Replay: The History of Video Games (14 page)

But on the other side of the Pacific from Atari, Namco – the company that bought the wreckage of Atari Japan in 1974 – had come up with one of the first full-colour video games:
Galaxian
. It was a
Space Invaders
clone that removed the shields and added aliens that dive-bombed players. Colour proved a powerful selling point and made
Galaxian
a huge success. Other game developers were inspired to follow suit. Dona Bailey, a car sensors programmer at General Motors, was inspired to leave the car industry for Atari after seeing the colours of
Galaxian
: “I adored
Galaxian
, I thought it was intensely beautiful. Its repetition of patterns, its colours and its swooping and swerving motions. I wanted to make something that seemed as beautiful to me.”

Galaxian
’s rougher, tougher remake of
Space Invaders
also proved influential, marking the start of a rapid evolution in shoot ’em ups that saw them crank up the intensity of their man versus machine challenge. Atari’s Dave Theurer served up energetic shooting games based on nightmares. His 1980 game
Missile Command
, a trackball-enhanced scramble to protect cities from never-ending barrages of nuclear missiles, came out of Cold War nightmares of nuclear war.
[3]
Theurer’s next creation, 1981’s
Tempest
, was a colour vector graphics game based on a nightmare he had about monsters coming out of a hole. It challenged players to zap strange abstract shapes that crawled out of a cylindrical 3D pit. Not to be outdone, Namco continued to hone the aggression of
Galaxian
with 1981’s
Galaga
– a sequel that handed the aliens new tricks such as tractor beams used to try and capture the player’s craft.

But none of these were as angry as
Defender
, the ferocious shoot ’em up created by Eugene Jarvis that marked leading pinball manufacturer Williams’ return to the video game business. Jarvis joinedlliams as a pinball designer after a stint at Atari’s ill-fated pinball division. Williams had dabbled in video games in the wake of
Pong
, but quickly reverted back to pinball tables. By the end of the 1970s it was clear the decision to walk away was a mistake. “We all could see a revolution happening in video games. It was a no brainer to bullshit management into blowing a few hundred grand on a video game,” said Jarvis, who had decided he wanted to make video games rather than pinball tables after playing
Space Invaders
. Jarvis soon found himself charged with developing Williams’ comeback game. The game designer had clear ideas about what he wanted to do. He wanted to make what he called “sperm games” – video games that bristled with testosterone, stimulated adrenal glands, and would terrify and thrill in equal measure. He sought to make
Defender
the embodiment of his vision. “The inspiration for
Defender
was to somehow capture the physical rush and freedom of flying in a 2D game and throw in a believable world with cool enemies,” said Jarvis. “And then, most importantly, give the player a real purpose – something to defend. The idea of defence as opposed to offence is so much more emotional. Protecting something precious from attack is much more visceral than randomly raping and pillaging aliens.”

Defender
was a high-speed race to destroy waves of alien attackers who were determined to capture the humans, spread across the game’s horizontally scrolling game world. Captured humans would be lifted into the skies and used to turn weak aliens into fast, angry, laser-spitting mutants that would seek out the player. As a result, it was in players’ self-interest to stop the aliens from capturing humans. Jarvis completed
Defender
just hours before its debut at the October 1980 Amusement and Music Operators Association trade show in Chicago – the highlight of the US arcade industry’s calendar.

Williams’ return to the video game business was
a big deal and the industry was keen to see what the company had come up with. Jarvis and the team were nervous: “None of us really had a clue whether the game was any good or not. Everything was so new at that time.”
Defender
’s macho swagger proved too much for the trade show delegates. The sight of the game’s controls – a joystick and five buttons at a time when one or two buttons were standard – scared off numerous delegates. Those who dared to step up to the daunting control panel found themselves beaten to a pulp within seconds of pressing the start button. “The show goers were old shiny-suit guys and blonde spokes-models,” said Jarvis. “They didn’t know a video game from a TV set. They played for 10 seconds and died.” The delegates dismissed
Defender
as a failure. It was too hard and too complex to be a hit, they agreed. So they consigned it to their lists of no-hope games, the titles the industry expected to flop. Another game on that year’s list was Namco’s
Pac-Man
, the feminine yin to
Defender
’s masculine yang.
[4]

Toru Iwatani,
Pac-Man
’s designer, had set out to challenge the status quo of the arcades with his maze game. “Most arcade video games of the time were violent and focused on the male player, so the game centres became places frequented mainly by men,” he said. “We decided to change that demographic by designing games that could appeal to women and thus to couples, therefore making game centres desirable places to go on a date.” After giving it some thought, Iwatani decided his game should be about eating. “When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword,” he said. “When I was doing research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had that eureka moment. So I based the Pac-Man character design on that shape.”

For the look of the characters in his maze game Iw
atani drew on the Japanese kawaii
[5]
art style he had already used in his previous game, the
Pong
-influenced
Cutie Q
. The cute, kitsch characters of kawaii originated in the art of early manga comics and anime films, but really took off in 1974 when the fashion accessories company Sanrio launched its Hello Kitty range of merchandise aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at teenage girls.

Kawaii characters resonated culturally with the Japanese so much that, by the dawn of the 1980s, the interest was growing rather than fading. Kawaii became so integrated into Japanese culture that kawaii characters can be found on everything from government posters and bank literature to computers and cooking pans. For Iwatani kawaii visuals had two advantages: “The hardware specifications at the time, compared to the present time, were very limited, so we could only have artwork in a very simplistic style and it was very difficult to create a sense of empathy for the player with this limited artistic style. But we wanted as many people as possible to enjoy the game, so by creating kawaii characters we thought we could appeal to women as well.”

