Replay: The History of Video Games (13 page)

Pop idols: Buckner & Garcia meet
Pac-Man
. Courtesy of Buckner & Garcia

7. Pac-Man Fever

It’s the summer of 1982 and North America is in the grip of video game mania. In the four years since
Space Invaders
made its Japanese debut, video games had exploded in popularity. Back in 1978 the US sales of home and coin-operated games stood at $454 million; 48 months later in 1982 that figure had soared to $5,313 million. To put it another way, the video game business was expanding by a massive 5 per cent a month.

Excitement about video games pervaded every corner of American life. The public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for electronic play had transformed the retail landscape. Arcades had sprung up in every mall and high street. Coin-op games could be found in launderettes, movie theatres, cocktail lounges, hotels and restaurants. Even supermarkets were installing video games for their customers to play. “Arcade locations were like Starbucks back then – literally everywhere,” said Scott Miller, who wrote columns for the
Dallas Morning News
about video games at the time. There was no respite at home either as millions upon millions of Atari VCS 2600 consoles had embedded themselves under the nation’s TV sets.

Journalists marvelled at the dazzling success of the video game. They pored over analyst reports suggesting that video games would soon be bigger than film and music combined. They interviewed fresh-faced game designers who boasted about how they had spent royalty cheques and bonus payments worth tens of thousands of dollars on a celebrity lifestyle of fast cars and flash pads. And they wrote about the new ‘pinball wizards’ – the hot-shot players who were the masters of the arcades. “The public and the media were fascinated by the video game,” said Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies, which started life as a small arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, before turning itself into the official keeper of video game high score records. “The media, in particular, was amazed by players who could actually beat the games. It was this perception of ‘man versus machine’ that made many news stories so intriguing to the public.”

Everyone wanted a piece of video games, from the movers and shakers of Washington D.C. to the studio bosses of Hollywood.
Star Wars
director George Lucas set about forming a games division at his company Lucasfilm. Walt Disney Pictures sought to cash in with
Tron
, a film about a man trapped inside a video game that was touted as a summer blockbuster. Guides explaining how to beat arcade machines clogged up the bestseller lists. Quaker Oats, Parker Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Thorn EMI formed video game divisions. McDonald’s started serving Atari-themed burger meals where “thanks to McDonald’s and Atari, the old-fashioned TV dinner is being replaced by an exciting video-dinner that could make you a winner”. And if a burger, fries and shake were too much, you could snack on a packet of Universal Foods’ Pretzel Invaders. In Washington D.C., a group of young Democrats – including future presidential candidate Al Gore – became known as the Atari Democrats for their support for giving tax breaks to high-tech industries rather than older manufacturing industries such as steel and cars. As
Time
magazine’s cover declared in late 1981: “Gronk! Flash! Zap! Video Games Are Blitzing The World’.

The blitz began with
Space Invaders
. Its success reignited interest in video games just as a trinity of technological and cost breakthroughs allowed for a major leap forward in the quality and vision of games being released in the arcades. The first development was the microprocessor and the design freedom it granted game developers, the second and third were improvements in video game visuals: high-resolution vector graphics and colour games. Both came to fruition in 1979.

Vector graphics had existed for years
, but had always been too expensive for use in the arcades.
[1]
Standard TVs, also known as raster scan monitors, build images out of a series of horizontal lines that are drawn in turn left to right starting from the top. Using this method a TV can create a full-screen image once every 50th or 60th of a second. Vector monitors take a different approach.

Instead of building complete pictures, they draw pencil-thin white lines between two co-ordinates on the screen. While poor at drawing complete images, vector graphics were perfect for drawing crisp, smooth outlines that were also brighter than the images created by standard TVs. “The resolution of raster games was not so great in those days,” said Owen Rubin, an Atari engineer who started out making vector graphics games on his university’s computers. “The graphics of a vector monitor were extremely sharp and, for the time, very high resolution. They just looked very good.”

Vector graphics first came to the arcade, thanks to Larry Rosenthal, an engineer who, like Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, wanted to bring
Spacewar!
, to the arcades. He built the Vectorbeam system that made vector graphics cheap enough to use in arcade games and used it to make
Space Wars
, an arcade version of the Tech Model Railroad Club’s game. Rosenthal hoped arcade manufacturers would buy the rights to the game and most were interested. But when Rosenthal insisted on getting half of the profits, potential buyers such as Atari walked away. Having alienated the big players, Rosenthal found himself pitching the system to small-fry video game companies. One of these was Cinematronics of El Cajon, California. Cinematronics was in bad shape when Rosenthal got in touch. The company had released two unsuccessful games and was on its last legs, so figuring it had nothing to lose, it accepted Rosenthal’s high price. In October 1977
Space Wars
went on sale, introducing vector graphics to the arcades for the first timee game’s distinctive ghostly outline visuals helped Cinematronics shift 10,000 machines, saving it from the brink of closure. Cinematronics’ relationship with Rosenthal would be short lived. Rosenthal felt he wasn’t earning enough from the game and walked out taking his Vectorbeam system with him. After a legal tussle, Cinematronics paid Rosenthal for the rights to use the Vectorbeam technology and set about trying to become the premier creator of vector graphics arcade games.

