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 (26 page)

Miyamoto did not have to worry about the technical aspects of game creation. The cabinets already existed—Yamauchi planned to build Miyamoto’s game by converting unsold
Radarscope
machines. To make sure the project proceeded smoothly, Yamauchi assigned Gumpei Yokoi, the dean of Nintendo’s engineering team, to oversee the implementation of Miyamoto’s ideas.

Like Eugene Jarvis, Miyamoto began by inventing an elaborate story to explain his game. The story involved a gorilla escaping from its master, a carpenter, and kidnapping his girlfriend. First the gorilla climbed to the top of a seven-story construction site. When his master followed, the ape rolled barrels at him. Players helped the carpenter leap over the barrels as he followed the gorilla.

Once the carpenter reached the top of the foundation, the chase moved to a five-story structure made of steel girders. This time the carpenter had to avoid marching flames while pulling the pins that held the girders together.
*
Once the structure collapsed, the carpenter and his girlfriend were reunited.

Because of his desire to penetrate the American market, Yamauchi wanted the game to have an English name. Since Miyamoto spoke only a little English, he used a Japanese-English dictionary to find the correct words for the title. He wanted to name the game after the ape—“Stubborn Gorilla.” Looking through the dictionary, Miyamoto selected the word
donkey
as a synonym for “stubborn” and the word
Kong
for “gorilla.”

Masaya Nakamura may not have foreseen the success of
Pac-Man
and Michael Kogan may not have predicted the impact of
Space Invaders
, but Hiroshi
Yamauchi immediately recognized the potential of
Donkey Kong.
He called his son-in-law and told him that a new game was coming that would make Nintendo one of the hottest game companies in American arcades.

The news could not have come at a better time. Ron Judy and Al Stone had nearly bankrupted themselves, and Arakawa was having trouble covering the costs of his floundering operation. Around this time, Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo’s warehouse, visited Arakawa to complain that the rent was late. After threats and angry words, Segale accepted Arakawa’s promise that the money would arrive shortly. Arakawa later immortalized Segale by renaming Jumpman, the carpenter in
Donkey Kong
, Mario.

Arakawa wanted to file a trademark patent on the new game, so he asked Ron Judy to recommend a good lawyer. Judy and Stone took Arakawa to meet their lawyer, Howard Lincoln, the day they learned that Nintendo’s new super game would be called
Donkey Kong.

By this time they were deeply in debt and anxious to abandon Nintendo. The only reason they had stayed was Arakawa’s solemn promise that the next game out of Japan would be a major hit. The name
Donkey Kong
did not inspire their confidence.

Just as Al Alcorn had learned about
Pong
’s appeal by placing it in Andy Capp’s Tavern, Arakawa discovered he had a hit by placing
Donkey Kong
in two Seattle bars—the Spot Tavern in South Seattle and Goldies, a bar near the University of Washington. Stone and Judy persuaded the managers of the bars to let them use their locations as test sites. When both test locations cleared more than $30 per day for an entire week, the managers asked for more machines.

It didn’t take long for
Donkey Kong
to develop a following. Because of a lack of funds, Arakawa, Judy, and Stone converted the 2,000
Radarscope
machines stockpiled in the warehouse into
Donkey Kong
machines themselves. Soon the entire inventory had been sold, and orders kept rolling in. Arakawa decided to manufacture more machines in the Nintendo of America warehouse in Redmond because it took too long to ship them from Japan.

The straight-commission pay schedule that had nearly bankrupted Ron Judy and Al Stone suddenly turned them into millionaires. Toward the end of 1981, Lincoln received a telephone call from their accountant. He had been expecting the accountant to call about filing their bankruptcy notice. Instead, the accountant asked Lincoln to incorporate them to protect their immense earnings.

After
Asteroids
, Ed Logg teamed up with Dona Bailey and created one of the few games that appealed to female players as well as male—
Centipede.

Before going to Atari, Bailey spent three years at General Motors, where she helped design the microprocessor-based cruise control in the Cadillac Seville. In 1980, she applied for a job at Atari because she enjoyed playing video
games. Once she got the job, she found herself in an odd position—the only female programmer in the coin-op division.

