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 (20 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Within a year, Midway manufactured and sold more than 60,000
Space Invader
machines in the United States. Suddenly, video games were the most lucrative equipment a vendor could own.
Not too long after I opened the game room,
Space Invaders
came out. What a great game. That was the first time I saw a cash box that represented a significant portion of the cost of [buying] the game in any one week. It was
hard to believe that any game could capture the audience to the degree that it was capable of doing.I can remember only a few games that had that dynamic game-playing magnetism. You could probably count them on your fingers.
—Joel Hochberg
In a 1982 interview, Taito import manager S. Ikawa tried to explain why so many people liked
Space Invaders:
“
Space Invaders
gives you a feeling of tension. A little neglect may breed great mischief.”
1
Though
Space Invaders
played the biggest role in revitalizing the coin-operated business, another game also had a major impact—Atari
Football.
Contrary to a popular notion,
Football
was not the first game to use a trak-ball controller. According to Dave Stubben, who created the hardware for Atari
Football
, Taito beat Atari to market with a soccer game that used one. According to Steve Bristow, when his engineers saw the game, they brought a copy into their lab and imitated it.
Dave Stubben, a large and beefy man who often wore cowboy boots to work, cocreated
Football
with software designer Mike Albaugh. Stubben saw a partially completed football game called
X’s and O’s
that Bristow had begun around the time that he created
Tank.
Stubben improved Bristow’s design by adding a smooth-scrolling playing field and trackball controllers.
*
Few games absorbed more abuse than Atari
Football
, and few games have injured so many players. It was housed in a waist-high tabletop cabinet. Players stood beside the cabinet, pounding the trackball as hard as they could. On offense, players slapped the trackball to control their quarterback and make their receivers run. To build speed and to maneuver, players had to spin the trackball as quickly as possible. All over the country, people developed blisters on their hands.
Although the computer microprocessor that powered
Football
far exceeded dedicated circuits of games like
Pong
, it lacked the horsepower needed to display complex graphics. The teams in
Football
were represented by Xs and Os.
Unlike
Space Invaders
,
Football
ran on a three-minute timer. Once the three minutes were up, players had to insert more quarters to continue. For the first three months of its release,
Football
was, quarter-for-quarter, as big a money maker as
Space Invaders.
The football season ended in January, and with it went most of Atari’s
Football
business.
One of Nolan Bushnell’s pet projects while working at Atari was finding new outlets for getting his games to the public. Video games had already found their way into bowling alleys, amusement parks, movie theaters, bars, pool halls, and arcades. In 1979,
Space Invaders
opened new doors as fast-food restaurants and even drugstores began experimenting with games.
The progress was slow, however, because much of the public still associated video games with pool halls, sleazy arcades, and vagrancy. Adding to the problem was a very effective war against video games launched by a woman named Ronnie Lamb, from Centereach, Long Island. She had seen a growing number of children playing the games and was appalled at the waste of time and money. She did not approve of the violence in many of the games and felt that arcades were not wholesome environments.
Ms. Lamb presented her concerns on
The Phil Donahue Show.
Her campaign resulted in a few small towns banning arcades and helped to sour the public’s perception of video games and arcades. Despite arcades’ growing popularity, few shopping mall owners would allow arcades to be built on their properties.
In order to reach a larger audience, Bushnell had to find a way to legitimize video games. He wanted to make them a family activity, and the only way to do that was to create locations in which parents were practically forced to let their children play them. The answer came in the form of a pizza parlor with a video game arcade and a built-in theater that showed a robot stage act.
Bushnell hoped that the restaurant would legitimize the arcade. The robotic show, he thought, could create a Disney-like atmosphere that would make children select his parlors over such other chains as Pizza Hut and Godfather’s.
It didn’t matter if the pizza was good or even mediocre; the arcade and robot show would attract kids. Once he lured customers, Bushnell hoped they would enter his arcade while their pizza was cooking. To help tempt them, he gave them a handful of free game tokens—enough to last five minutes. They
would have to purchase more tokens if they wanted to spend additional time in the arcade while they waited.
We were running out of locations, and opening a video game arcade in the 1970s was like opening a pool hall. Malls weren’t interested in letting us open arcades. So Nolan figured, okay, I’ll go into food service.
What food are people used to waiting a long time to eat? Pizza. While they wait, we’ll give them tokens to play games so they don’t mind waiting a half hour for the pizza. We’ll use these animatronic robots that Grass Valley engineered.
It was a scheme where you could tell mall management, “I’m not putting in a video-game arcade, I’m putting in a pizza parlor with video games.” But it was as big an arcade as you could possibly get in and still call it a pizza parlor.
—Al Alcorn
Bushnell called his new venture Pizza Time Theaters. He named his restaurants Chuck E. Cheese after the robotic rat mascot.
Although Chuck E. Cheese restaurants were somewhat similar to the Cavalier restaurant/arcade that Joel Hochberg helped open in 1961, Bushnell’s vision was unique. The Cavalier was designed to attract adults with games and food. Bushnell went after children, knowing that if they came, their parents would have to follow.
