virtual world,
Space Invaders
conquered Japan within weeks of its launch in July 1978. Children, teenagers and adults alike flocked to the arcades to join the battle against the alien threat. Pachinko parlours, bowling alleys and even grocery stores reinvented themselves as dedicated
Space Invaders
arcades. Cafés swapped their tables for
Space Invaders
cocktail cabinets. Novelty pop act Funny Stuff took the invasion onto the airwaves with
Disco Space Invaders
, a hit single backed with dance moves inspired by the jerky movements of Nishikado’s aliens. Within three months of its launch,
Space Invaders
had gobbled up so many ¥100 coins it brought Japan to a standstill, preventing people from buying subway tickets or using public telephone boxes. A panicked Bank of Japan responded by ordering an investigation of Taito, which would sell more than 100,000
Space Invaders
machines in Japan alone. Nishikado, however, paid little attention to the fuss his game was causing: “I don’t remember being particularly happy or pleased at the time. I was more concerned with the low quality of the hardware for this game and was concentrating my efforts on creating better hardware.”

Space Invaders
’ formula would prove no less potent in North America and Europe. Bally Midway, Taito’s US distributor, sold around 60,000
Space Invaders
machines and watched its profits soar. Eugene Jarvis, who was a pinball designer for Atari when
Space Invaders
reached the US in late 1978, responded by abandoning the world of flippers and pins. “I was a real pinball fanatic, but when
Space Invaders
came out I knew the future was in video games,” he said. “I was instantly addicted by the possibilities of computer intelligence applied to video games. This was a huge advance from the first generation of ‘dumb’ games like
Pong
, which relied solely on the intelligence of human players.”

The impact of
Space Invaders
could alsobe seen in the US sales figures for coin-op games. In 1978 the business generated revenues of $472 million, slightly down on the previous year’s $551 million. In 1979 the figure had more than tripled to $1,333 million – with
Space Invaders
accounting for a large proportion of that total. And having conquered the world’s arcades,
Space Invaders
then helped Atari conquer the home.

By late 1979 competition in the home video game business was hotting up. Fairchild and RCA’s consoles had bitten the dust but new machines had taken their place. Atari’s biggest rival in the arcades, Bally, had released the Professional Arcade. Designed by Dave Nutting Associates, the Bally Professional Arcade was more powerful than Atari’s machine – a fact the company hoped would give it the edge. “We knew we were miles ahead of Atari technically,” said Jay Fenton, an engineer at Dave Nutting Associates who helped create Bally’s console. “Nothing else came close to our console until the Nintendo.”

But that technology came at a higher price and, unlike Atari, which sold the 2600 at cost price, Bally was determined to make a profit on every console sold. “What really killed us was being more expensive – like double what the VCS went for,” said Fenton. The citizens of New Jersey also delivered the console an unintentional blow, said Dave Nutting. In 1978 the state’s voters backed a law allowing casino gambling in Atlantic City. The vote turned the east coast city into a new Las Vegas and for Bally, which also made fruit machines, it was a major business opportunity. “Bill O’Donnell was the president of Bally and his dream was for Bally to get into owning and operating casinos,” said Nutting. “He now had the financial resources, from Bally’s incredible success in the commercial video game market, and now had the place. Bally lost interest in pursuing the consumer market and decided to abandon the project.” The Professional Arcade was sold off to a group of small businessmen who relaunched it as the Astrocade only to watch it fade into oblivion.

Internal politics also crippled the Magnavox Odyssey
2
, the TV set manufacturer’s answer to the 2600 and Fairchild’s Channel F. To give its console the edge, Magnavox decided to base the system on the 8244 graphics chip that Intel was developing. This chip, one of the first graphics chips to be created, would handle much of the work involved in generating on-screen images and audio, leaving the Odyssey
2
’s main microprocessor to concentrate on running games. “It was by far the most advanced graphics chip of its day and gave a huge advantage to the Odyssey
2
,” said Ed Averett, one of the Intel team that created the chip. But the chip’s development was plagued by delays that kept pushing back the launch of the Odyssey
2
until 1978. Despite the delays, Averett was upbeat about the console’s chances and quit Intel to make games for the console. “With incredible hardware for that time and distribution in place, the only thing missing was software,” he explained. “So I left Intel to design games for the Odyssey
2
. Everyone thought I was crazy. Intel, Magnavox, even my family, except my wife and our one-year-old daughter Ashley.”
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But by the time the Odyssey
2
launched, Magnavox was already trying to extract itself from the video game business. The project had nearly been cancelled before launch, until Ralph Baer intervened and persuaded the company, which was now part of the Dutch electronics giant Philips, to stick with it. And even though it went ahead with the launch, Magnavox was still looking for a way out. “By the time the chip arrived, Magnavox was seriously thinking about getting out of the video game business as soon as its obligation to Intel was fulfilled,” said Averett. “All of their engineers had been told to stop designing games and most were reassigned. The lights were going out for the Odyssey
2
before it was even born.” The console’s only internal support at senior level came from Mike Staup, one of Magnavox’s vice-presidents, and he faced an uphill battle trying to keep the rest of the company’s upper management from pulling the plug on the system. Averett, however, did quite well out of Magnavox’s decision to stop making games internally: “When the Odyssey
2
finally hit the market it sold out immediately, so Magnavox said ‘ok, design one more game, but this is the last game we want, ever’. This philosophy of just one more game prevailed for three years.”

Averett ended up the sole game creator for the Odyssey
2
– a one-man freelancer working for royalties taking on Atari’s dedicated pool of VCS game designers. “It was incredibly frustrating since the Odyssey
2
was vastly superior to the VCS,” he said. “Atari deserves huge credit for taking on Magnavox and then Philips with an inferior product and beating them soundly in the marketplace. While frustrated, I did get a lot of satisfaction about being part of one of the best-kept secrets at the time in the industry – being one guy going toe-to-toe against Atari design teams. We went to some lengths to keep that secret for obvious reasons: one of the biggest being I had no time for anything but designing games.” The only support Averett got was technical help from his wife and criticism from the kids in his neighbourhood, who he used as play testers. “It was as brutal as you might imagine – kids don’t mince words,” he said. The Odyssey
2
would eventually crawl past the million sales mark and did well in Europe where Philips released it as the Videopac G7000, but the lack of corporate support ensured the console never came close to matching the sales of the VCS.