Ed Logg got the idea for
Centipede
from a book of game ideas, in which it was listed as “Bug Shooter.” Bailey asked if she could work on the project, so Logg fleshed out the game and turned it over to her.

In
Centipede
, players used a trackball to move a cursor shaped like a snake’s head along the bottom of the screen. The goal of the game was to shoot quick-moving centipedes as they appeared at the top of the screen and snaked their way down. The centipedes were composed of eleven sections with legs. Each time a section was hit, it turned into a mushroom, and the rest of the centipede continued its nimble march.

The playing field in
Centipede
was covered with mushrooms that could be shot away. Whenever the centipede collided with a mushroom, the centipede changed directions. Some players developed strategies in which they set traps by creating mushroom formations that forced the centipede to drop down the side of the screen.

Along with the centipedes, players shot bouncing spiders, scorpions, and fleas that dropped from the top and left mushrooms in their wake.

One of Dona Bailey’s chief contributions to the game was its unusual color scheme. While other game designers used bright colors, she chose pastels. The first stage of the game had a lime-green centipede scurrying through a patch of green mushrooms with orange edges. The next centipede was pink and traveled through a patch of pink mushrooms with white edges. Nobody knows precisely why
Centipede
appealed to women, but several people believe that Bailey’s pastel colors were part of the attraction.

On October 28, 1981, Tournament Games held a three-day national video-game championship in the Chicago Exposition Center. Tournament Games, a company that had extensive experience promoting tournaments for such bar games as billiards and darts, heralded the event as a major new sporting contest in which 10,000 to 15,000 of the world’s best video-game players would go head-to-head on a single game—
Centipede.

Tournament Game’s experience with billiards and darts tournaments did not translate to video games. The company invited the winners of local video-game tournaments to compete, but contestants had to pay for their own transportation and lodging. Walk-on contestants had to pay a $60 registration fee. These expenses were too high for the teenage crowd that frequented the arcades, and less than 150 people signed up for the competition.

Competitors were invited to practice before the event, but the 250
Centipede
machines that Tournament Games installed were not set on free play. The
contestants not only had to pay to practice, but the machines had internal timers that stopped their games after three minutes.

The “Open Singles” winner of the tournament was Eric Ginner, who received a check for $12,000. Ok-Soo Han, one of less than a dozen women who entered, won $4,000 as the top female competitor. Both checks bounced. In the end, Atari covered the checks to avoid bad publicity.

Despite a growing list of competitors and mounting internal problems, Atari remained one of the strongest companies in the industry. By this time, so many new companies were manufacturing arcade equipment that no one company could hope to control more than half the market as Atari had in the past.

In 1981, Taito America had its first American-made hit—
Qix
, a highly innovative game that one reviewer described as a cross between an
Etch-a Sketch
and
Star Wars;
Sega distributed
Frogger
, a game in which players helped a frog cross a busy highway and an alligator-filled stream; Stern attracted crowds with
Berzerk;
and Midway imported several strong titles from Namco and released domestic hits created by Dave Nutting and other American designers. Smaller companies like Nichibutsu, maker of
Crazy Climber
, and Konami also made their mark.

Toward the end of the year, Atari released a new game by Dave Theurer, designer of
Missile Command.
The game was called
Tempest.

Tempest
did not start out as an original idea. Shortly after finishing
Missile Command
, Theurer went hunting for his next game in the book of game themes that had been compiled at company brainstorming sessions. The idea that caught his eye was called “First-Person Space Invaders.”

Since his game would be played from the first-person perspective, Theurer needed the efficiency of a vector-graphic generator. As it turned
out, a new X-Y generator that created color lines was under development.
Tempest, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Gravitar, Black Widow, Space Duel, Quantum
, and
Major Havoc
were the only games Atari ever released that used the color X-Y generator.

It took Theurer six weeks to create a preliminary version of
First Person Space Invaders.
The project was almost derailed when he demonstrated it at a coin-op meeting.