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 (24 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Pac-Man
was not the only overlooked game at the AMOA show that year. Few people noticed when Williams Electronics, the leading pinball manufacturer, unveiled its first video game since
Paddle Ball
, a rip-off of
Pong.
The game was called
Defender.
Eugene Jarvis, creator of
Defender
, had broken into the amusement industry designing wide-body pinball machines at Atari. He realized the pinball division would be closed shortly after Bushnell left the company, so he quit and spent a few months vacationing in Costa Rica. When he returned, another Atari pinball veteran named Steve Ritchie asked him to come to Chicago to help produce pinball games for Williams. They teamed up to build three groundbreaking pinball games—
Lazerball, Firepower
, and
Gorgar.
*
In February 1980, Williams executives decided to enter the arena of video games. They asked Jarvis to design their first title. He had to start by designing a hardware platform for running his game.
The first step was getting a hardware system going. We debated the merits of color versus black and white. We kind of said, “Okay, we’ve got to go with the future, we’ve got to be hip dudes, so we’re going to go color.”
The next question was deciding how many colors.
For
Defender
, we decided we’d go all out and make every pixel on the screen capable of sixteen colors. It was like, “Wow! This was more colors than you’ll ever need.”I don’t even know if the game had a name at that point.
—Eugene Jarvis
Jarvis, who described himself as a fan of violence and action, wanted to give his game a title that would justify the game’s violence.
I had to have this whole justification for why you were there and what you were doing. A lot of games fall short. They just put you there, and all of a sudden you’re beating people up and you start to wonder, “Why am I beating these people up?”
There was actually an old TV show called
The Defenders
about attorneys back in the 1960s, and I kind of liked that show. You know, if you’re defending something, you’re being attacked, and you can do whatever you want.—Eugene Jarvis
According to Jarvis, space battles provided the most popular theme for games at the time. Placing
Defender
in space appealed to Jarvis because it covered up the inadequacies of his hardware.
At the time, space was just the happening thing. It was very easy to do space because space is very abstract.
We had limited graphic ability—just making a person look like a person was very difficult. It was almost as if you wanted to go to more abstract outer-world themes because that way people couldn’t say, “You know, that thing looks like shit.”
—Eugene Jarvis
Jarvis’s first inclination was to create a game similar to
Space Invaders.
After several aborted attempts, he began trying to design something closer to
Asteroids.
He liked the controls in
Asteroids
, which let players go anywhere on the screen.
When his programmer began creating the game, Jarvis changed his mind because he didn’t like the way the game anchored him into a single screen.
In his next attempt, Jarvis created a world that was far larger than the screen.
I came up with scrolling the screen, making the field larger than the actual screen. The
Defender
world turned out to be three and one-half screens or seven screens or something. Having a universe that was larger than the screen, that was just a huge, huge breakthrough.My original idea was to go one direction. I tended to want to go left to right. My friend told me that was bogus, that you needed to be able to go backward. Changing the program to make it go backward was a pain in the ass, but he finally talked me into it.
—Eugene Jarvis
By July, Jarvis found himself far behind schedule. He had his spaceship, his scrolling world, and his controls, but he still needed to create allies to defend and enemies to attack. He needed to finish the game before the upcoming trade show, which took place in mid-September.
Jarvis decided to defend astronauts—humans in space. He spent weeks creating tiny men who actually walked on the surface of the planet while players shot enemy aliens out of the sky. The process took too long. Jarvis’s boss began pushing him to finish the game, even if it meant taking the astronauts out.
Somewhere during that time, I just wanted to put all my stuff in a box and quit. I don’t know why I didn’t actually quit. Everyone was hassling me on spending so much time on these little astronaut guys.
Around this time, a really talented guy joined the team. His name was Sam Dicker. He was about nineteen years old.
He did some really incredible effects for the game. All of a sudden, we were blowing up things, we had some sound going, and it was starting to get fun.
—Eugene Jarvis
Jarvis did not finish the game on time. He ended up spending several hours completing
Defender
on the floor of the show.
Defender
was Williams Electronics’ biggest seller. More than 55,000 units were placed worldwide.
In making
Defender
, Jarvis had created one of the toughest games in arcade history. Players controlled a fighter craft as it defended the inhabitants of a small planet, ten astronauts in stasis, from alien abduction.
In the beginning, the alien invaders slowly dropped from the sky in an effort to snare an astronaut and fly back into space. When aliens escaped with an astronaut, they turned into fast-moving mutants. If the aliens managed to capture every astronaut, the planet exploded and the player found himself flying through hyperspace being chased by a seemingly endless supply of aliens.
Defender
had an elaborate control panel with a joystick for controlling altitude and five buttons for firing weapons, dropping smart bombs, accelerating, changing directions, and jumping into hyperspace.