Iwatani’s ideas resulted in a maze chase game where the player, as Pac-Man, has to eat all the dots in the maze while dodging four cute ghosts. Pac-Man’s only defence was four power pills located in the far corners of the maze. If eaten, these pills allowed Pac-Man to eat the ghosts for a limited period of time, turning the player from pursued to pursuer. It was a simple but elegant game lifted by its charming kawaii looks. But few thought it would be popular. Namco doubted its potential. Namco’s US distributor Bally Midway believed no one wanted to play maze games. The delegates at the Chicago trade show agreed. Instead they reckoned the hit in waiting was Namco’s other offering
Rally-X
, a colour game where players had to drive a car around a maze spread over several screens to collect flags while being chased by other cars.

“Unlike the other exciting games that were around at the time,
Pac-Man
was designed for people to play with ease and when relaxed without ‘excitement’,” said Iwatani. “So when it was launched we didn’t get the kind of review that other games got. I guess
Pac-Man
didn’t have the ‘sational’ image. I myself could not imagine that it would be loved by so many people and be such an international hit.”

The industry veterans at the trade show were, however, wrong. Very wrong.
Defender
became a huge success as players sought to master the game in the hope of gaining kudos from conquering the most vicious game in the arcade. “Kids used to steal rare silver collectible quarters from their parents’ coin collections, which were worth 10 to 100 times a regular quarter, to stick into
Defender
,” said Jarvis. “The average
Defender
cabinet in the US would take in about 2,500 quarters a week. Since there were 60,000
Defender
games out there, you would have up to 150 million quarters in the games every week. That is a lot of quarters.”

But even
Defender
’s success paled before the commercial juggernaut that was
Pac-Man
. For Twin Galaxies’ Day, Pac-Man was the moment when the already rapid growth of arcades went into overdrive: “When
Pac-Man
came on the scene, it brought the female audience into the arcade and made the amount of income so great that businessmen started opening up arcades and, thereby, making games available in more places.”

Pac-Man
’s cute kawaii characters were also ideal for merchandising and soon the pizza-inspired hero and the ghosts of Iwatani’s mega-hit game started appearing everywhere. ABC-TV started showing a
Pac-Man
cartoon series that attracted 20 million viewers on its first broadcast. Pac-Man turned up on lunchboxes, Frisbees, stickers, yo-yos, sleeping bags and ‘I brake for Pac-Man’ bumper stickers.
Pac-Man
even scaled the heights of the pop charts thanks to Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, a song-writing duo from Arkon, Ohio, who worked under the name Buckner & Garcia. The pair discovered
Pac-Man
at their local bar. “We were drawn to the video game craze like everyone at that time and played most of the games,” recalled Buckner. “There was a bar near a recording studio we worked at with a
Pac-Man
machine that we played every chance we got. At some point the idea for the song sprang up.” Big record labels initially rejected their
Pac-Man Fever
song, but after Buckner & Garcia released it locally and sold 12,000 copies in a week, CBS quickly offered them a deal. CBS re-released
Pac-Man Fever
in December 1981, the following March it hit number 9 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart selling more than a million copies in the process. CBS pushed Buckner & Garcia to make a whole album of songs about video games as quickly as possible to capitalise the success of their novelty single. “With only three weeks to complete the album we would go to a game room and look for a game that was hot and have the good players explain how to play it,” said Garcia. “We would then go home and write the music for it and by the next de laying the basic tracks for the song.” The result of those rushed sessions was the
Pac-Man Fever
album: a saccharine pop snapshot of arcade life in early 1982.

Its eight tracks of sugary melodies name-checked some of the biggest games of the time from Sega’s traffic dodging
Frogger
(
Froggy’s Lament
) to
Centipede
, a shoot ’em up set amid the mushroom-strewn detritus of a forest that was created by former General Motors employee Bailey and
Asteroids
designer Logg (
Ode to Centipede
). Buckner & Garcia’s lyrics captured a world of pockets brimming with quarters, intergalactic battles and calloused fingers. Sound effects taken from the games punctuated the tracks with blasts of white noise, eldritch beeps and the robotic monotone of synthesized speech. The album sold nearly a million copies and made Buckner & Garcia stars of the video game boom. They appeared on TV shows such as the Dick Clark-presented chart show
American Bandstand
and a special
Pac-Man Fever
day on MTV, an exciting new TV channel dedicated to music videos that had started broadcasting in August 1981.

Buckner & Garcia weren’t the only people sharing in the success of
Pac-Man
. Atari, more by fluke than design, had found itself the holder of the exclusive rights to make
Pac-Man
on home consoles and computers thanks to a $1 million deal signed in 1978 when Namco had no hit games to its name. Atari couldn’t believe its luck. For a relative pittance the company had gained control of the biggest game of the past decade. In April 1982,
Pac-Man
arrived on the VCS 2600 sending sales of the console through the roof. More than 12 million
Pac-Man
cartridges were sold worldwide. “
Pac-Man
was our all-time best seller. It was a phenomenon,” said Ray Kassar, Atari’s president. And with Namco owed no more than 50 cents from each of the $25 cartridges, most of the profit ended up in Atari’s coffers. The
Pac-Man
cartridge confirmed the 2600’s utter dominance of the home games market. The 2600’s lead over its nearest rival, the Mattel Intellivision, was now approaching 20 million units. Atari had pretty much stopped worrying about rival consoles, it was now more concerned about the video game companies that had started releasing 2600 games to cash in on the captive audience Atari had build up with its console.