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 (5 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Accepting a job at Burroughs would have meant Hochberg moving to Pennsylvania, which, because of his mother’s dire illness, he was unwilling to do. “My mother was deathly ill, and I really had no idea as to what the prognosis was. She was basically terminal, but I didn’t know it. At least I didn’t believe it.”
Anxious to stay near his mother, Hochberg took a job at Tri-Borough Maintenance. “We did Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan. We probably did all five boroughs, but it was called Tri-Borough because I think the individuals who formed the company came from three different boroughs.” For a salary of $55 a week, Hochberg worked long hours six days a week and provided his own car. He began by repairing jukeboxes and pool tables.
At this time, New York distributors carried novelty games as well as jukeboxes—pinball was still banned. For the most part, novelty games represented only a small part of the business. The popular novelty themes of the times included shuffle alleys—indoor tabletop bowling lanes on which players used metal pucks to knock down miniature bowling pins. Other popular themes included racing, baseball, and shooting galleries. In New York, where pinball was still illegal, novelty games often turned a good profit.
The biggest part of our business was shuffle alleys and ball bowlers. Remember, I came from the city [New York], and these were legal items. Every bar and grill, every tavern had a shuffle alley.
Baseball was a very popular game. It used a bat and pitching mechanism. In some cases, lights on the playing field [were used to show bases with runners], and in other cases, men rotating on a motor carriage. You had some moving targets, some escalation ramps. You had home run areas that were predetermined, and of course, sometimes [home run] ramps came up and if you were able to hit them, your ball went out of the park.
—Joel Hochberg
Wall boxes were another popular item in the industry. These were tabletop cabinets that linked booths and tables to a central jukebox. Each box had a song list, coin slot, and buttons for ordering songs. Restaurants, diners, and malt shops placed wall boxes on tables and in booths so that customers could select and order songs more conveniently.
… and wall boxes were great for the industry because the machine would play a record once. It’s conceivable if a record was popular, that four, five, or six people would select that record—but it would only play it once. The same situation holds true today. Jukeboxes don’t dedicate songs to an individual; they just deliver the requirement to play.
—Joel Hochberg
Always the innovator, Hochberg found a way to improve the system. He was the first engineer in his area to place volume switches behind bars and counters so that bartenders and restaurant managers could make the music louder upon request. Location managers welcomed the change. Before this, the only volume control was a knob hidden on the back of the jukebox so that customers couldn’t get to it.
Though his mother died shortly after he started work at Tri-Borough, Hochberg continued working for New York amusement companies until 1961. This was during a period in which working within the amusement industry had its hazards.
I’ve also had a situation where a gentleman who played the game after [I repaired it] lost a lot of money. So he was angry. He said, “If you didn’t repair this game I wouldn’t have lost.” And he wanted to do a number on me.
I’ve seen a man carrying a gun in his hat. I’ve had a shot fired at me. Let’s change that…. Not fired at me directly but fired into the location while I was working on a
United Baseball
game.—Joel Hochberg
Once, when Hochberg showed up at a bar early one Sunday morning to service a machine, he was attacked and beaten. An investigation into the incident revealed that he’d been mistaken for the bartender.
The next thing I knew, I was being brutalized by a couple of people who were very aggressive because they didn’t know who to beat up. The indication was, he’s in the bar on Sundays before the bar opens, so there were two people in the bar. They didn’t ask what my name was or what the other gentleman’s name was. They just came in there. It seems that there was some kind of local area issue, something that had something to do with a relative of one of the people. The bartender’s wife was the sister of one of these fellows, and the bartender was mistreating the sister.
—Joel Hochberg
Hochberg also remembers that many people liked him for what he did. Sometimes while working his route, he’d have to run outside to put money in a parking meter, only to discover that people had recognized his car and fed the meter for him.
In 1961 Hochberg took a job with New Plan Realty, which was opening the Cavalier, one of the world’s first restaurant/arcades. Built in a new shopping center in Philadelphia, the Cavalier was an enormous endeavor with a 10,000-square-foot dining area and 2,500-square-foot arcade. Hochberg was hired to help build and manage the arcade.
The same year that Hochberg moved to Philadelphia, a group of socially awkward college kids began an experiment that would eventually change Hochberg’s life.
*
Whether or not Lincoln did in fact play the game, an old political cartoon shows him playing it during his presidency.
*
Pin games is a slang term that members of the amusement industry often use to describe pinball machines.
*
Readers interested in learning more about the history of pinball and seeing its color and pageantry should look for
Pinball!
by Roger C. Sharpe (E. P. Dutton, 1977).
*
Years later, Harry Williams hired Mabs as his chief designer. Mabs later recruited Kordek to work for Williams.
Forgotten FathersThere’s some question about how you define a computer game. Two interactive programs existed before
Spacewar
, in which you interacted with switches on the computer and you changed a display on the screen, depending on what you did with the switches. But they weren’t particularly designed as games. And they weren’t very popular because, as games, they weren’t very good.—Steve Russell, creator of
Spacewar
T
he members of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had their own language. They called broken equipment
munged.
1
They called rolling chairs
bunkies.
They called garbage
cruft.
