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 (36 page)

Q*Bert
was released in 1983. The game’s popularity resulted in licensing deals for lunchboxes, board games, and a Saturday morning cartoon. Gottlieb sold approximately 25,000
Q*Bert
arcade machines.

In 1983, Cinematronics, the pioneering arcade company that led the move toward vector-graphics games in the late 1970s, released
Dragon’s Lair.

The game, which combined computer engineering and a Pioneer laser disc machine, had animated cartoon graphics that looked like something out of a Walt Disney cartoon. Understandably, it resembled a Disney cartoon, because it was created by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who had worked on films such as
Robin Hood, The Rescuers
, and
Pete’s Dragon.

In
Dragon’s Lair
, players helped a knight named Dirk as he rescued Princess Daphne from an evil castle. The game play was like a cross between an old-fashioned Saturday morning serial and a series of multiple-choice questions. The screen would show an animated sequence in which Dirk faced some new danger and players had to respond by moving Dirk with a joystick or pressing a button to make him draw his sword.

In one sequence, for instance, Dirk walked into a room in which a boiling beaker of liquid sat on a table under a sign reading “Drink me.” Left to his own devices, Dirk would drink the liquid and die, but players could save him by pulling the joystick to the right, causing him to leave the room.

If he drank the potion, players saw an animation of Dirk gasping. After three mistakes, the screen showed a picture of a partially skeletal Dirk scowling at the player.

Cinematronics had been in Chapter 11 for a year when it released
Dragon’s Lair.
To complete the project, Cinematronics established a partnership with RDI Technologies, a company that later tried to market a home laser-disc game system.
*

Due largely to public fascination with the new technology,
Dragon’s Lair
was an immediate and profitable hit. Cinematronics sold more than 16,000
Dragon’s Lair
machines in 1983, for an average price of $4,300.
³
Coleco purchased the home rights to the game, giving Cinematronics an additional $2 million.
Dragon’s Lair
was so successful that Cinematronics released a follow-up game called
Space Ace
within a few months.

A battle formed between Cinematronics, Don Bluth, and RDI Technologies. Though Bluth began work on
Dragon’s Lair II
shortly after finishing
Space Ace
, the game did not come out until 1991. By the time it did, both Cinematronics and RDI Technologies had gone out of business. Leland, a Texas-based company, released
Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp
into the arcades.

Mylstar (formerly Gottlieb), Atari, and Williams all joined Cinematronics in releasing laser-disc games, but
Dragon’s Lair
was the only game of its kind to become a hit.

By the middle of 1982, even as the arcade industry began its lengthy fall, video games crept into other areas of American popular culture. Video jockeys talked about video games on MTV. Walt Disney Pictures made a movie,
Tron
, in which actor Jeff Bridges saved the world by entering a super computer and defeating an evil program in a series of video game–like battles. The first movie to feature computer-drawn special effects, it inspired two arcade games from Bally/Midway—
Tron
and
Discs of Tron
—as well as several home game cartridges from Mattel. Arcade games were also used in the backgrounds of dozens of movies.

Consumers no longer had to go to the store to buy games; they could purchase them from home. Columbia House, the parent company of the Columbia Record Club, opened the Columbia Cartridge Club. Other companies, such as Tele Soft, Inc., and VideoLivery, set up toll-free lines to let shoppers call in orders for the latest games. Some companies even began experimenting with delivering games over modems and cable television.

Software manufacturers also experimented with new topics for games. In October 1982, Caballero Control Corporation released three X-rated games for the Atari VCS. The games—
Custer’s Revenge, Bachelor Party
, and
Beat ’Em & Eat ’Em
—were more crude than sexual. They retailed for $49.95.

Of the three games,
Custer’s Revenge
received the most attention. The game involved helping Custer escape from battle by dodging arrows. Once safely away from the battlefield, he would find and rape an Indian woman tied to a stake.

Another sign of the video-game industry’s growing strength was its continuing expansion. In 1982, Activision replaced Atari as the fastest-growing company in the history of the United States. Riding high with such hits as
Pitfall
and
River Raid
, Activision had $150 million in sales in 1982.