Beginning players seldom lasted more than a few seconds on
Defender
, and mastering the game became a badge of honor. Some players let the aliens capture their astronauts, then shot them as they tried to escape. They would catch the astronauts as they fell back toward the planet and carry them on the front of their fighter. Other players preferred to let the aliens take the humans because so many aliens attacked them in hyperspace that they easily built up their scores. Different players came up with their own solutions for conquering
Defender’
s very intense play.
I came into an arcade on a Friday night and there was a crowd of people four deep around this game, putting in their quarters and lasting maybe 35, 40 seconds.
Defender
was a very ferocious game—very difficult controls.They were seeing the special effects in the game and they just, they wanted to do it. And one after the other, they were throwing quarters in.
Defender
made $700 its first week. I have never seen a quarter-a-play video game make money like that—not before or after
Defender.
It was the most phenomenal collection anyone had ever seen.It was a hell of a game….
—Larry DeMar, video-game and pinball designer, Williams Electronics
In November 1980, Atari released a game with an updated version of a familiar Atari theme—tank warfare. The game was titled
Battlezone.
Though Ed Rotberg is credited with creating
Battlezone
, the game was a group effort from the beginning. Rotberg used Howie Delman’s vector-graphics generator because it offered enough power to create a three-dimensional environment. He also asked other designers for help.
The idea that we should do a first-person tank game came out of a company brainstorming session. Morgan Hoff was the project leader, Jed Margolin was the electrical engineer, and I did the programming.
Roger Hector did the models [for the enemy tanks]. I went to Roger and said I needed something that looked like a tank but used as few lines as possible because we had only so much processing power back then.
We needed a missile and we needed this and that, so Roger did all the artwork. He did the background as a line drawing that we had converted into a series of vectors, and there was a volcano in it.
We worked in labs and I was in a lab with Owen Rubin, who would always come in and say, “When are you going to make the volcano active?”
I was trying to make a game, and every day Rubin came in with, “When are you going to make the volcano active? When are you going to make the volcano active?”
Finally, I said, “Look, I’m trying to make this game here. If you want the volcano active, write the damn code yourself.”
I came into work the next day and there, sitting on my desk, was a bunch of code. That’s how we got the active volcano in
Battlezone.
It was really the only code in the game that was not written by me.—Ed Rotberg
Like
Sea Wolf
,
Battlezone
had a distinctive periscope-like viewer. Players pressed their faces against it to see the screen. The viewer in
Sea Wolf
, however, pivoted and was used to aim torpedoes. The one in
Battlezone
was a stationary plastic structure that enhanced the feeling of being inside a tank. It could not be used for aiming, however, since the player’s tank only fired straight ahead.
To this day I don’t like it [the viewer]. I was concerned with coin drop. It isolated players and gave them a feeling of immersion, but it blocked other people’s view of the game.
—Ed Rotberg
In
Battlezone
, players used two large joysticks to maneuver their tanks as they hunted enemy vehicles. A radar scope in the top of the screen showed the position of enemy vehicles. The key to the game was using the scope to evade enemy attacks.
Battlezone
featured several kinds of enemies—slow-moving standard tanks, super tanks, and anti-tank missiles. Sometimes flying saucers appeared as well.
Rotberg created a three-dimensional plain for his battlefields. In this silent world, Roger Hector’s volcano could be seen spewing boulders along the horizon. Blocks and pyramids scattered throughout the plain added depth and provided players with cover from enemy attacks. Though all of the objects were shown as line art,
Battlezone’
s realistic depiction of tank warfare attracted attention that Rotberg later came to resent.
*
There are two kinds of monitors—vector and raster scan. Raster-scan technology, used in televisions, is based on an electronic beam painting images of the screen by constantly drawing and redrawing every row. Rather than going row by row, vector screens draw images by tracing lines from point to point, making them unsuitable for drawing pictures but excellent for displaying high-resolution outlines. Vector, or X-Y graphics, are displayed as lines. Rather than drawing an entire screen, a vector-graphics generator creates independent objects. The games
Asteroids, Battlezone
, and
Star Castle
were vector graphics games, as was
Space Wars.
*
Though
Night Driver
, a driving simulation published by Atari in 1977, featured 3D pylons along the side of the road,
Tail Gunner
is generally acknowledged as the first true 3D game.
*
A number of industry people, including coin-op game executives, acknowledged that
Asteroids Deluxe
was not one of Atari’s better games.
*
Gee Bee
was the only game manufactured by Namco in 1978, and
Bomb Bee
was one of the only games manufactured by the company the following year.
*
Gorgar
was the first electronic game to feature synthesized speech.
The Golden AgeWe only mentioned
Space Invaders
and
Pac-Man
, but there were a few others that made it into that boom period, which lasted until June of 1982. It was only a short-lived thing, but it got everybody’s attention, including the national media.—Eddie Adlum