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 (21 page)

Borrowing a page from Odyssey, the Cosmos used overlays to improve the look of its games. Cosmos’s overlays, however, were among the most impressive technologies ever created by Atari engineers.

Atari negotiated a deal with a bank for access to patents belonging to Holosonics, a bankrupt corporation that controlled most of the world’s patents for holograms—a technology for creating three-dimensional images using lasers. Alcorn brought in two specialists, Steve McGrew and Ken Haynes, to develop a process for mass-producing holograms that could be used with his game.

McGrew developed a process for creating holograms on mylar. In later years, Haynes expanded the technology for other uses, such as placing 3D pictures on credit cards.

Alcorn used their mylar technology to create an impressive array of 3D holographic overlays for the Cosmos.

One of the first games developed for the system was similar to Steve Russell’s
Spacewar
—an outer-space dogfight in which two small ships battled. The game took place in empty space with no obstructions, but the holographic overlay created an extremely elaborate backdrop with whirling 3D asteroids. The overlay did not affect the game. The ships could not interact with the backdrop, but the visual effects were spectacular.

Before beginning the project, Alcorn asked Ray Kassar for permission to create a new stand-alone game system. According to Alcorn, Kassar seemed uninterested but did not object. By the middle of 1980, Alcorn and his team had completed a working prototype. When they showed it to marketing, they were told that the department had no interest in selling anything other than the VCS.

Alcorn, Jenkins, and Hector had invested too much time in Cosmos to abandon it. Other engineers advised them to simply walk away from the project, but Alcorn decided to market the unit himself. He asked for space to show Cosmos at Atari’s booth during the 1980 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Amazingly, the marketing department said yes.

By this time, Mattel and Bally had entered the market with newer, more powerful consoles, but no one seemed to care. The VCS had more games and a much larger installed base. A constant stream of buyers from toy stores and department stores flowed through the Atari booth. While they were there, several buyers stopped by the Cosmos table, where Alcorn, Hector, and Jenkins demonstrated the console themselves. The holographic overlays attracted a lot of attention.

A few months later, Alcorn, Hector, and Jenkins manned a similar display at the Toy Fair in New York City. Having learned from his failure to sell
Home Pong
on the floor of the show, Alcorn also set up a suite for private meetings. Among the visitors to the booth was Al Nilsen, the new toy buyer for JC Penney.

Although the response to
Cosmos
was not even remotely close to the response to the VCS, several buyers decided to gamble on the system. Alcorn returned to California from the Toy Fair with orders for 250,000 units. When he told Kassar that he wanted to begin manufacturing, Kassar derailed his plans. Despite the impressive number of orders, Kassar did not want to manufacture a game system that would compete with the VCS. Cosmos was never manufactured.

Alcorn and Hector long claimed that Kassar refused to manufacture the Cosmos because it represented competition for the VCS, but some of the people who tried the game console disagree. There were questions about the play value of its games.

Kassar’s decision to mothball Cosmos infuriated Alcorn, and he left the company. He hoped to receive the same retirement benefits that Bushnell, Williams, and Keenan were enjoying. According to Alcorn, being put “on the beach” by Manny Gerard meant receiving an expense account, a monthly check, and a company car.

Alcorn’s plans, however, nearly did not come to pass. According to Warner Communications, Alcorn was not entitled to the same retirement package as Bushnell and Keenan. Warner attorneys claimed that Alcorn had negotiated his severance separate from the other board members and that he was not entitled to the same bonus-pool compensation.

By this time, Atari controlled 75 percent of the lucrative home video-game market and VCS sales were nearing $2 billion per year. The 1 percent of a bonus pool that Bushnell and Keenan received represented a substantial income. The case went to court.

Warner settled and Alcorn, Atari’s first full-time engineer, retired “to the beach.”

In 1978, Cinematronics released
Space Wars
, a coin-operated arcade version of Steve Russell’s computer game that improved on the original by incorporating vector graphics.
*
Cinematronics was founded by Jim Pierce, Dennis Parte, and Gary Garrison in El Cajon, California, in 1975. Over the next few years, Parte and Garrison sold most of their shares in the business to Tom “Papa” Stroud.
¹
Cinematronics and its games went fairly unnoticed until MIT graduate Larry Rosenthal joined the company. Rosenthal, who had done his master’s thesis on
Spacewar
, the game created by MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, had created a processor powerful and economical enough to run a full-scale version of the PDP Computer classic in an arcade machine. He convinced Stroud and Pierce to manufacture a game based on
Spacewar
using his processing technology. Appropriately enough, the game was called
Space Wars.

Rosenthal’s vector graphics technology gave him several advantages over designers using raster-scan screens. Images drawn with vector graphics can have sharp edges and crisp shapes. At the time, most raster-scan games had crude shapes—cars looked like rectangles, and people and animals looked like doodles. By contrast, vector graphics enabled designers to create fairly elaborate line art with stark contrast. Early vector-graphics hardware could not generate colors, so many companies placed colored plastic overlays on their games to create the illusion of color.

Feeling that he was not being paid enough for his innovations, Rosenthal left Cinematronics and tried to take his processing technology with him. Pierce and Stroud sued. The case was settled with Rosenthal selling his technology back to the company.

Vector graphics also enabled Cinematronics’ game designers to animate more independent objects simultaneously than their competitors. Thanks to
his vector-beam technology, the first game from Rosenthal’s designer had forty independent objects at a time. Most raster-scan games had fewer than ten moving objects on a single screen.

After
Space Wars
, Cinematronics released a few more games that tapped into the science-fiction mania created by George Lucas’s
Star Wars
movies.
Star Castle
, for instance, featured a Death Star–like space fortress with a giant cannon. Players flew tiny spaceships around the fortress, pecking away at its shields until they created a hole deep enough to destroy the fortress by shooting deep into its heart.

In 1981, Cinematronics released
Tail Gunner
, the first video game to feature three-dimensional animated objects.
*
In this game, players used a small chrome-plated joystick to target a gun in the rear of a large spaceship. The game was played from the first-person perspective—the player looked directly through the gunning station window, rather than over the shoulder of a character in the game. Because of the 3D effects, enemy fighters could turn and fly away rather than simply pass the ship.

Cinematronics emerged as one of the more successful companies in the wake of the
Space Invaders
phenomena. The company’s biggest hit, however, would come with another innovative technology.

In 1980, an Atari engineer named Howie Delman created a powerful vector-graphics generator for coin-op games. The first game that used his hardware was
Lunar Lander
—a game based on a common exercise in physics classes that was adapted for arcade use by Rich Moore. In this game, players had to dock a lunar lander on the moon, using limited fuel and dealing with a realistic simulation of the physics of lunar gravity. In order to succeed, players had to conserve fuel by using their thrusters as little as possible.

To dress up their game, Atari engineers created a massive two-handled lever for controlling the lander’s booster engines. Springs on the lever made it snap back in place when it was released. Unfortunately, some younger players got their faces too close to the lever, resulting in complaints about children being hit in the face when the lever snapped back in place.

Though
Lunar Lander
was never particularly successful, its vector-graphics generator was the impetus of Atari’s most successful coin-operated game. Lyle Rains, vice president of the coin-operated games division, had an idea for a game in which players cleared an area of space by shooting asteroids flying around a small ship.

Rains described his idea to programmer Ed Logg and suggested that the asteroids should repeatedly get smaller when the ship shot them. Logg, who held a master’s degree in math from Stanford University, thought he could expand the idea into a working game. He had recently completed the game
Super Breakout
and wanted to start his next project.