Bushnell began work on Chuck E. Cheese long before leaving Atari. He told a reporter that he had a rat costume on a mannequin in his office as early as 1974. Atari purchased an abandoned Dean Witter brokerage office in a San Jose outdoor mall and converted it into a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in November of 1977.
The first Chuck E. Cheese was far smaller than later restaurants. Along with an arcade, the establishment had a food service area with three stages, from which a robotic animal band played family tunes. The eating area was laid out like a cafeteria, with tables in long rows.
Though Warner acquired the rights to Chuck E. Cheese when it purchased Atari, the project never interested Manny Gerard or Steve Ross. According to Bushnell, they eventually asked him to sell the entire franchise off.
The project was started before Warner bought the company. They sort of said, “Okay, it’s another one of Nolan’s hare brains.” They sort of tolerated it, but they figured it was going to be something that would go away. They didn’t understand it.
—Nolan Bushnell
When Bushnell left Atari, he asked to buy the rights to Chuck E. Cheese. Ross sold him the entire project, including the rights to the robot technology, for $500,000. Bushnell paid the debt at the rate of $100,000 per year. Within weeks of leaving the company, he began planning his second location.
Along with video games, Chuck E. Cheese had midway games that rewarded players with tickets that could be redeemed for prizes. Bushnell had run similar games at the amusement park in Salt Lake City, Utah, while working his way through school. He believed that the promise of winning prizes would have enormous appeal to children.
Skeeball was dying. The company [that made the games], Philadelphia Toboggan, was going out of business and all of a sudden Nolan recognized there was play value there. You’ve got to give him credit for this.
The whole redemption idea was kind of a shady thing at the arcades, almost gambling, but Nolan realized that this was something the kiddies would love because they could spend time at the counter redeeming all those tickets.
I don’t know if he stole the idea from somebody else, but it was his drive and his vision.
—Al Alcorn
Had the video-game industry remained in the doldrums, Chuck E. Cheese might have quietly failed and disappeared. Instead,
Space Invaders
burst upon the scene and the entire industry flourished. Since Chuck E. Cheese was one of the places people were sure to find the games they were looking for, the franchise rode the swell of excitement over hot titles like
Space Invaders.
The second Chuck E. Cheese was far more ambitious than the first one. Bushnell put it in a San Jose building that had once housed a Toys “R” Us store. It was one of the largest Californian arcades of its time, with two floors
of video games and a spiral ramp running around a 20-foot tall revolving statue of Chuck E. Cheese.
By the end of 1979, Bushnell began selling Pizza Time Theater franchises. It cost approximately $1.5 million to construct a full-sized Pizza Time Theater. A properly run location could pay for itself in six months.
As it turned out,
Space Invaders
was only the tip of an iceberg that eventually turned Chuck E. Cheese and several other video game–associated ventures into billion-dollar success stories. The golden age of video games was about to dawn.
*
The trackball was created by Jerry Liachek, the Atari mechanical engineer who created all of Atari’s best coin-op controllers. Liachek worked on the handle for
Lunar Lander
, the joystick controller for
Star Wars
, and the dual joysticks for
Battlezone.
The Golden AgeNobody gets their first game published.
—Theurer’s Law (Atari doctrine named after Dave Theurer,
creator of
Missile Command
and
Tempest)
Games such as
Pac-Man
and
Space Invaders
were going into virtually every location in the country, with the exception of maybe funeral parlors, and even a few funeral parlors had video games in the basements. Absolutely true. I believe churches and synagogues were about the only types of locations to escape video games.—Eddie Adlum
Once Nolan Bushnell left Atari, other notables soon followed. Within a few months of Bushnell’s departure, Joe Keenan joined him. Gil Williams hung on for nearly two years; his last assignment was to set up a coin-op manufacturing plant in Ireland. Gene Lipkin remained a bit longer, then left the company under unpleasant circumstances.
As one of the company’s original employees, Al Alcorn was caught in a tough position. He had been with the company since 1972 and helped develop its most successful products—
Pong, Home Pong
, and the Video Computer System. His name still carried weight at Atari, but he did not like the direction in which the company was headed.
As far as Alcorn was concerned, things had changed since Warner Communications took control. Under Bushnell, Atari was an engineering company. The leadership took risks and pioneered new technologies. When Ray Kassar replaced Bushnell as president, Atari became a marketing company. Instead of developing new technologies, Kassar preferred to push existing ideas to their fullest. Alcorn wanted to begin work on the next generation of home video-game hardware, but Kassar didn’t even want to consider an alternative to the VCS.
Toward the end of 1978, Alcorn assembled a team of engineers and began designing a game console called Cosmos. Unlike the VCS, Cosmos did not plug into a television set. It had a light-emitting diode display. Both systems played games stored on cartridges, but Cosmos’s tiny cartridges had no electronics, simply a four-by-five inch mylar transparency that cost so little to manufacture that the entire cartridges could retail for $10.
Alcorn’s team included two new engineers. Harry Jenkins, who had just graduated from Stanford University, and Roger Hector, a project designer who had done some impressive work in the coin-op division. Both were assigned to work directly under Alcorn on the project.