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 (25 page)

In 1981, 15-year-old Steve Juraszek of Arlington Heights, Illinois, scored 15,963,100 points in a 16-hour game of
Defender.
He set a new world’s record, became an instant celebrity, and got his picture in
Time
magazine. Local school officials were not impressed. The game began during school hours. Juraszek was banned from leaving school grounds for playing hooky.
¹

Arlington Heights was not the only town that saw a connection between video games and truancy. The Pittsburgh City Council enacted an ordinance that prohibited minors from playing video games during school hours and threatened to revoke the license of any arcade that ignored that ordinance.

Several small towns, including Babylon, New York, pushed for laws to monitor the operation of video-game arcades. In Oakland, California, the city council voted to ban minors from visiting arcades during school hours, after 10
P.M.
on weeknights, and after midnight on weekends. A dispute over zoning laws between Aladdin’s Castle, a large chain of arcades, and the city of Mesquite, Texas, ended up before the Supreme Court (
City of Mesquite v. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc.
, 455 U.S. 283 [1982]).

Other countries also struggled with the growth of video games. In November 1981, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos banned video games and gave arcade owners two weeks to destroy them.
²

A
Time
magazine cover story reported that Americans dropped 20 billion quarters into video games in 1981 and that “video game addicts” spent 75,000 man-years playing the machines. The article went on to explain that the video-game industry earned twice as much money as all Nevada casinos combined, nearly twice as much money as the movie industry, and three times as much money as major league baseball, basketball, and football.
³

America was covered with arcades. According to a
Play Meter Magazine
study, there were approximately 24,000 full arcades and 400,000 street locations. In all, according to the 1982 study, more than 1.5 million arcade machines were in operation in the United States.

Despite the popularity of their games, Atari’s designers were forbidden to take credit for their work. Whether Atari president Ray Kassar thought competitors
would try to buy his designers away or simply felt that they didn’t deserve the publicity, he seldom allowed his designers to meet reporters and never let them put their names on their machines. When Steve Bloom interviewed Atari coin-op engineers in a book called
Video Invader
, he had to change their names. He referred to Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, creators of
Centipede
, as Dona Taylor and Ed Lodge.
*

Tension continued to mount between game designers and management at Atari. By this time, such software companies as On-Line Systems
**
and Broderbund were making consumer versions of popular coin-op games for Apple, Atari, and Commodore home computers. Ken Williams, founder of On-Line, treated his designers like rock stars, lavishing them with publicity and bonus checks.

At Atari, only managers and executives received public accolades. Some coin-op engineers began referring to Lyle Rains as “Hollywood Lyle” because he appeared before the media so often. A number of publications mistakenly credited him with the creation of
Asteroids.

Shortly after
Battlezone
was released, a group of retired Army generals contacted Atari. The officers wanted to license a more realistic version of the game to be used for training soldiers. The new version of the game would require several technical features and had to be built within a few months, in time to be demonstrated at an important trade show. Despite his vigorous protests, Ed Rotberg was asked to take the project.

Military Battlezone
was much more complex than the original game. In the arcade game, players could only shoot straight ahead, and their projectiles flew in a straight trajectory unaffected by gravity. The military version was considerably more realistic.

Rotberg deeply resented being forced to work on the military version of
Battlezone.
His next project was a game called
Dragon Riders
that was based on the novels of fantasy writer Ann MaCaffrey. Had it been completed,
Dragon Riders
would have been the first game based on a novel. Atari never licensed MaCaffrey’s books and the game never made it out of production.

Rotberg’s final project at Atari was a game called
Warp Speed.
This was a high-speed outer-space flight simulation in which players attacked a well-armed space fortress. Rotberg left Atari before the project was finished.

The people who completed
Warp Speed
decided to use the joystick from
Military Battlezone
on their game. Around this time, Atari struck a licensing deal with another Bay-area legend—film maker George Lucas. With its ships and activities altered to replicate the battle over the Death Star, and voices from the movie added to the game, the game was released as
Star Wars.

During the golden age of arcades, a few Japanese companies earned huge profits through U.S. operations. Namco prospered through its partnership with Midway. Taito had made so much money from
Space Invaders
that it opened its own U.S. operation—Taito America.

A few Japanese companies, nevertheless, seemed unable to crack the American market. One of these was Nintendo, a nearly 100-year-old playing-card manufacturer that had recently expanded into making toys and electronic games.

By 1980, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Company Limited, decided that his company needed a U.S. office if it was going to break into the American arcade market. He hired his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to establish an American operation.

Yamauchi did not hire Arakawa out of family loyalty. Arakawa had just spent three years overseeing the building of a Canadian condominium project for a Japanese construction firm. He had a proven track record as a manager. More important, he had experience running the North American office of a Japanese firm.

In April 1980, Arakawa set up an office in Manhattan and a warehouse in New Jersey. His first distributors were a couple of entrepreneurs named Ron Judy and Al Stone, who owned a Seattle-based trucking company but moonlighted as game
resellers. They had been purchasing Nintendo arcade games through a firm in Hawaii and marketing them in the continental United States.

Arakawa offered to cover their expenses and pay them a large commission if they would become consultant-representatives of Nintendo of America.

Their first game,
Radarscope
, did not sell well, even though it had done fairly well in Japan. Yamauchi told Arakawa that
Radarscope
would be a hit. Nintendo shipped 3,000 copies of the game to the United States.

Around this time, Arakawa discovered that locating his operation on the East Coast added two weeks to the time it took to ship games from Japan. He decided to relocate his headquarters to the West Coast and settled in Redmond, Washington.

Radarscope
did not appeal to American audiences, and Judy and Stone were unable to sell all 3,000 units. Since Nintendo of America covered their expenses, they did not incur debts, but they also received very little income since they were being paid a straight commission.

As president of Nintendo Co. Ltd., Hiroshi Yamauchi ran his company in a notoriously imperialistic style. Before taking over the family business, Yamauchi had his dying grandfather fire relatives working for Nintendo so that he could consolidate his power base. As Nintendo expanded operations from Hanafuda playing cards to toys, Yamauchi acted as sole judge of new products. If a concept appealed to him, it went to market. Since Yamauchi’s instincts were almost always correct, Nintendo generally thrived.

Breaking into the American market, however, proved baffling to Yamauchi. Arakawa reported failure after failure.
Space Fever
did not attract business. Arcade owners did not like
Sheriff.
Judy and Stone were able to sell a scant 1,000 units of
Radarscope
, the game Yamauchi hoped would take America by storm. Two thousand
Radarscope
machines sat stacked in the New Jersey warehouse. If Yamauchi was going to establish Nintendo in the United States, he would need something that Americans had never seen before.

Fortunately, there was a project that looked very promising. In 1977, Yamauchi had hired a creative young college graduate with a degree in industrial design named Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto was somewhat of an anomaly in Kyoto, Japan. He played the banjo, loved bluegrass music, and collected Beatles albums. Above all else, Miyamoto loved designing toys. Years later, after establishing himself as the greatest designer in the video-game industry, Miyamoto told a reporter that he still wanted to design toys, not video games.

Ironically, one of Miyamoto’s first jobs at Nintendo was to create the art for the outside panels of
Radarscope
and
Sheriff
cabinets. In 1979, Yamauchi called Miyamoto to his office and asked him if he could design an arcade game. Miyamoto excitedly said yes.