And they called practical jokes and impressive feats
hacks.
Like most colleges, MIT had several campus organizations. The Tech Model Railroad Club appealed to students who liked to build systems and see how things worked. These were not typical college students. Many of them were short and most were unathletic. Some wore thick glasses. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, years before the invention of the pocket calculator, these were the kids who carried a slide ruler.
These strange college students, with their funny jargon and nerdy ways, did more to start the computer revolution than any Silicon Valley engineering team. Naturally curious, these MIT students had devoted their lives to intellectual tinkering. They believed in a cooperative society and imagined themselves living in a utopian world in which people shared information—sometimes without regard to property rights. Once they discovered computers, they became known as “hackers.” Before that, they were simply nerds.
Some members of the TMRC explored MIT at night, looking for machines to examine. One night in 1959, Peter Samson opened a door in the Electronic Accounting Machinery building and found an IBM 407, a machine capable of creating and reading punch cards. To Samson, finding an unguarded computer was as exciting as discovering a new law of physics.
The IBM 407 was not a full-fledged computer. In order to make it work, Samson and his friends needed to “kludge” a plug board. They didn’t mind the challenge—they’d joined the TMRC because they loved jury-rigging systems. Soon the IBM 407 became a major focal point in the lives of many TMRC members.
Many computers of the 1960s were large enough to fill entire rooms. Their inner workings consisted of rows of expensive vacuum tubes; the standard building block for early electronics. Because vacuum tubes generated great amounts of heat, early computers needed cooling systems to prevent fires. Some even had water pipes running through them for cooling. Not only did
vacuum tubes heat up, but they were also delicate. Certain computers, while in operation, required a dedicated technician to replace broken tubes.
Since 1960, silicon chips have replaced transistors, which replaced vacuum tubes, resulting in smaller, faster, and more powerful computers. Floppy disks and compact disks are used instead of much less efficient forms of data storage, such as punch cards and ticker tapes. A standard 3.5-inch floppy disk can hold as much data as a mountain of punch cards and offers faster access to the information.
For the gaming world, the biggest transformation is in the way computers display information. Early computers communicated via teletype. A few units had computer readout screens. Throughout the 1960s, the University of Utah, Stanford, and MIT were the only U.S. universities that had computers with monitors.
In 1961 MIT’s two main computers were gigantic—an IBM 709, which the members of the TMRC called “the Hulking Giant,” and the TX-O, one of the earliest computers to use transistors. Though it was considerably smaller than the Hulking Giant, the TX-O still required 15 tons of air-conditioning equipment for cooling. Unlike the 709, which used punch cards, the TX-O encoded data on long strips of paper tape.
Most students at MIT gravitated toward the IBM 709, causing the unregulated forces of the TMRC to develop disdain for it. They preferred the more efficient TX-O, which had been developed for military purposes. It was smaller, sleeker, and its military designers had given it a monitor. Working on the TX-O, several TMRC members quickly distinguished themselves as master programmers.
In the summer of 1961, Digital Equipment donated its latest computer to MIT, the PDP-1 (Programmable Data Processor-1). Compared to the Hulking Giant and even the TX-O, the PDP-1 was modest in size—about the size of a large automobile. It sold for a paltry $120,000, and like the TX-O, it had a readout terminal. The TMRC adopted it immediately.
In those days, when computers were as rare as nuclear reactors, hackers wrote programs for the good of the computer-loving community. TMRC members stored their PDP-1 programs on ticker tapes in a drawer near the computer, where anyone could try them out or even revise them. Creating a new program was considered an impressive hack. So was making a good revision.
Steve Russell, a fairly new Model Railroader who had just transferred from Dartmouth College, decided to make the ultimate hack: an interactive game.
Russell, a short, nervous kid, was fairly new to the club. He spoke quietly, wore glasses, and had curly hair. Though not a senior member of the club, Russell had earned the other club members’ respect by helping a professor implement a computer language called “LISP.”
Despite his nickname, “Slug,” Russell was intensely smart and energetic. He was an avid reader of “B-grade” science fiction. He particularly loved Doc Savage, a Flash Gordon–like character. Reflecting that passion, Russell determined to set his interactive hack in outer space. He told the other club members about his plans and generated more than a little excitement.
There was one problem, however. Russell needed motivating. Over the next few months, fellow club members would ask about his progress and become frustrated. They complained that he was wasting time. In the end, Alan Kotok, a more senior member of the TMRC, had to push Russell into finishing his work. When Russell told Kotok that he needed a sine-cosine routine to get started, Kotok went directly to Digital Equipment, the PDP’s manufacturer, to get it.
Eventually, Allen Kotok came to me and said, “Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines. Now what’s your excuse?” He’d gotten it out of the [Digital Equipment] users’ library.
Since I had run out of excuses, I sat down and wrote the program to run two spaceships on the CRT, which you controlled with switches. The prototype was completed in 1961 and the finished version in 1962.
—Steve Russell
It took Russell nearly six months and 200 hours to complete the first version of the game: a simple duel between rocket ships. Using toggle switches built into the PDP-1, players controlled the speed and direction of both ships and fired torpedoes at each other. Russell called his game
Spacewar.
*