To help it develop more vector games the company hired Tim Skelly, a programmer whose journey into video games began with a night out at The Sub’s Pub in Kansas City. “A guy walked into the bar room with a computer under his arm. Seriously,” he said. “Of course you talk when someone walks into a bar with odd company or artefacts.”

The man with the computer was Douglas Pratt and he planned to open a video game arcade. Skelly decided to go into business with him: “I had my doubts, but almost anything was better than just making sandwiches.” The venture failed but gave Skelly enough experience to land a job at Cinematronics designing their new vector games. Skelly loved the visuals: “It was different from what other games were using. The best part was that we could do smooth rotations at high speed. Vector games were much more fluid and fine-grained. Raster, chunky. Vector, smooth. I liked smooth.” Skelly’s first vector games started rolling off the production line in early 1979. They ranged from the 3D dogfights in space of
Tailgunner
to
Warrior
, an overhead view sword-fighting game where players controlled two smoothly animated warriors carrying long swords.

By then, however, Atari had caught up. In the wake of
Space Wars
, Atari’s research and development team in Grass Valley, California, had got to work on vector graphics technology of its own and by early 1978 had a working prototype to show the company’s coin-op team. “It wasn’t much more than a demonstration test bed, but it clearly demonstrated that cool vector images could be displayed,” said Atari engineer Howard Delman, who teamed up with fellow coin-op engineer, Rick Moncrief, to turn the prototype into a useable device. Having refined the prototype, Delman decided Atari’s first venture into vectors should be a remake of the moon landing game
Lunar Lander
, a 1973 remake of the 1969 text-only computer game
Lunar
that used the vector graphics abilities of the DEC GT40 terminal. “I had previously seen the game and thought it would be a good choice to demonstrate the look and feel of our new technology,” he said. Released in early 1979, Atari’s
Lunar Lander
was a delicate real-time battle against gravity that challenged players to land their craft on the moon’s mountainous landscape before their limited supply of fuel ran dry. It was an impressive demonstration of what vectors could do but it would be
Asteroids
, Atari’s second venture into vector graphics, that really caught the public imagination.

Asteroids
began with a meeting between programmer Ed Logg, who had done some of the work on
Lunar Lander
, and Lylains, vice-president of the coin-op games division. “I get called into Lyle’s office and he goes: ‘I’ve got an idea for a game’,” said Logg. Rains suggested a game where players controlled a spaceship that had to blow up asteroids, splitting them into smaller and smaller chunks of cosmic debris until they vanished altogether. The challenge would be to avoid colliding into the asteroid fragments. Logg decided it should use vectors: “Vector monitors are high resolution. They are 1064 by 728 pixels whereas standard rasters are 320 by 240 – a big difference in resolution so when you turn your ship you can tell which direction it’s facing, which is really important.”

Logg developed the rock smashing idea by turning it into a balancing act. Trigger happy players risked being overwhelmed by the volume of asteroids floating around the screen while those who did too little would find themselves under attack from the flying saucers that Logg created to force players to act. The tension between action and inaction was enhanced by the sound effects created by Delman, which echoed the ominous thumping beat that the aliens of
Space Invaders
marched to. “I tried to create the sound of a heartbeat,” said Delman. “My sense was that the player’s heart rate would be increasing as the game got more frenetic, and I wanted the player, subconsciously, to be hearing his own heart racing.”
Asteroids
became the most popular game ever made by Atari and the second biggest arcade game of 1979 – outdone only by
Space Invaders
.

Atari followed it up with a spate of popular
vector games, most notably Ed Rotberg’s 1980 game
Battlezone
, a futuristic tank battle viewed from within the player’s tank. “Given that we now had the vector generator technology, it seemed like a natural follow on to the successful
Tank
and
Tank-8
arcade games for Atari,” said Rotberg. The game’s 3D visuals inspired a group of retired US Army generals to ask Atari to remake it as a training simulation to help soldiers learn to drive the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
[2]
Atari’s management readily agreed to the idea and then told Rotberg. “I was told about it after the prototype had been promised – and on a very aggressive schedule,” he said. “I was not pleased. I felt that Atari should not be doing government/military products. Back at the time, most of us could have gotten jobs in the military-industrial complex if we had wanted to. Many of us were still very much affected by what had happened during the Vietnam War. Most of us had pacifistic leanings at that time, myself included. I simply did not want to work on a product that would help people learn how to kill other people.” As the only person capable to meeting the generals’ deadline, Rotberg agreed to do the prototype but on the condition that he would never work on a similar product. After three months of toil he completed the
Bradley Trainer
prototype, but it never went beyond the prototype stage.

The crisp outlines of vector games were an exciting departure from the blocky monochrome of old. But by the end of 1979 the arrival of colour graphics was proving even more exciting. Prior to 1979, almost evy arcade video games was black and white. The closest they got was the use of transparent coloured plastic to create an illusion of colour in particular areas of the screen.
Breakout
used this approach to make its bricks different colours, while
Space Invaders
had a strip of green plastic glued to the bottom of the screen to colour in the player’s missile launcher and shields. “Colour was not added for some time because of cost, both for the monitor and the additional hardware needed to support colour,” said Rubin. “At the time, it was not a trivial change. A few games, like an eight-player
Tank
game were tested in colour – it was the only way to have eight players look different – but for most of the games we were doing, colour did not add a lot.”