In April 1982, Atari released one of the most anticipated video-game cartridges of all time—the VCS version of
Pac-Man.
Demand for the game was so immense that Atari executives believed that many consumers would purchase VCSs just to play
Pac-Man.
Atari manufactured 12 million
Pac-Man
cartridges.

The video-game industry became frenzied with excitement with the release of
Pac-Man.
Drugstores opened video-game counters, toy stores fought for the latest cartridges, and Kmart and JC Penney challenged Sears’s claim as the largest video-game vendor. In the end, JC Penney, led by a savvy toy buyer named Al Nilsen, narrowly inched out Sears to become Atari’s number-one retail partner.

In August of 1981, Atari took General Computer to court to stop it from making enhancement boards. The case was settled out of court. General Computer agreed to make video games for Atari and stop making enhancement boards, and Atari dropped the suit and paid General Computer $50,000 per month for the next two years in exchange for first refusal rights on all games they might make.

Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran, founders of General Computer, immediately set up a larger shop and hired programmers to help design and build new games. What they did not understand was that Atari did not expect to receive games; the $50,000 per month was Atari’s way of buying them out of the industry.

Within 90 days, they called Atari, asking how they could submit their first game—an arcade game called
Food Fight.

Food Fight
was a fast-paced chase game, in which Charley Chuck, a blonde-haired boy, picked up pies, bananas, and other foods and threw them at chefs as they tried to corner him. It was a simple game in which the goal was to eat the ice cream cone on the other side of the board. The boy throwing the food was designed to look like Jonathan Hurd, the lead programmer on the project. Atari bought the game and published it.

Though
Food Fight
was not a particularly successful game, the speed with which General Computer created the game impressed Atari executives. Asked if they could also make games for the VCS, Curran and Macrae said they could and began making what turned out to be some of the most popular cartridges Atari ever offered.

Between 1982 and 1984, General Computer hired a pool of seventy engineers, making it much larger than Atari’s internal VCS research and development team. Curran and Macrae produced seventy-two games during that time, including the VCS versions of
Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede
, and
Pole Position.

Toward the end of 1982, Atari finally made the hardware upgrade that Nolan Bushnell had suggested in 1978: a new and improved game console called the Atari 5200. Shaped like a large, rectangular wedge, the 5200 had the same processor as the Atari 400 home computer and retailed for $250.

Atari’s engineering team was particularly unhappy with the 5200. In the months before its launch, team members passed a petition around the research and development department to try and get the system dropped unless new controllers were added. When they gave the petition to Ray Kassar, however, he decided to ignore it and pushed the system through manufacturing.

At its launch, Atari released translations of
Super Breakout, Pac-Man, Centipede
,
Space Invaders, Defender, Missile Command
, and
Galaxian
to support the new system. (More than half of the games for the 5200 were developed by General Computer.) In all, twelve cartridges were ready at the time of the launch.

Most reviewers and analysts were impressed.
Newsweek
called the 5200 “a quantum improvement over the standard 2600 (with the release of the 5200, Atari began referring to the VCS as the 2600).”
⁴
Video Games
magazine called the 5200 “a classy act” and complimented the unit for its special effects, its high-resolution color graphics, its ability to handle several moving objects at one time, and its sophisticated sound synthesizer.
⁵

Despite its strengths, the 5200 had a few strikes against it. It cost more than ColecoVision, yet its graphics were not as attractive. It had a fairly small library of games, and Atari’s programming team could not devote its full attention to the 5200 because it was still making games for the huge 2600 user base. According to Arnie Katz, editor in chief of
Electronic Games
, the 5200 was “a buggy, unpleasant system with basically the same old games turned up a notch in terms of audiovisual quality.”

The 5200’s biggest problem, according to
Electronic Games
executive editor Bill Kunkel, was its controller. The joysticks on the 5200 did not center themselves, making it harder to control the action. Other joysticks had self-centering springs, but the joysticks on the 5200 simply fell over.