Authors: Steven Kent
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)
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Since that time, several high-tech companies have surpassed Atari’s record.
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He got the idea from the Beatles’
White Album
, which allegedly had a message that could only be found if people played the album backward. According to Robinette, the game became an experiment to see if anyone could ever find his hidden secret.
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The secret room in
Adventure
was discovered while Robinett was in Europe.
A Case of Two GorillasI remember sitting in the Coleco booth (at the Toy Fair trade show in 1981) even before it was announced. They brought out an 8 × 10 photograph of the new system and said, “We’re coming out with this. It’s got a TI (Texas Instrument) chip in it. Stay tuned.”
—Al Nilsen, former electronics buyer, JC Penney
This is a dispute over two gorillas.
—Judge Robert W. Sweet, U.S. District Court, S.D. New York
Our big success was something that I conceptualized—the first handheld game. I asked the design group to see if they could come up with a game that was electronic that was the same size as a calculator.
—Michael Katz, former marketing director, Mattel Toys
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.
We developed a prototype of an obstacle avoidance game in which you had to guide your one LED, avoiding two or three other rows of LEDs that were coming down. It wasn’t themed; it was just game play that we tested that turned out to be fun. Then we had to theme it.
We could have themed it as football. We could have pretended the LED was a running back, but we knew we had a better game coming along from the developers at Mattel that was going to make for a better football game, so we chose auto racing.
We tested themes with kids by showing them drawings of what the actual game would look like and having them play the prototype. Racing came in second [to football], so we themed our first game as an auto race.
—Michael Katz
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.
Howard Morrison, who was a principal at Marvin Glass [a firm that designed toys], and I went to an MOA [Music Operators Association] show and saw a thing called
Touch Me
, made by Nolan [Bushnell]. It had four buttons and made some horrible noises.We said, “This has all the earmarks of a great game.” And we sat down and came up with the concept for
Simon.—Ralph Baer, designer of Magnavox Odyssey
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.
I went through
Compton’s Encyclopedia for Kids
to find an instrument that had four notes that could be played in any sequence without sounding dissonant. It turned out to be the bugle, C-G-E and B, I think. That’s how I determined the four notes that are played in
Simon;
notes that sound harmonious no matter what sequence you play them in.—Ralph Baer
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.
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Despite
Simon’
s success, however, Atari did not file suit against Marvin Glass Associates, Milton Bradley, or Ralph Baer for copying the idea.
First of all, I don’t think he [Bushnell] had a patent. Second, I think the scheme he had implemented was an old scheme—following a sequential light.
Simon’
s claim to fame was the association of discrete sounds with each light. A whole lot of people played
Simon
by ear.—Ralph Baer
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.
Arnold knew that I had been responsible for Mattel’s handhelds and he asked me if I wanted to come to Coleco and be part of what he thought would be a wonderful turnaround and establish the first marketing department that Coleco really ever had. He offered to make me vice president of marketing and to give me stock options that I didn’t have at Mattel.
The timing was good because we got into all kinds of other handheld games, including the Head-to-Head series, which were two player games that sold very well. We got licenses and designed tabletop games that looked exactly like miniature arcade games, like
Pac-Man
and
Donkey Kong.
They sold extremely well.—Michael Katz
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.”
People give me credit for working for both Arnold Greenberg and [Jack Tramiel, the volatile founder of Commodore Computers] in one lifetime and surviving. They ask, “How could you work for Jack Tramiel?” and I say, “I worked for Arnold Greenberg for three and one half years.”
Arnold was incredibly bright and articulate, just a wonderful, spontaneous speaker. I think [he was] a very good leader…. dynamic and very tough and demanding.
—Michael Katz
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.
