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 (32 page)

A Case of Two Gorillas

In 1976, Mattel began work on a line of calculator-sized sports games that became the world’s first handheld electronic games. The project began when Michael Katz, Mattel’s new product category marketing director, told the engineers in the electronics group to design a game the size of a calculator, using LED (light-emitting diodes) technology.

The engineers returned with a strip of red plastic that housed several rows of LEDs, which could be moved and controlled like shapes on the screen of a video game. Players could control lights as they moved across the strip, making them go forward, backward, up, or down, using four directional buttons.

The unit had built-in collision detection. If the player’s light made contact with other lights on the strip, the toy registered it.

Simple as this unit was, it became the basis for the first generation of portable electronic games. With the right packaging, Katz decided that the toy could be marketed as either a racing game or a football game. He decided to go with racing.

Katz’s team made no effort to make the LEDs look like race cars. They were simply lights on a vertical plastic strip with three lanes painted on top. The object of the game was to guide a light from the bottom of the strip to the top four times without colliding with other LEDs. Each trip represented a lap around the race course. The game was called
Auto Race.

After
Auto Race
, Mattel released
Football.
In this game, players controlled an LED on a horizontal strip with ten lines representing yard lines. The LED represented a quarterback who could either pass the ball or scramble across the strip ten times for a touchdown.

Selling for $25 to $35, Mattel’s handheld sports games were a great success, generating more than $400 million in sales. Mattel formed an electronics division that followed
Football
and
Auto Race
with
Basketball, Hockey, Baseball
, and eventually the Intellivision game console.

In 1975, Magnavox filed a suit against Atari, claiming that Nolan Bushnell attended a demonstration of the Odyssey game console in Burlingame, California, and stole Ralph Baer’s concept of electronic table tennis. In an ironic twist, Baer attended a 1976 trade show and stole an idea for a portable game from Bushnell.

Bushnell’s toy had a row of lights that flashed patterns and made sounds that players had to memorize and repeat. Baer, working closely with Marvin Glass Associates, improved the game by replacing the sounds with distinct musical notes. His toy had four bright-colored buttons that lit up and played musical notes when pressed.

Baer’s prototype had a square case and square buttons. After applying for a patent for the toy, engineers at Marvin Glass Associates replaced Baer’s square case with a round one, with four buttons forming a ring. They called the game
Simon.

Simon
played three memorization games. All of the games involved repeating patterns. In the first game,
Simon
played musical patterns. Players competed with the machine by watching the buttons light up and listening to the musical notes, then repeating the pattern by pressing the buttons in the correct order. The game lasted until the player made a mistake.

Game two was exactly the same, except that players added one note to the pattern after every turn. The pattern simply became longer until the player made a mistake. In game three, players competed against each other instead of the machine.

Marvin Glass Associates sold
Simon
to Milton Bradley Electronics, a toy company already in the electronic games industry with
Comp IV
, the electronic version of the board game
Mastermind. Simon
was a major hit during the 1977 Christmas season.
*
Despite
Simon’
s success, however, Atari did not file suit against Marvin Glass Associates, Milton Bradley, or Ralph Baer for copying the idea.

Handheld electronics were extremely popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the earliest games were either sports simulations or memory games, though Mattel experimented with electronic handheld versions of popular game themes such as
Sub Chase.
In 1980, several companies saw the success of Atari’s Video Computer System (VCS) version of
Space Invaders
and realized that a big demand existed for home versions of arcade games. Soon afterward, handheld versions of arcade games began appearing in stores.

Nintendo and Mego Electronics created lines of credit card–sized toys with liquid crystal screens that played games and displayed the time. The Mego Time Out series featured original games such as the
Exterminator, Fireman
, and
Flag Man.
Nintendo manufactured the Game and Watch series, which included original games and simplified versions of
Donkey Kong
and other popular Nintendo arcade hits.

Not all portable games were the size of paperback books or credit cards. Joyce Worley, a founder of
Electronic Games
magazine, dubbed the larger gadgets “tabletop games.” In 1981, three companies introduced new lines of tabletop games that looked like miniature arcade machines. These games would have simplified versions of such top arcade hits as
Pac-Man
and
Galaxian
, housed in eight-inch cases that were scale models of arcade cabinets.

Nintendo and Tiger Electronics made some very good tabletop games, but the company that earned the reputation for making the best tabletop games was Coleco—the leather company that nearly cornered the market for
Pong
-style television games.

After nearly going bankrupt in 1976 with the collapse of the
Home Pong
generation of games, Coleco barely survived to the end of the 1970s. Arnold Greenberg, CEO of Coleco, however, had not lost his entrepreneurial ambitions, and he was impressed with the handheld game industry’s potential for growth. Shortly after Mattel released
Football
, Coleco entered the market with a similar game titled
Electronic Quarterback
that had a lower price tag and more features.

Whether he was following a set plan or making decisions as he went along, Greenberg seemed to have discovered a way to ride the market. He hired Michael Katz, the Mattel executive who had overseen the launch of
Auto Race
and
Football
, to establish Coleco’s marketing department. Greenberg became very aggressive about developing new products.

By 1980, the handheld game market began fading, but it didn’t matter to Greenberg. He no longer cared about handheld games; he wanted to create a video-game console that could play arcade-quality games. Coleco had made enough money during the heyday of handheld games to begin the research and development phase of building the new console, and Greenberg was ready to try to steal some of Atari’s enormous share of the market.

Greenberg had a tough reputation as an employer. He was known to have a temper and to browbeat his executives. According to Michael Katz, Greenberg’s driven nature often caused him to live up to his rough reputation, but Katz described him as “tough, smart, eloquent, and fair.”

In 1981, Coleco began manufacturing tabletop versions of arcade hits. It wasn’t just the game play in these tabletop toys that resembled the arcade originals; the cabinets were scale models of arcade machines, right down to the artwork on the outside panels. In order to do this, Greenberg arranged licensing agreements with eight arcade companies, including Sega, Bally/Midway, Exidy, Centuri, Universal, and Nintendo. These arrangements became very important to Coleco with later projects.

Greenberg used his relations with arcade companies to expand his business in another direction. Activision had already launched its first titles by this time, and third-party publishers had become part of the business. Just as Greenberg had seen an opportunity in manufacturing handheld games, he suddenly saw a gold mine in becoming a third-party publisher. Instead of creating new games, however, Greenberg wanted to convert arcade hits into VCS and Intellivision cartridges.